Always Worth Saying’s Question Time Review

Question Time 3rd February 2022

The Panel:

Crispin Blunt (Conservative)
Rosena Allin-Khan (Labour)
Robin Shattock (Imperial College)
Victor Adebowale (NHS Confederation)
Tim Stanley (Journalist)

Venue: Tottenham

In last week’s review, eagle-eyed readers spotted I’d confused Alison Pearson (of the Telegraph) with Alison Philips (Daily Mirror) and declared comedian Colin Crompton to be ‘Colin Compton’. These things come in threes. I also assured Puffins that Putin had no intention of invading The Ukraine. Be afraid.

Advertised for weeks in advance as an anti-vaxxer special, the programme began with increases to the cost of living.

“As a child who grew up in a home with just one electric heater,” began Rosena Allin-Khan ludicrously.

Crispin was enthusiastic about cutting people’s energy bills then taking the money off them later on anyway through a compulsory cut and loans system unveiled by the government today. He also referenced a £150 handout for council taxpayers in the A to D bands but omitted to mention the gross injustice meted out to the Band E community who pay more council tax, and pay more for energy too, as they’ve got bigger houses. *very angry face*.

Dr Rosena mentioned her front line NHS work and added something about Boris’s Jimmy Savile insult aimed at Starmer. Now she mentions it, with his portering, Jimmy Savile was an NHS front line worker too.

Tim Stanley moved the conversation to the rising price of energy which he blamed on a lack of investment in nuclear and fracking shale, added to the Tory’s Labour-like green social taxes.

An arse in the audience mentioned ‘climate crisis’. Another wanted the energy sector to be held to account for making a profit. Victor Adebowale agreed, suggesting a windfall tax on energy companies, most of which have recently gone bankrupt. He also suggested stopping dividends being paid to private-sector pension funds while omitting to mention his own numerous and massive public sector pensions – which you pay him out of your wages.

Tim Stanley (journalist) is a columnist at Andrew Neil’s pro-Ghislaine Maxell Spectator Magazine^[1,2,3,4]. Robin Shattock (Imperial College) is an immunologist, hopelessly compromised by his commercial links with China, as detailed in a previous QT Review here.

Victor Adebowale (NHS Confederation) is a ludicrous quango-land trougher. An addendum to the 11th March 2021 QT Review lists several dozen of Victor’s appointments. Since then he will have added more. Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative) is MP for Reigate and Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Having got that out of the way, we are left with Rosena Allin-Khan (Labour), Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health.

In a lengthy London Standard 2016 piece^[5] when Rosena Allin-Khan was a candidate in the Tooting by-election brought about by sitting MP Sadiq Kahn’s elevation to Mayor of London, Rosamund Urwin wrote;

A junior doctor, Allin-Khan works in A&E at St George’s Hospital — the constituency’s biggest employer, where government cuts are hitting hard and the row over junior doctors’ contracts has hurt morale.

The article went on to claim,

Since medical school was unaffordable, she opted instead to study medical biochemistry at Brunel

This is a bare-faced lie. When 45-year-old Rosena was a student in the late 1990s, higher education was funded by the softest of soft loans with student grants not being abolished (by Labour) until 1999 when Rosena would have been 21. Tuition fees were not introduced until 1998 and were set at a bargain price of £1,000 a year.

The real reason Rosena didn’t go to medical school was because of her miserable exam results. Upon leaving Grey Coat Hospital Girl’s School in Westminster, she had gained only 2Es and a U at A-Level.

A poor return for Grey Coats, a Church of England school with strict admittance policies (including long term regular worship in the Church of England), they had been generous to admit Rosena given her Pakistani Muslim father and Polish Catholic mother.

Ms Allin-Khan was eventually accepted to study medicine at Cambridge, aged 24 in 2001. She was provisionally registered as a doctor in August 2006 and fully registered in November 2009.

She studied at St Lucy’s College as a mature post-graduate student with her Brunel degree substituting for the A and A* science A-levels required for admission.

St Lucy’s course requirements also strongly recommend,

“Obtaining medical/ healthcare experience as a paid or volunteer worker, and the shadowing of medical professionals”

Subsequently, Rosena was to make much of her volunteering in the Middle East for the Red Cross. She claims to have ‘worked with Palestinian refugees in Lebanese camps’ and ‘with the victims of flooding in Pakistan’ but the volunteering seems to have included shadowing the photographer’s lens as a model. The Evening Standard interview explained the prospective Tooting MP had,

“Posed for Adidas trainers and Wella hair campaigns to fund her aid work, and a “swimwear shoot” was actually a make-up test. “My friend’s a make-up artist and wanted to do a blog about it staying on underwater. I’ve never been a swimwear model.”

However the Daily Asian Age knew different,

“While Rosena… was a volunteer for the Red Cross, she was earning money as a swimwear model. In one shoot, she can be seen immersed in a swimming pool in Dubai, wearing a white bikini, full make-up and colourful, chunky jewellery. ‘It was a way of paying her bills while she was working as a volunteer,’ says a friend. Rosena has also modelled for sportswear firm Adidas and posed for various hair and makeup shoots.”

Swimwear model or not a swimwear model? Decide for yourselves here, here and here. In fact, Allin-Kahn worked as a model for many years and was on the books of at least two modelling agencies; Fame and Emodels.^[6,7]

After winning the Tooting by-election, and while being a qualified doctor, Rosena went on to make much play of her continuing role as a doctor, sometimes conflating volunteering with working.

Despite ‘government cuts hitting hard’ at A&E, at St George’s Hospital Dr Rosena is very well-paid.

On October 13th 2021, Rosena was paid £525 for an 8-hour shift. That’s £66.62 an hour. On the 23rd, £665 for a 10-hour shift (£66.50 an hour). 31st October, also £665 for 10 hours.

This is a second job. Altogether in 2021 Rosena declared £10,893 in income from St Georges for working 171 hours, in 18 shifts, at an average of £63.70 an hour.

She was also paid £572 for one 10 hour day covering for holiday leave at a GP’s surgery in Wimbledon.

As we shall see, Rosena has an even better paid third job in health care but first a note on Rosena’s declarations of interest.

MPs are supposed to declare their outside interests, including second jobs and donations, within 28 days of receipt.

In autumn 2018, Rosena declared eight payments, all many months late and all at once. Why? Because she’d been caught and was being investigated by the House of Commons Committee on Standards. On the 18th October, she disclosed seven payments, two of them eight months late, three of them five months late and two of them one month late. The payments, again from the hospital, totalled £3800 for 61 hours of work.

A week later, she registered another late payment, this time of £420 for 7 hours (£60 an hour).

Looking through Dr Rosena’s registered interests, we find an even more lucrative third job. She is regularly paid £2,000 for 22 hrs work (£90.90 an hour) for ‘completing A&E medical reports for victims of violent crimes’. ie filling in forms for the compo claim industry.

***

Incidentally, as an aside, if you think cricket is full of weapons-grade racists following the Yorkshire County Cricket Club hoo-ha, the Chairman of Essex using the n-word and the Chairman of Middlesex having to apologise for his ‘swotty Indians’ remarks, hang your head in shame.

On 14th July 2019, purely out of the goodness of their own hearts and with no ulterior motive, the England and Wales Cricket Board donated two tickets and hospitality worth £948 to Rosena – when she was Shadow Minister for Sport.

Likewise, the Football Association, who donated two tickets to a football match worth £332.40, on 30th January 2019.

***

Also included in Rosena’s late submissions was £4,200 from the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a five day jolly to the Gulf state. This isn’t the only Middle East freebie that the good doctor has been on.

On 30th of July 2019, @DrRosena thundered via Twitter;

I travelled to Palestine earlier this year, working as a doctor, with the aim of finding out what issues Palestinians face with accessing hospital treatment.

This refers to her ‘medical aid visit’ to Palestine and Israel the previous April in which she ‘worked as a doctor’ during a five day jolly in which flights, accommodation, food and transport (costing £1,469.30) was paid for by Medical Aid for Palestinians.

She continued,

I saw some truly horrific cases inc. of Palestinian babies being born prematurely, but because of permit issues mothers were sent back to Gaza shortly after birth, with some babies dying alone in hospital. I spoke at length with many news outlets, the Guardian and the Today Prog did good pieces on this. Kids undergoing chemotheory (sic) can’t travel with parents because they’re deemed a security risk.

Besides wondering what ‘chemotheory’ is, one ponders how many Jewish children are treated in Palestinian hospitals and, if Isreal is such a nasty place, why Palestinian children aren’t treated in nearby Egypt, Syria or Lebanon? Come to think of it, one also wonders of the Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) organisation.

On its website, MAP strays away from medical aid and ‘working as doctors’ to comment on,

“Isreal’s systematic discrimination and fragmentation of Palestinian society and healthcare.”

Elsewhere they put to one side the bandages and iodine to rant of,

Systematic detention of Palestinians for extended periods without charge or trial, in violation of international law, forms part of a coercive environment which comprises a range of abusive Israeli practices that discriminate against Palestinians, fragment Palestinian society, and facilitate the presence of [Jewsish] settlements.

If Puffins are concerned about MAP, so are the Charity Commission for England and Wales. The month before Dr Rosena enjoyed MAP’s largess, it was revealed that some of MAP’s annual income is used for political propaganda, they have links to funding NGO’s tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claim Israel is to blame for breast cancer in Palestinian women and promote anti-Semitic works such as the videos of former Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke.^[8]

In response, the bedwetters at the Charity Commission urged MAP to ‘take care to heed regulatory guidelines’.

Another foreign trip was to the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar to ‘work in a refugee camp’ for five days in October 2018. The £1,865 cost was paid for by More United Ltd. More United is a limited company, not a charity. The nature of its business is declared as being political, not philanthropic. More United takes its name from a quote by the late Jo Cox MP but has no other association with her.

In anticipation of the 2017 general election, More United crowdfunded on behalf of 49 candidates of various parties, including Rosena Allin-Kahn. The only Conservative on the list was Puffin’s favourite Anna Sourby. They also endorsed Allin-Khan in the 2019 election.

During the jolly to Bangladesh, Rosena took the side of the Muslim Rohingya in their conflict with the Myanmar authorities.

Taking time out from working in the refugee camp, on 6th October 2018, Rosena tweeted a photo of her relaxed self, dressed in T-shirt and jeans. The other (covered) ladies were segregated from the gentlemen present as part of a team captioned by Rosena as being an Islam Relief Worldwide community clinic.

According to wiki, in 2014, Islamic Relief Worldwide were banned from Israel because of their links with Hamas. In 2016 they were banned from the UAE because of their links with the Muslim Brotherhood. Also in 2016, HSBC bank severed its link with the charity over concerns, “Cash meant for humanitarian aid could potentially end up with terrorist groups abroad.”

In 2020, Islamic Relief Worldwide trustee Heshmat Khalifa had to resign after (careful now amber alert) calling Eqypt’s President Sisi a “Pimp son of the Jews” and referring to Israeli authorities (careful now red alert) as “grandchildren of monkeys and pigs.”

Ms Rosena did well to rendezvous with Islamic Relief Worldwide in Bangladesh, as the government there have been trying to ban them from refugee camps after, again according to wiki, “Alleging funds were used to preach Islam, construct mosques, encourage radicalism, and fund militants.”

At least the good doctor gets some positive publicity from gin-soaked Greggs smörgåsbord pleasurer Fatty Fawkes’ sister publication The Sun.

In an article bashing Labour MPs for claiming IT products on expenses, Rupert Murdoch’s organ notes,

“But their party colleague Rosena Allin-Khan showed them up by securing a donation of laptops, worth £10,000, and handing them to schools. The 44 computers were distributed to Primary Schools across her South London constituency of Tooting.”

Laptops that would be delivered to schools by chauffeuring and logistics company Smart City Prestige.

Excellent PR that no one could possibly be cynical about. Or could they? Further reference to Dr Allin-Khan’s register of interests shows that the £10,119.56p worth of laptops were donated to her by Henley Homes on the 19th January 2021.

Furthermore, on the 29th of January 2020 Henley Homes had also donated £5,000 to her with another payment of £5,000 being made on 28th February 2020. Interesting.

According to documents lodged at Companies House, the nature of Henley Homes’ business is ‘Development of building projects’. On their website, Henley self describes as

‘An efficient, progressive and design-led development company, with a reputation for creating outstanding and award-winning homes, in and around the capital.’

At the moment the company has two directors, the progressive Kashif Zamir Usmani and the progressive Tariq Zamir Usmani and, yes, Smart City Prestige is part of the Henley Homes group.

In the group’s latest submitted accounts, dated 31st December 2020, auditors Simmons Gainsford LLP are somewhat lukewarm and conclude,

No instances of material non-compliance were identified. However, the likelihood of detecting irregularities, including fraud, is limited by the inherent difficulty in detecting irregularities, the effectiveness of the entities controls, and the nature, timing and extent of the audit procedures performed. Irregularities that result from fraud might be inherently more difficult to detect than irregularities that result from error. As explained above, there is an unavoidable risk that material misstatements may not be detected, even though the audit has been planned and performed in accordance with ISAs (UK).

The ‘explained above’ includes references to reviewing documentation relating to health, safety and fire regulation compliance and “challenging assumptions made by management in their specific accounting policies and estimates.”

Also, “challenging assumptions made by management regarding the recovery of balances which remain outstanding”, challenging assumptions regarding changes to the value of investment property, identifying unusual or unexpected movements in account balances which may be indicative of fraud, evaluating the underlying business reasons for unusual transactions etc etc etc.

The developer’s charitable arm is called Better Community Business Network or BCBN. BCBN’s progressive charity events include fundraisers for the West London Islamic Centre Redevelopment Fund. Previously, the fund’s website offered an opportunity for fine dining, entertainment and networking with keynote speakers that included then Tooting MP Sadiq Kahn and the aforementioned Tariq Usmani. All proceeds were to be donated to the West London Islamic Centre Redevelopment Project and would count as Sadaqah Jarriyah (the religious obligation placed upon Muslims to give to Muslim charities).

Further to that, BCBN claims to have raised over £1.3million pounds for causes such as the Muslim Fostering Project, The Refugees Council and the Muslim Youth Helpline.

There is much, much, much, more on Doctor Allin-Khan MP, and her fellow travellers in enriched Tooting, but space forbids. In conclusion, she is a particular type of Labour Member of Parliament for a particular type of Labour seat, both best avoided like the plague.