THERE is an overpowering fishy stench left in the air over the affair of Blackburn and Darwen Racial Equality Council seeking to fill the post of its racial harassment supervisor.

For it was REC's own chairman, Blackburn councillor Mohammed Khan, who was an applicant for the £22,000-a-year publicly-funded post - and was offered it!

Equally disturbing is that at least two of the four interviewers for the job - Coun Dave Hollings and Labour Party women's officer Pat Maudsley - were political colleagues of Coun Khan.

Indeed, these close connections are underlined by the fact that Coun Hollings is actually deputy to Coun Khan who chairs Blackburn with Darwen housing committee.

Nor could the rest of the panel be seen as distinctly neutral strangers to the person to whom they offered the job.

Pat Maudsley was once also a Labour councillor as was fellow interviewer, Abdul Piracha, while Conservative Edna Arnold is a member of the same local authority.

But if this intimacy is disturbingly unwholesome, worse is the fact that the whole business of the REC's chairman applying for the job in the first place was a fundamental breach of its own rules.

It is charitable to conclude that Coun Khan did not know this.

And it may be that the panel did not either.

But if such ignorance permitted them to remain blinkered to the fact that the process they then engaged in - in blunt terms, manifest cronyism - then Coun Khan was clearly unfit to be chairman of the REC and the others were unfit to be on the panel. And if somehow Coun Khan appeared before them as a "surprise" candidate, they should have at once realised that their present and past associations with him were far too close to be ethical and exempted themselves at once from the selection process.

That they didn't, that he applied and that he was appointed leaves the stench of favouritism, cosy set-ups and political preference pervading not just the REC, but the town hall and the Labour Party.

It must be purged - first of all by Coun Khan being booted out from the REC and having the decency also to resign from the council - along with his deputy.

And the others involved need to publicly explain themselves and face open disciplinary action by their parties.

The last thing that is needed in an organisation like a Racial Equality Council, where integrity and impartiality are of the essence, is any kind of discrimination - and this whole affair positively stinks of it.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.