With All Due Respect

The likes of Harry's Place and Andrew Gilligan (on whom Google "Andrew Gilligan Keith Vaz") are having kittens about the failure of Mehdi Hasan, in his New Statesman interview with Lutfur Rahman, to pursue their own wilder conspiracy theories about the man and his supporters. Perhaps they could explain exactly what upper limit they would put on the number of "Asian" names permitted on any candidate's nomination papers, and why? Perhaps they could explain why interference by the ultranationalist governing party of Bangladesh is perfectly acceptable?

And one really does not have to carry any candle for Rahman or his supporters to deprecate most ferociously the assumption, and that as if it were self-evident, that only upper-middle-class white atheists should be permitted to play any part whatever in the political process, with no one else even allowed to join a political party. Never mind to wonder how and why the Telegraph Group became the media outlet for the expression of that assumption and for a sustained political campaign on the basis of it. The Times, you could understand, even expect.