u/Sensitive_Echo5058

A fourth newly elected Green Party councillor in London has quit, leaving taxpayers with a £80,000 bill.

New Green representatives on Camden, Haringey, Lambeth and Hackney councils have immediately stood down, meaning by-elections will have to be held.

Each poll is expected to cost the local authorities between £20,000 and £25,000.

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “The Greens can’t be trusted to deliver at your local council. Now their incompetence will come at a huge cost to taxpayers everywhere.”

Saiqa Ali was elected as one of 29 Green councillors in Lambeth on May 7, despite her arrest in the lead up to the polls over allegations she had made a series of antisemitic social media posts.

She was suspended from the party and it was revealed on Thursday night that she has decided not to take up her seat in the Streatham St Leonard ward.

To fellow Muslims in London’s Tower Hamlets district, Abdul Halim Khan seemed a pillar of the community. The respected imam was a familiar face at his local mosque, delivering prayers and always on hand to dispense the Almighty’s wisdom. To certain members of his flock, however, his spiritual talk took a very different turn.

During private religious guidance sessions with women and young girls, Khan would claim he had become possessed by a “jinn” or spirit. He would then carry out rape and sexual assaults, blaming the malign entity that was “inside” him. That same jinn, he would then warn his victims, would also wreak vengeance if they told anyone what had happened.

Khan committed his abuse over an 11-year period from 2004 to 2015, with one of those he preyed on aged just 12. Eventually, his youngest victim reported him to a teacher at her school in 2018. That then triggered a long and complex investigation by the Metropolitan Police, which led to six more victims coming forward and Khan’s conviction after a three-month trial. To break their silence, witnesses overcame not just their worries of retribution by Khan’s ‘jinn’, but their fear of testifying against an influential man of standing.

The areas are:

1. Norwich District Council

2. Waltham Forest

3. Hackney

4. Lewisham

5. Hastings

Iris Duane referred to monarch as ‘big lizard Lizzie’ in social media post seven months before Elizabeth II died

Restore Britain have won all ten seats in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk County Council elections. Leader Rupert Lowe’s constituency and the only place in which candidates have stood…

A Restore Britain Spokesperson said:

“The people of Great Yarmouth have spoken loud and clear. They want real change, not more of the same failed politics from Westminster. This clean sweep of all 10 seats is a massive vote of confidence in our local team and in the Restore Britain movement. We ran on commonsense policies: securing our borders, cutting waste, protecting British jobs for local workers, and always putting Great Yarmouth first. Today, the voters of Great Yarmouth delivered a landslide. This is just the beginning.”

Candidates stood for “Great Yarmouth First” which is the ‘local arm’ of Restore. 🇬🇧

No amount of Labour spin will disguise the party’s dreadful night, but the hefty losses of seats in English council areas are nothing more than was expected. The bigger story of the night is the failure of the Greens to make any meaningful breakthrough.

The Greens are only really doing well in student areas. This shouldn’t come as any great surprise, as they have been leading in the polls among 18 to 24 year olds. Their policies could not be better tuned to stirring student activists: climate change, Palestine, as well as declaring war on billionaires and small-time landlords. Yet their policies, similarly, could not be better calculated to offend Red Wall voters. They want to ban horse-racing and make driving a privilege rather than a right and force motorists to retake a test every five years. Just try selling that to white van man.

Reform UK is succeeding as an insurgent party of the Right and Left. Moreover, while they have their bitter enemies, who see the party as a grave threat to the nation, those enemies are not sufficiently numerous nor organised to damage Reform. Farage’s party may never get much over 30 per cent of the vote, but in a four or five party, first past the post system, that is an extremely powerful proportion of the popular vote.

Labour may well dump Starmer as a result of these elections. It will do them no good whatsoever; merely make them look riven by internecine warfare, just as the Tories did in their latter years. But then neither do the Greens look in any position to capitalise. Reform UK has now firmly established itself as the favourite to win the next general election, quite possibly with a good working majority. 🇬🇧