UK: How a Muslim “Community Activist” Kills Free Speech

Until this weekend’s story broke about her expenses irregularities you’d probably never heard of Britain’s first Muslim peer Baroness Uddin. I had, though, because a couple of years ago, I remember being particularly incensed while driving along listening to a Radio 4 programme about the disasters of multiculturalism.

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On one side of the debate was an intelligent, articulate, well-spoken Muslim doctor who was talking about the damage multi-culti pieties had done to social cohesion in East London’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Particularly rubbish, he said, was the policy of PC councils of translating everything into languages like Urdu and Bengali – rather than encouraging immigrant communities to learn English. This, he explained, did bullying Muslim husbands’ dirty work for them by enabling them to keep their non-English-speaking, often-imported brides in thrall, and away from the tainting influence of the kuffar.

Baroness Uddin was speaking opposite him and though I can’t remember exactly what she said, I do recall being so struck by the unutterable idiocy of her half-baked and ill-expressed views that I stopped the car to jot down her name. “Christ on a bike,” I thought to myself. “What kind of world do we inhabit that someone like this gets a peerage?”

I’m still searching for an answer. She can’t be totally stupid, for her response when the story broke about her having allegedly claimed £100,000 for a “main home” she doesn’t live in was impressively swift: round she came in her BMW 4 x 4 to put some curtains up and a mat by the front door. Iain Dale has lots more comedy dirt on this, such as the claim that the house she DOES live in is Housing Association property with a subsidised rent supposedly designed for low-income families. Principled socialism in action, eh, readers?

Was your immediate thought: here is a woman whose intelligence, rapier wit, wisdom, commonsense and mastery of the English language in all its nuance and complexity more than justifies her elevation to the Lords?

Me neither.

She was elevated to the peerage by Tony Blair (says it all really) in 1998, though for which particular service to the nation is not immediately apparent. She has been a Labour councillor, a liaison officer for Tower Hamlets social services and is described on her Wikipedia entry as a “community activist.”

Hmm. Sounds like perfect MBE material to me.

But a peerage?