In Tower Hamlets, there have been repeated reports of Muslim shop staff threatened for not wearing headscarves. Signs have appeared announcing that the area is a "gay-free zone" while "provocative" advertisements for deodorants and underwear have been blacked out. Gay rights groups have reported a significant rise in attacks on gay men by Bangladeshi youths. While no connection should be made between these incidents and the borough's politics, when Peter Golds, the Conservative opposition leader, attempts to speak at council meetings a claque shouts "Mrs Gold" or "poofter".
With an annual budget of £1.3 billion one might imagine Mayor Rahman has enough cash for his favoured causes. And yet the business and skills department has given Yazdani Choudary more than £1 million to develop IT training and apprenticeship schemes from a building in Whitechapel, which, by coincidence, hosts his brother Anjem's newly-minted Centre for Islamic Services. Anjem is the unemployed law graduate and putative cleric who figured prominently in al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK, before these Islamist fronts were banned. The same building also hosts a printing business which employs a graphic designer (and al-Muhajiroun supporter) jailed for two years in 2008 for trying to fund overseas terrorism. When Ted Jeory, a doughty local Sunday Express journalist who runs an investigative website dedicated to the Islamisation of Tower Hamlets, attempted to interview this man, he was told, "Rot in hell or embrace Islam".
The coalition government has recently sought to address some of the deficiencies in the 2007 Prevent counter-terrorism strategy it inherited from Labour, in essence a system of payoffs to the tribal chiefs of Islamism who know how to work it. As far as I can see from the wordy end-product, the revision mostly involves rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, by civil servants well past their sell-by date. No wonder the response has been tepid. None of it will reassure the likes of Mr Smith, as he looks nervously over his shoulder in an area which is fast separating itself from mainstream British society.
