The Convergence of The Five Rivers

The former Labour MP for Glasgow Central, and father of the present one, Mohammed Sarwar, has reverted to sole Pakistani nationality and is expected to be named as the new Governor of that country’s Punjab Province, which has well over 90 million inhabitants.

He owes this advancement, effectively to viceregal status, to his very close ties to the fabulously rich Sharif brothers, one if whom is Prime Minister of Pakistan while the other is Chief Minister of Punjab.

They head, and indeed of them has given the final initial to, the PML-N, a party of relentless privatisers and deregulators, virulently hostile to organised labour and to its achievements.

Yet Sarwar was in charge of selecting its parliamentary candidates in an electorally key area. But it is not about that. It is about clans and what not. Of course. These lefties and their darkies, eh?

Well, actually, no. Around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms.

David Cameron’s vehicles toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under his party. His “Quality of Life Commission” (don’t laugh, it’s real) then proposed giving the power to decide these things to “local community leaders”.

What else will those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys’ interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise?

To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places will flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation forever.

Cameron has also signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru.

Rehman Chishti, now a rising star as MP for Gillingham and Rainham, was Francis Maude’s Labour opponent in 2005 while working for Benazir Bhutto, whom he assisted from 1991 until her assassination in 2007 in her leadership of a party the motto of which includes both “Islam is our Faith” and “Socialism is our Economy”; he was still doing that job when he defected to the Conservative Party in 2006 and became an aide to Maude as its Chairman.

And so on, and on, and on.