Simon Foster, Labour’s candidate for one of the highest profile Police and Crime Commissioner posts – the West Midlands – is seeking to oversee policing in an area covering the UK’s second largest city from May. Which is why Guido’s eyebrows were raised when Foster agreed to join an event hosted by the notorious ‘Muslim Engagement and Development’ (MEND) group. The week the UK’s terror threat level increased to ‘severe’…

The head of counter-terrorism at the Met called out MEND two years ago as an extremist linked group, noting that “one of MEND’s former leading figures lost a libel case labelling him as “a hard-line Islamic extremist” in the context of comments he made supporting the killing of British soldiers in Iraq.” At the time of the 2017 attack on Parliament, MEND’s director of engagement Azad Ali claimed that the terrorist attack, which killed five including PC Keith Palmer, was “not terrorism”. The organisation has a reputation so troubling that even then Chair of the the APPG on British Muslims Anna Soubry ditched a meeting with them in 2017…

Senior police officers and parliamentarians have called out this organisation, yet Corbynista Foster thought it was a good idea to accept their invitation to meet with them in the aftermath of a spate terrorist attacks in France and Austria. Worrying.