By Christina Patterson
Clearly, we can’t yet know whether Lee Jasper has, as alleged in the Standard over the past couple of weeks, been responsible for cronyism on a breathtaking scale - but it’s certainly not looking good. And if the array of witnesses that Andrew Gilligan has assembled in what appears to be an impressively detailed piece of investigative journalism are to be believed, Jasper is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, with fingers in lots of pies – and one whose mechanisms for ensuring that the pies stay sweet draw heavily on the standard tactics of the playground bully.
The whole situation raises so many questions that it’s hard to know where to start. Why on earth has Ken been so reliant on such a man? What hold does Jasper have over him? And why is the nexus of “black” organisations ostensibly in a position to supply training programmes so tiny and apparently corrupt? Is London, a city with the largest black population in Europe, really so short of competent black managers that it has to rely on backhanders to mates? If, 60 years after the Windrush first arrived on these shores, that’s really the case then we should, as a society, be ashamed. If it isn’t – if there are plenty but Jasper and the LDA have chosen to ignore them – then he should, and so should Ken. Apologies for slavery are all very well, but sometimes the problems are closer to home.
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