Fit and Proper?

In 2012, George Galloway removed Amjad Bashir as a Respect candidate, calling him “not a fit and proper person to represent Respect”.

In 2014, Bashir became a UKIP Member of the European Parliament. It is inconceivable that UKIP in Bradford was unaware of his history.

But now, this MQM stalwart has gone back to the Conservative Party. His journey to it is entirely unremarkable.

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.