Everyone who’s anyone in Oldham knows Irish Imy. Born Mohammed Imran Ali in Dublin in 1980 and raised in Werneth in south-west Oldham, Imy is the borough’s recurring bad guy. He’s done time for assault, trafficking heroin and being the getaway driver for the murderer Dale Cregan, who shot three people and blew up their bodies with grenades in 2012. Naturally, Imy now wants to be a politician. He’s standing in this year’s local elections as an independent, promising to ‘Make Werneth Great Again’. His campaign is not regarded as insane. He may win.
Imy is capitalising on the sense that this Greater Manchester borough is corrupt. People in Oldham say the local elections are rigged and believe that council seats are handed out through the South Asian biradari clan system. They say the town’s grooming gangs scandal has become a political toy and they worry about the increasing number of intimidatory crimes in the area. Last month, another candidate in the upcoming May locals was targeted in a double arson attack. In one night his car was petrol-bombed and his mother’s garden was torched. He has now decided to not stand in the upcoming elections.
Winston Churchill was the MP for Oldham in the early 1900s and said that its people had ‘warm hearts and bright eyes’. Oldhamers today are more cynical.
I asked Brian Hobin, Oldham’s deputy mayor, how to find Irish Imy. ‘Just look for the biggest and flashiest car you can see,’ he replied. I had visited Hobin at the pub he runs to talk about the state of Oldham’s politics (‘It’s toxic’). Afterwards he offered to drive me to my appointment with Imy, whom he knows by reputation. We found him in a black Volkswagen Amarok, a bruising 4×4 which is also used by the Dutch military. ‘I hope Brian’s been saying good things,’ Imy said as he got out and gripped my hand. The deputy mayor smiled weakly and left.
At a café on the top floor of a furniture shop, Imy claimed that he was standing for the council to ‘break up the little boys’ club’. For about 20 years Oldham has been run the same way by the same people. ‘That chamber,’ Imy said, ‘it’s a circus.’ Many Oldhamers believe this. Partly that’s because of the way council candidates seem to be chosen. People from all political and religious backgrounds complain that in wards such as Werneth, St Mary’s and Alexandra, local elections are sewn up in mosques and back rooms by community elders. Ethnically Pakistani and Bangladeshi residents make up large proportions of these wards’ populations. They decide who they want in power and then the main political parties select them.
Despite this, Oldham’s representatives seem to do nothing. In Werneth, Imy is trying to oust Labour’s Fida Hussain, who has been a councillor there since 2008. ‘Fida is utterly useless,’ one of his former Labour colleagues told me. They said Imy could win the ward because formerly loyal Muslim voters are becoming tired of having poor local services. ‘People want to be councillors for status, their ego, nothing else,’ said an independent candidate standing in May’s local elections. A former mayor of the borough agreed: ‘It’s a status symbol.’
‘People want to be councillors for status, their ego, nothing else,’
said an independent candidate
The map of Oldham is scarred with failed, delayed and incomplete council projects. The Oldham Mumps, the site of a train station from 1847 until 2009, is today a wasteland of car parks and boarded-up neo-Baroque buildings. Tommyfield Market, previously the best market in the north-west, is dying. Traders are waiting for the council to finish building the Spindles shopping centre, to which they are being forced to relocate. The Oldham Coliseum, a venue where Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel once performed, closed three years ago. The council said the Coliseum would reopen for the 2025 panto season. It did not.
Oldham’s political scene is becoming increasingly fraught. Lots of people put that down to three eccentric blogs called Recusant Nine, The Forsaken, and Red Wall & the Rabble. They are run by a man called Raja Miah, a local who was awarded an MBE in 2004 for improving ‘community relations’ after race riots in Oldham. In Raja’s ‘disclosures’ (articles) and ‘transmissions’ (podcasts), he claims to expose ‘the cover-up of grooming gangs, local government corruption and how Labour party politicians have encouraged division by courting the cartel-controlled block Asian vote’. While to some, Raja is a hero, his critics say he is a conspiracist grifter who poisoned Oldham’s politics as revenge. He has a long-running feud with Oldham West’s Labour MP, Jim McMahon, over free schools he used to run. ‘Raja is a complete opportunist,’ said Imy. ‘He’s quite intelligent to a certain crowd – the far right.’
Raja’s magnum opus is a seven-part series of Substack ‘disclosures’ on Recusant Nine titled ‘Welcome to Oldham’. It’s a wild story of the borough from his childhood to the present day, a tale of what he sees as Oldham’s decline into mobsterism. Raja’s central, unproven and denied allegation is that Oldham’s Labour branch and McMahon covered up the grooming gangs to win Asian votes. Raja also charts the intriguing relationship between Irish Imy and Oldham council’s leader, Labour’s Arooj Shah. She has been a close friend of Imy’s for decades. ‘I can’t turn my back on people I’ve known since childhood,’ Shah said in a statement a few years ago when she was asked about Imy’s life of crime.
Raja says that more than 20 million people have seen his work. This is no surprise. His narrative has spread through Oldham because there’s truth to it. He is correct in saying that the ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang worked for Oldham council as a ‘welfare rights’ officer and was a member of the Oldham Labour party; he is right to find Shah’s continued close relationship with Imy weird; and there has been, as he alleges, a history of fraudulent postal voting in the borough. He just ties all the threads together a little excitedly.
‘Some people from the outside will look at Oldham, they’ll look at us and think we’re mad as a box of frogs’
The result of Raja’s efforts is that local politics in Oldham is becoming a dogfight. Men selected through the clan system still rule the inner wards, and Labour still just about runs the council, but in the white-majority doughnut around the borough’s centre, more reactionary candidates are finding success. New groups, such as the Failsworth Independent party, are taking old Labour territory. Brian Hobin, the deputy mayor, is a member of the Failsworth Independents, and is the first independent deputy mayor in Oldham’s history. If convention is followed, the top post will be his next year. Not long ago, he was a taxi driver.
Hobin and the Failsworth Independents have made great political gains from Raja’s grooming gang narratives. Sean Fielding, the then Oldham council leader, ended up losing his seat in 2021, and is now a councillor in Bolton. People close to Fielding say that towards the end of his tenure he removed himself from borough life. He started to be seen in public less. He was being followed by skinheads.
In Hobin’s pub, the Mare and Foal, the deputy mayor told me that he regretted the style of politics he used to practise. ‘I’ve never known an environment like Oldham politics for toxicity,’ he said. ‘And I think to a certain degree, in the early days, I will hold my hands up and say the independents did cause some of it… Some people from the outside will look at Oldham, they’ll look at us and think we’re mad as a box of frogs. And sometimes I stand back and I think there must be investors and business people who are looking for somewhere to go. And they look at Oldham and think, “Oh no I don’t want to get involved in that.”’
The intimidation of Oldham’s political figures gives a sense of that violent unruliness. Last month’s double arson attack was not the first incident against a politician. In July 2021, Arooj Shah discovered that her car had been petrol-bombed, and in November 2019 someone threw a pig’s head through a former councillor’s window. Police have not found the culprits for any of the attacks, and in the vacuum, people have blamed Oldham Labour, the far right, and inter-clan warfare respectively. Everyone denies they were involved.
The fear is that Oldham is moving backwards. That politics is going the way it was 25 years ago. In 2001, Oldham suffered race riots unlike anything Britain has seen since. They culminated in a street battle between 500 Asian Oldhamers and police. In a report by Professor Ted Cantle published six months after the violence, he said Asian and white Oldhamers had been living ‘parallel lives’. Side by side, never crossing. The trouble had been coming for years, and in the end all it took was a scrap between two white and two Asian kids outside a fish and chip shop to send everything up.
In the top-floor café, Imy wasn’t all that keen to go into what he was doing in 2001. He said that a criminal’s life was a dog’s life, and that was that.
He said that his aim was to repair a place that he had helped to break, and said that Shah wasn’t particularly pleased when he told her that he’d be standing against one of her candidates in May. We left the café, said goodbye, and I saw him meet a woman wearing heels with red Christian Louboutin soles. She held his arm, and they walked off down the paranoid streets.
Comments