Neil Wilby Media

After several weeks of sustained bluster, more humiliation has been heaped on a notorious, unemployed, Tameside-based conspiracy theorist, Raja Miah.

Not for the first time, the betrayal has come from within his own ranks of supporters whom, appositely, self-style as The Rabble (or Raja’s Rabble) as much vaunted and highly publicised plots for a motion, calling for a no-confidence vote in the administration of Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, came to nothing.

The deadline for lodging such motions, ahead of the next Full Council meeting on 12th July, 2023, has now passed and Bradford-born Miah is drowning in self pity on his various Recusant Nine social media platforms as supporters willing to back his increasingly frenzied and largely evidence-free output, in viable numbers, are, by his own admission, dwindling away.

The Rabble now, extraordinarily, includes six sitting elected Members at the infamous ‘cover-up’ Council who dance to the tune of ‘The Malicious Beggar’ (or, more simply, ‘The Beggar’), as the Mossley man is widely known on social media. Those councillors find nothing objectionable in him leeching donations and subscriptions from the State benefits of a group largely comprised of elderly, vulnerable, disabled, gullible and deluded cultists and, indeed, at least two of them actually fund his routinely divisive, hate-filled narratives themselves.

Two councillors, the newly elected Cllr Marc Hince and Cllr Maggie Hurley, whom, along with Cllr Sandra Ball, have formed the ‘The Independent Group‘ (TIG) within Oldham Council, rather than, perhaps, the more accurate ‘The Rabble Party‘, were expected to move and second the no confidence motion. It is believed that the plan was abandoned when it became clear that, apart from the TIGs, there would be little or no support for it from other Opposition parties. Apart from a renegade Tory, Cllr Lewis Quigg, whom according to a, usually, very well informed fellow councillor, faced losing the Party whip if he attached himself to the motion.

The general feeling is that, in the midst of a cost of living, energy and child poverty crisis, other elected Members across the chamber, even those with serious misgivings about the Labour Administration, and its newly restored Leader, Cllr Arooj Shah, would rather focus on what they were elected to achieve as councillors, improving the lot of their ward constituents, rather than pandering to the whims of Raja Miah, his tame acolytes and wholly misconceived, time-wasting motions.

For Cllr Hurley, who represents the Royton South ward, it is the third Raja Miah conspiracy theory to which she has become firmly attached in just under two months in elected office. Along with ‘The Beggar’, she was the prime mover of a claimed ‘cross-party boycott’ of Oldham’s Mayor Making on 24th May, 2023. In the event, the boycott comprised just one councillor or invited guest: Maggie Hurley. The event,  an annual high spot in the civic calendar, which saw the investiture of former Cabinet Member,  Dr Zahid Chauhan OBE, to high office, was widely hailed as a great success in spite of her absence.

The third fantasy is Cllr Hurley’s limpet-like attachment to Raja Miah’s raison d’être and connected money-making capers: A ‘cover-up’ of industrial scale child sexual exploitation (CSE) by a long-running, wide-scale conspiracy, comprising, at the very least, Labour councillors; Labour MPs (including the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Party); a Mayor and two Deputy Mayors, senior paid council officers; an entire police force; their safeguarding partners; expert and independent investigators; local and regional journalists, including the author of this article, Neil Wilby, in return for Asian block votes at local and general elections.

What Maggie Hurley will come to realise, in the coming months, is that whilst ‘The Malicious Beggar’, as a long-term resident of a different Borough, studiously avoids any form of scrutiny, and flatly refuses to answer straight questions with straight answers (read more here), preferring to block then abuse enquirers, she is in a very different position as an elected public official: If she is unable to produce probative evidence of those claims, as Miah or any other member of The Rabble has been unwilling or unable to do for at least the past four years, then what little credibility she retains in the council chamber, as The Beggar’s parrot, will disappear to nothing and she, along with her fellow TIGs, will very quickly become figures of further ridicule and derision.

Cllr Hurley has been offered right of reply. She was also invited to put forward a reason why Neil Wilby is blocked from the ‘Royton Independents’ page which she curates.

UPDATES: Cllr Hurley did not acknowledge or respond substantively to the email sent to her. A matter entirely for her, of course, but does little to nothing for her credibility.

But one Royton resident, who did not wish to be named, has contacted NWM, since the article was published, to say:

“During the election campaign I asked Maggie about how she knew children were being gang-raped by Asian men. Her answer was, ‘Raja has all the evidence’. Asked if she’d seen it, she said, ‘No’.”

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Page last updated: Monday 3rd July, 2023 at 15h25

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