So, there is an election coming and apparently it might be decided in Keighley, my home constituency. This is likely to be the third event to occur in the area, after the Tour de France went through in 2014 and Keighley Cougars RLFC won the 1995 second division championship, so I thought I’d devote a…
Read More Come, muse, let us sing of KeighleyIt looks like the Biryani Project is back in the news. I’ve created a new blog category for my posts from March-April 2015 on the subject here. The news is this Huff story, which is driven by the fact Stephen Yaxley-Lennon needs another Stone Island jacket, and therefore he’s got a book out. The key…
Read More Reopening the #biryaniproject fileSo I noticed Jahan Mahmood was on twitter. I had some stuff I wanted to know so I thought I’d ask him and find out. @yorksranter Of course, I parted with Afzal on the direction he wanted 2 pursue. I was always interestd in grassroots work & nothing else — Jahan Mahmood (@jahanmahmood) March 29,…
Read More A bit more #biryaniproject.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 edition