When Docklands Had Shore

Huffing and puffing that, if this is what he is and and if such a figure can exist, Britain's most senior Sharia judge has denied that rape within marriage was a crime under Sharia law.

Well, perhaps it isn't, as it wasn't under English law, which is an awful lot easier to change, until really very recently. He would certainly know better than I, and better than his noisiest detractors today. And it is academic anyway, since the matter is for the same Police and the same Courts regardless of whether or not either or both parties is Muslim.

However, 15 years ago, it seems that this cove, who was at the time a co-opted member of the Tower Hamlets Education Committee, was named as having been involved in war crimes during the Bangladeshi War of Independence. That elicited this response from the then MP for Bethnal Green & Stepney, Peter Shore:

"It is not for me to make judgements about particular cases. The law officers of the Crown ought to investigate, and having done so, should refer any prima facie cases to the prosecuting authorities."

Where is the party to which Peter Shore would now belong? Where is now the party to which he did belong? What are you doing to restore it as a force in British politics?

In Shore's old neck of the woods, Labour has become the branch office of the Awami League, which may not be Islamist, but which is more Bengali-communalist than Islamists are in principle supposed to be (Bengalis are in fact the Awami in question), and which is still, when all is said and done, a foreign party, indeed the governing party of a foreign country.

At a meeting last night, improperly held in the Palace of Westminster, it voted to "isolate" Lutfur Rahman, apparently oblivious to the fact of its own having lost the election, and of Rahman's having won it. "Isolate" him from what, exactly?