Your article ‘Bob Blackman hits back’ (Asian Voice 3/12/2017) falls short of giving full sense of the community concern about Bob Blackman’s divisiveness.
Harrow Council full meeting on 30 November 2017 noted that the Harrow East MP, Bob Blackman, has recently hosted an event at the UK Parliament where the extremist keynote speaker was Mr Tapan Ghosh, who has written articles that are regarded by many in the Harrow community (and elsewhere) as anti-Muslim. Therefore, the council not just criticised Mr Blackman’s behaviour but rightly passed the following council motion:
‘To instruct the Chief Executive to write to Bob Blackman MP, condemning the visit of Tapan Ghosh and reaffirming that Harrow is one of the most diverse places in the UK, where hate speech is not tolerated. To instruct the Chief Executive to write to the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, calling on him to condemn the visit of Tapan Ghosh and to discourage hate speech in public institutions (such as the UK Parliament).’
Mr Blackman’s ongoing divisive politics, playing on sectarian issues, has been consistently condemned. For example assembly member Navin Shah who slashed Bob Blackman’s majority from 4,757 in 2015 to 1,757 last election, had said in an Asian Voice article: “I’m proud of positive and clean campaign we ran in Harrow East .... the general election (2017) saw the same old issues like Kashmiri Pundits and caste legislation dragged out for the Tory propaganda to find cheap favours amongst Indian / Hindu voters”.
Dr Pravin Shah
Coordinator, Harrow Monitoring Group
