Lutfur Rahman would easily have been cast down for treating and all the rest of it.
Labour's Catholic, Muslim, and black-majority church bases must demand that the "undue spiritual influence" law be repealed. Labour's Catholic and its old school Temperance Methodist bases ought to have done so a hundred years ago.
Indeed, that law criminalised the very foundation of the Labour Party by, especially, Methodist preachers acting as such. The wonder is that it was never enforced. Labour would have been strangled in the cradle.
Meanwhile, over to the Labour candidates at Brent Central, Finchley and Golders Green, Hampstead and Kilburn, Harrow East, Harrow West, Hendon, Hornsey and Wood Green, and Hove. Get your petitions ready for 8th May if Labour does not win those seats.
And it is time to look into "undue spiritual influence" in certain wards that voted Labour for the Greater London Assembly, but which voted on the same day for Boris Johnson rather than Ken Livingstone as Mayor.
Although, speaking of Livingstone, he managed to remain a member, not only of the Labour Party, but of its National Executive Committee, while campaigning for Rahman against John Biggs, Labour's candidate.
Just as several Fleet Street types managed to retain their party cards (even if one of them has since given it up his over Syria, of all things) while using their columns to advocate a vote for Johnson against Livingstone, Labour's candidate.
The London Labour Party is a complete and utter shambles.
Agreed that the law is an anachronism. The problem here is the essential failure of multiculturalism. We must "celebrate" diversity but what if in doing so we also permit practices which are not only alien but often diametrically opposed to the Enlightenment values on which most of Western political ideologies are now based? No problem if you hold these beliefs but remain within the law but I have seen first hand at both ward and constituency levels the kind behaviour seen in tower Hamlets by "the community" to bully individuals into conformity and to support a specific candidate who promises to deliver resources purely for that, be it Bengali or Pakistani, community's use. Also the Police and other bodies which should have acted failed to do so, indeed they appeared to protect Rahman and his associates simple on the grounds of race and religion, indeed seemingly to be more interested in discovering if those claiming were doing so on "racist" grounds. Sad echoes of Rochdale and Oxford here and I suspect that Tower Hamlets is just one of many.
ReplyDeleteA point of information from a legal perspective. The statutory wording is not "undue spiritual influence", it is "inflict[ing]... spiritual injury" (s.115(2)(a)). This is a much narrower concept. I'm allowed to exercise influence on you, but I'm not allowed to injure you. That is surely reasonable.
ReplyDeleteTo use your Methodist/Catholic examples, it is the difference between saying "temperance is good"/"abortion is bad" and saying "if you vote for Mr Miliband, you will be excommunicated/go to Hell". The latter is a specific threat designed to use, or rather abuse, someone's faith in order to gain a political end. You don't have to be a person of faith (as I am) to think that some legal protection is needed against such abuses.
As you intimate, if it was that easy to fall foul of the provision, there would have been a lot more cases in the past against candidates representing "the Tory Party at prayer" or "Methodism not Marxism". In fact, there have been none at all since the Irish Catholic bishops unwisely tried to stamp out Parnellism in the 1890s.