Cllr Abdul Malik was spared jail this week thanks to his service to the Bangladeshi community
There was a time when the Labour Party was thought to represent the British working class.
That delusion can be laid to rest following the conviction this week of Oldham Labour councillor Abdul Malik, who was spared imprisonment at Manchester Crown Court this week after being convicted of offences against the Work at Height Regulations 2005, which had led to a near fatal accident in which an employee fell from scaffolding, breaking his hip and both heels.
This was an especially shameful exploitation of a vulnerable (and of course White) employee, who had “significant learning difficulties”, and who was instructed by his employer Cllr Malik to climb a hazardous scaffolding tower at the Oldham Bangladeshi Cultural Centre in 2013, consequently suffering his near-fatal fall.
H&D‘s assistant editor is especially disgusted by this: his great-uncle was killed near Oldham in a similar fall in the late 1920s, but he assumed that Labour Party and trade union actions had made such exploitation a thing of the past.
Sadly (as George Orwell knew) some are more equal than others. Cllr Malik (who represents Coldhurst ward, a Bangladeshi ghetto in central Oldham, and lives in Werneth, a formerly White area where H&D‘s assistant editor went to school) was told that his disgraceful conduct would normally have merited a prison sentence, but that his valuable work for the (Bangladeshi) community meant he would be spared jail.
Will the Labour Party now clean up their act and remove Cllr Malik and his ilk – a cabal of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin businessmen who are no more ‘socialist’ than Margaret Thatcher? We aren’t holding our breath.
