From Great Things To Greater?

As the earth-shatteringly important race to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of Tower Hamlets approaches its conclusion, perhaps Andrew Gilligan would care to set out the precise religious test that he believes ought to be applied for membership of a political party?

I carry no candle for this Rahman, to say the very least. But will Gilligan now undertake to do what Martin Bell did in 2001, when he put up against Eric Pickles because Pentecostals had dared to join the Brentwood & Ongar Conservative Association, and we cannot have the wrong sort behaving like citizens, can we?

Then again, perhaps Gilligan will do something on Cameron's warm welcome of the SWP faction of Tower Hamlets Respect, among numerous other Hard Leftists, Islamists, communal rabble-rousers of Asian and other extraction, and many more besides, in many parts of the country, who surprisingly, yet somehow unsurprisingly, have found an utterly convivial home among the old 1980s Radical Right, paid bag men of apartheid South Africa and of the Nazi-harbouring monetarist pioneers in Latin America? Blue is the new Red-Brown.

Infiltration of the Tower Hamlets Labour Party, if that is really what this is rather than just darkies daring to join it and to become active, is bad. But it is not the big story.