Graves of Division

Kamran Ghafoor And His Oldham Group Want to Divide Oldham's Dead.

Oldham has a segregation problem. Eighty years of failed multiculturalism confirmed it. Race riots validated it. And three decades of official reports have confirmed it. Despite all the evidence, the political class that control Oldham continue on their journey of celebrating diversity and screaming racist at anyone who objects to the gang rape of little White girls.

Now a faction of Pakistani sectarians and Islamists, calling itself the Oldham Group, is running candidates on a platform that would make it worse.

Kamran Ghafoor leads it. His own colleagues denounced him from the council chamber as a slum landlord. His building collapsed at 31 King Street and put forty people out of their homes overnight. Reports filed in the aftermath raised concerns about human trafficking and modern slavery. Those concerns have not been resolved. Ghafoor has not addressed them.

He is instead running a political campaign.

The Cemetery Proposal Is a Recruitment Tool

The Oldham Group's headline demand is a Muslim-only cemetery.

Oldham's cemeteries already accommodate Islamic burial requirements. The direction of the body, the absence of embalming, swift interment. Existing sites meet all of it. There is no unmet religious need here. Ghafoor invented one. The cemetery is how he tells people they are separate from their neighbours and positions himself as the man who proved it.

My mother is buried in Chadderton cemetery. So are my uncles, my aunts, people I have known all my life. They are buried alongside everyone else who has ever lost someone in this town. That is where their memory lives, in ground that belongs to all of us. To fence that off along sectarian lines is a political act. It puts division into the earth permanently.

Ghafoor is using the dead to recruit.

The Oldham Group came from a network that has spent years operating without scrutiny.

Ghafoor's properties generated a building collapse and reports of criminal exploitation of the people living inside them. Nobody in that network has been held to account. They have moved into electoral politics instead. Ghafoor is now seeking a position that would give him institutional weight to resist further inquiry.

The biraderi system has operated this way in Oldham for decades. Votes are delivered through obligation and kinship. The network absorbs accountability before it reaches anyone who might act on it. The people who should be answering questions about King Street are the ones asking for your vote.

Political Islam Is Capturing British Local Government. Oldham Is Next.

What is happening in Oldham is part of a national story the political establishment has refused to read honestly.

Political Islam is the project of organising Muslim communities as a theocratic bloc, using democratic structures to reach destinations those structures were not designed to reach. The distinction from ordinary Muslim political participation matters. The establishment has spent a decade refusing to make it.

Lutfur Rahman Was Removed From Office. He Came Back. The Movement Took Note.

Lutfur Rahman was removed from office by an election court in 2015. The court found vote-rigging and exploitation of religious influence from a network that treated the borough as a possession. The political class treated it as an anomaly.

Rahman came back. In 2022 he won Tower Hamlets again, this time with his own party, ASPIRE, built on the same bloc-vote architecture the court had already condemned. He remains one of the most powerful local politicians in East London. The lesson the movement took from 2015 was that it had been caught and survived. That survival became a proof of concept.

Every political Islamist network in Britain watched that result.

In 2024, Political Islam Proved Its Electoral Infrastructure Works

Five independent candidates won parliamentary seats in 2024 running explicitly on Muslim identity politics. Leicester South. Birmingham Perry Barr. Blackburn. Dewsbury and Batley. Stratford and Bow. They were the result of organised campaigns with coordinated candidate selection and mosque networks activated as electoral infrastructure.

The Muslim Vote campaign operated openly, targeting marginal seats and publishing candidate scorecards based on positions acceptable to its organising network. George Galloway's Workers Party ran candidates across dozens of constituencies on a platform fusing hard-left economics with Islamist communal politics. They now officially partner with Ghafoor and his clans.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose stated goal is a global caliphate, was not proscribed until January 2024, decades after its intentions were publicly documented. It spent those decades recruiting on British university campuses.

The infrastructure is built. The question now is where it goes next.

Labour Built the Ladder and Is Surprised to Find Someone Climbing It

The Labour Party cultivated Muslim bloc votes for over thirty years. It did so by treating Muslim communities as a monolith to be managed through approved community leaders, men who operated through the biraderi patronage structure and answered to nobody outside it. Labour did not ask how the votes were delivered.

That arrangement has broken. The networks Labour empowered now have their own candidates and their own agenda. Labour's response has been appeasement. It has gerrymandered internal selections and buried complaints.

Gaza broke the relationship openly. Labour refused to call it a genocide. Starmer equivocated for months while the images ran on every phone in every Muslim household in Britain. The Islamist movement harvested that anger. Demographic growth in communities with young populations and concentrated geography gave it the means. The people with most to lose from this looked away. The anger that political Islam is harvesting was Labour's to lose. Some of it went to the Greens. Some of it went elsewhere.

Labour's response has been appeasement.

It has formalised a definition of what it calls anti-Muslim hostility. The renaming from Islamophobia is cosmetic. Whatever it is called, its function is the same. It treats scrutiny of Muslim political behaviour as a form of hatred. Anyone who names what political Islam is doing in British towns and cities risks the label. The movement that pushed for years to get this onto the statute books knew exactly what it was building, and it built it. The same Labour government that failed grooming gang victims across the north of England has handed it to them. The appeasement has not worked. The candidates are still standing and the demands have not stopped.

This Movement Is Dismantling Shared Public Life. Oldham Is Watching It Happen.

The movement's parliamentary and local government wing shares identifiable goals regardless of its internal variation. It pursues separate institutions and faith-based exemptions from common standards, with governance structures designed to sit outside democratic accountability. It does this through religious courts, faith-school expansion, and sustained pressure on public bodies to defer to community leaders on questions affecting Muslims.

What is happening nationally has a local address. In Oldham it is the Oldham Group. Its leading figure has unanswered questions about the people who lived in his properties. Its headline policy is a cemetery that encodes permanent division into public ground. The pattern is identical to every borough that has already been through this.

The cemetery proposal is not where the pattern ends. It is a test of how much ground you will surrender without a fight. Each concession normalises the next demand. Each silence is read as permission. That is the methodology, documented in every borough where this movement has gained a foothold and voters decided it was not their argument to have.

Ghafoor is an operator working inside a movement that has a direction. You have already seen one version of it in the properties he owns and the people who lived inside them.

This movement wins through cowardice. It advances when people look away, when the conversation feels too complicated, when good faith is extended to those who have none. It has studied every borough it has entered and learned the same lesson each time. The opposition fragments. The institutions hedge. The complaints get managed. And the movement banks another concession and returns with the next demand.

This election is about what kind of town Oldham chooses to be.

Oldham is not a special case. It is the next case. The cemetery is not a reasonable opening position. It is a measurement. Ghafoor and the bearded biraderi men behind him are measuring how much this town will give up before anyone pushes back.

The answer to that question is being written right now, in who turns out and who stays home, in who treats this election as consequential and who decides it is not their problem.

There is no neutral position available. Silence has already been counted as a vote. That applies to every political party operating in this town, including Reform. Especially Reform. They must speak out. They must stand against this.

I’m Raja Miah. For seven years, I led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs. Before that, I spent over a decade trying to stop violent extremists exploiting abandoned communities.

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Raja Miah MBE