Since being elected Mayor, I have stood shoulder to shoulder with leaders from all religious faiths, with the LBGT community and residents from all walks of life in our cosmopolitan borough in preventing far Right extremists from the British National Party and the English Defence League from tramping their way through the East End as Mosley and his Black shirts did in the 1930s. Sadly, the racists and bigots feed from, and re-print, much of the dangerous nonsense that is being promulgated in some quarters that somehow my administration is ‘Sharia law fringed’ or ‘Islamism-lite’. My religion is a private matter. But the kind of society I want to see mirrors that envisaged by Prince Charles. It is essentially where no one particular religion has hegemony; instead we have a community of faiths.

Lutfur Rahman responds to the Evening Standard witch-hunt against him, the main aim of which has been to discredit Ken Livingstone, Labour candidate for London mayor.

Lutfur says that the Standard initially agreed to allow him the right of reply but then withdrew that offer. So this piece appears in the Huffington Post.