British lawmaker Alexander Stafford MP has called for Lord Ahmed of Rotherham to be stripped of his title, calling the convicted child molester’s peerage “an insult to his victims”.
Nazir Ahmed was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer in 1998 on the recommendation of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, representing Labour until 2013, when he resigned from the leftist party ahead of an internal investigation into comments he made blaming a Jewish conspiracy for his 2009 conviction for dangerous driving over an incident that left a 28-year-old father of two dead.
He continued to sit in the Upper House as an independent until late 2020, however, when he resigned before he could be expelled for another scandal that saw the House of Lords Conduct Committee and Commissioner for Standards accuse him of “sexually assaulting” and “emotionally and sexually” exploiting a member of the public who came to him for help.
The Pakistani migrant has now been involved in arguably his worst scandal yet, however, with a jury convicting him of the buggery of a boy under the age of 11 and the attempted rape of a young girl in the 1970s, prompting Mr Stafford to call for his noble title to be stripped once and for all.
Despite inaccurate reports by establishment media outlets such as the BBC and Sky News during and after his trial that he is now “Mr Ahmed” and “formerly Lord Ahmed of Rotherham”, the paedophile did not actually lose his title following his resignation from the House of Lords, and thus remains The Right Honourable Lord Ahmed of Rotherham.
Indeed, after contacting the Lord Speaker’s Office to clarify his title last November, Breitbart News was told by the Head of Press and Media
for the House of Lords that, because peerages are technically awarded by the monarch, peers who resign or are expelled from the legislature — or who never sat in it in the first place — can only have their titles removed by an act of primary legislation.
Alexander Stafford, the Member of Parliament for the Rother Valley near Rotherham, said in comments reported by the Rotherham Advertiser that “here is no getting away from the fact that this paedophile is in possession of a peerage and this is absolutely and categorically unacceptable,” insisting that he “should be stripped of this immediately.”
“I will be speaking to my colleagues in the Department of Justice to ensure that this individual is not allowed to continue to hold a peerage, which would be an insult to his victims,” he said, adding on social media that he would be appealing to Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, directly, and inviting supporters to sign a petition backing the title’s removal on his website.
Breitbart News has contacted Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, to ask if she is considering tabling legislation to remove Lord Ahmed’s peerage, but had received no reply from her as of the time of publication.