This Reuters piece repays close reading: Crucially, for the people around Alum Rock, [Jahan] Mahmood takes no public funding for this part of his work. The fact his initiative lies outside of Prevent gives it credibility… Also: Prevent is derided by many Muslim groups for relying heavily on the police, for bureaucracy and incompetence, and…
Read More Even more #biryaniprojectWould it amaze anyone if this piece of shit turned out to be registered to the same no-name provider and hosted on the same server at 195.26.90.15 as the Curzon Institute? Also, all the image filenames are of the form Alamin_Img_[0-9].jpg, implying they’re basically his holiday snaps dumped onto the web. Some are clearly in…
Read More portfolios combine to deliver world-class services. and biryanisSo, to summarise this post a bit, here are some insights: 1) The Curzon Foundation website has been up since February 2010. The various Curzon companies have existed for the same period of time, one succeeding the other as they successively failed to file accounts and got struck off. It looks very much like each…
Read More 10 insights on the Biryani ProjectWhich companies did Afzal Amin intend to use for his various schemes? Here’s a rundown. 1) Curzon Education Ltd. This was formed on the 30th of July, 2013, as a company limited by guarantee (i.e. a nonprofit), by Afzal Amin as sole director. Its address is given as 1 VICTORIA SQUARE, BIRMINGHAM, B1 1BD, and…
Read More Biryani Project: the Webcheck remixRandy McDonald, and probably others, seem to have found the Afzal Amin piece baffling, so I thought I’d draft a brief explainer as follows. Afzal Amin, potential Tory MP and ex-army officer, tried to incite the EDL to stage a provocative demonstration in his heavily Muslim constituency during the campaign, while also inciting a group…
Read More More questions on the Biryani Project.My first thought about this story was that it was roughly what would have happened if the surviving characters at the end of Four Lions – the hopeless MP, the sinister-but-pathetic spook, the bungling police negotiator, the windbag imam – had to draw up a policy to prevent this from ever happening again. In fact,…
Read More ramshackle coalition of interests: black country editionSo the Chancellor has been dabbling in retail brokerage, with a little push-polling scattered on top. This is pretty much as shady as we’ve come to expect from him, but I was interested to see this: Those engaging in financial promotions are meant to be authorised to do so by the Financial Conduct Authority. A…
Read More “Ok so Mr Financial Regulator I really wanna pretend to be the revenue for my campaign”Alternative maps of Britain are an occasional theme. Here’s something really interesting – if it has a regional accent it probably has a genetic signature. Compare and contrast – here’s the map based on BT call-detail records from here. Here’s the genetic one from here:
Read More West Yorkshire: Special.Circling back to this post, here’s Alex Massie on a similar theme. I would point out that if being in a coalition, in general, would be Cleggifying, being in a coalition with the Tories would be the absolute ne plus ultra of Cleggification. The fast support the SNP gained over the referendum campaign would fade…
Read More My offer to you is…Nick Clegg.A quick thought about this story. There are, at the moment, two kinds of politicians in Europe: the Ins and the Outs. The Ins are the respectables, either conservative, liberal, or social democratic. They form governments, run the European Union, and practically drip seriousness. On the other hand, nobody believes a word they say, and…
Read More Why there won’t be a Labour-SNP coalition