BREAKING NEWS: Legal action warning to Lib Dem's John Griffiths and how the EVENING STANDARD's David Cohen found 'himself' denying the DISPOSSESSED!

BREAKING NEWS: Legal action warning to Lib Dem's John Griffiths and how the EVENING STANDARD's David Cohen found 'himself' denying the DISPOSSESSED in the East London Borough of Tower Hamlets on Monday night!

0940 [0840] Hrs GMT

London

Tuesday

19 October 2010

Editor © Muhammad Haque

Tower Hamlets councillor Lutfur Rahman last night warned the ex councillor for the Lib Dems and a self-styled businessman John Griffiths that he would take legal action against anyone who made untrue and false allegations against himself.

The warning followed a bizarre intervention by the London EVENING STANDARD’s David Cohen at an East End small business forum meeting organised by the SSBA at their meeting hall in the Greatorex Street near Brick Lane on Monday night.

Spitalfields Small Business Association [=SSBA] had invited councillor Lutfur Rahman and his fellow councillor Abbas Uddin ‘Helal’ [both from the same Tower Hamlets Council Ward where the SSBA is based] to quiz them on what they would do to help the area’s small business people. Abbas Uddin ‘Helal’ was the only one of the five invited as speakers to address the SSBA event that did not turn up.

Others who came included Lutfur Rahman who was a few minutes behind and arrived after the meeting had got going.

The session went broadly to plan and was nearing the end when a man who had sat there looking very unhappy glared at Lutfur and made an accusatory statement along the lines of someone beating their wife and would Lutfur Rahman condemn his [Lutfur] supporters! Or words roughly to that effect.

Lutfur didn’t follow the statement. Nor did the event organisers. Nor did the majority of the small business people present at the event.

Lutfur at first pointed to his wife sitting in the back a row or two behind where David Cohen had been sitting and said that he [Lutfur] was being helped by his wife all along and that he challenged anyone who made the kind of suggestion that David Cohen was making. This was obviously the response based on a mis understanding of what Cohen had said. Cohen had in fact said that he had earlier [in the afternoon] spoken to Abbas Uddin 'Helal' who had told him [Cohen] that Lutfur Rahman’s supporters had been spreading the line that Abbas Uddin ‘Helal’ was a wife beater and would Lutfur Rahman condemn that [alleged] behaviour by his [Lutfur Rahman’s] supporters.

There came the same sort of statement from Lutfur who reiterated the solid support of his wife.

As Lutfur Rahman was speaking, David Cohen looked unhappy and made a few attempts to clarify but then gave up trying. He was clearly not communicating very well. This was not helped by the fact that most of the people present thought that David Cohen was making an accusation against Lutfur Rahman himself. They said he was unfair to do so. A few of them asked him why he had made the statement at an event that was "not about politics but about local small bushiness.... "

And words to that effect.

This went on while the Lib Dems ex councillor John Griffiths, sitting a chair away from Lutfur Rahman made a statement, very brief, but audible enough for Lutfur Rahman to hear and react to.

Lutfur raised his right hand to a measured point just short of looking physically threatening and said firmly that he would take legal action against anyone who made that kind of allegation.

It appeared that the ex councillor now bidding to raise a flag for the Lib Dems in Tower Hamlets was not paying due attention to what had been said already. He looked in a rush to appear to echo what David Cohen had said, even if he [Griffiths] didn’t himself know really what David Cohen had been on about. He latched on to the bit where Cohen had taunted Rahman with the demand “will you condemn your supporters…?”

And in that little sub-intervention, the ex Councillor “for” Bethnal Green North acquired for himself a minus point for etiquette. What was he doing pandering to a taunting stranger who appeared only interested in adding discord to an evening’s proceedings?

It was noticeable that the lack of funding, the failure of the local Big Businesses to help small businesses and other aspects of the ‘East End economy’ that could have been addressed in a serious and tangible and dedicated way by some of the ‘local politicians’ who were in attendance, got distracted into the arena of spite, petty greed and even pettier ambitions, aided and abetted by a man from the London EVENING SANDARD who looked and acted zealously dedicated to a twisted rendering of a jihad of his own: to deny the truth to the East Enders. To tell them fibs and to make them unsettled!

To make dispossession look plausible, even deserved by the East Enders who have been daring to address the real issues affecting our lives!

Mr DISPOSSESSED of the London EVENING STANARD was there to add to the denial and to make the East Enders even more dispossessed!

Not a mean feat of service to CONDEM agenda of conning the little people out of all they has got.

And there is nought more damning than snatching from the little people in the inner city state-designated ‘zone of the dispossessed’ the right to exercise the franchise without interference from Big Brother, Big Business masquerading as a Big Society tendency under the CONDEM Cameron!

[To be continued]