Rotten ethnic politicking won't get my vote

Our last representative, Piara Khabra, the oldest MP in Parliament, died recently.

Putting it as politely as possible as a mark of respect for his bereaved supporters, I never thought much of him.

For 17 years he ran an efficient fiefdom for Labour, which has ruled supreme here for 50 years. When I moved to London from Oxford in 1978, the overbearing Syd Bidwell was the MP, and he was no better.

Democracy here has always been more expedient than clean, staged rather than real, murky, full of intrigue and secrets.

Backed by party leaders, ethnicity, race and communalism choose and direct the actors. The audience is manipulated, yet as devout democrats we dutifully turn up to vote.

This election could have blown away the musty air and let in real progressive politics.

But the theatre is dark and musty still and the show goes on as before. Most of the parties play to the ethnic vote and shoddily so. The biggest boos and hisses surely go to David Cameron, who plucked Tony Lit, (real name Surinder Paul Singh Lit) for the star role, clueless that his protégé gave thousands of pounds to Labour recently.

Labour's Virendra Sharma is an old, lacklustre, local-authority type.

He is already calling himself an MP in some of the leaflets found littering our streets. Even UKIP has an Asian warrior, Dr Rajan, an irate Indian immigrant doctor who now rails against incomers. The only good news is that the BNP is nowhere to be seen in this most mixed borough.

Perhaps they couldn't find a willing ethnic to field. Every candidate, bar one, is male and brown. To be fair to Khabra, he did want a woman to come after him, but his henchmen and politicians couldn't take the risk.

Thirty-nine per cent of the voters are British Asians and the assumption is we are third class, Third World people who have only the herd instinct and cannot tolerate a woman in charge.

"Community leaders" fit and feed that stereotype. The Sikh Federation wants a turbaned Sikh in Parliament; Muslims and Hindus demand representation.

There have been dramatic defections based on faith and ethnicity, again orchestrated by party strategists from all the main parties.

Only the Liberal Democrat candidate, Nigel Bakhai, refuses to play the ethnic part and treats voters as intelligent adults. He gets my vote. If he does succeed, he must change the culture of this London constituency. It has been rotten for too long.