In September last year, Oldham Council gathered to discuss, among other things, the recognition of the Palestinian state and the ongoing famine in Gaza.
In the end, these international points of order were overshadowed by something more distinctly local: mud-slinging. More precisely, the question of whether Kamran Ghafoor, leader of the breakaway pro-Palestine Oldham Group, had levelled a “degrading sexual slur” in Urdu at Labour council leader Arooj Shah, during a post-meeting ruckus.
Shah said she was “horrified”. Ghafoor said the accusation was “false” and “politically motivated”.
Not that Ghafoor had come to expect anything else. The slur incident came only four months after the previous time he’d been in the pages of the Manchester Evening News defending himself against “politically motivated” attacks. On that occasion, a building he owned on King Street in Oldham’s town centre had to be evacuated after a council inspection found unliveable conditions. Ghafoor was fined, but he said he was being made into a “scapegoat” and that the attacks were again, “politically motivated”.
Around that time, The Mill understands, a resident made a report about a crack in the side of another of Ghafoor’s buildings: 31 King Street.
Fast forward nine months and 31 King Street has dramatically collapsed. It happened at lunchtime on Tuesday and three people were injured, two hospitalised. The Euro King Mini Market housed on the ground floor was destroyed. In the coverage of the collapse, several people are quoted saying it is a “miracle” no one died. Ghafoor told local reporters that “windy weather” may have been a factor.
Spending time on King Street in the days after the collapse, it’s all anyone is talking about. At one takeaway on the street, the owner is keen to point out how unsurprised he is. “The building wasn’t safe. It was so old, the shop-owners were nearly trapped in the collapsed property because the fridges fell and blocked the entrance,” he says.
A collapsing politics
Twice-blighted by conniving councillors, now by Mother Nature, it perhaps isn’t surprising that Ghafoor has been under pressure this week — labelled a “slum landlord” and “scumbag” by his political opponents on Facebook. Ghafoor previously served as a Tory councillor in Oldham, but now runs the Oldham Group, which has quickly become a local force — hosting visits from George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn in the past year. In May’s council elections in Oldham, they are expected to take seats from Labour in parts of the town with large South Asian populations.
In a long email to The Mill last night, Ghafoor described a “long-standing political vendetta” against himself, and rubbished the “rogue landlord” claims he said were circulating about him. He also cast doubt on the integrity of the council investigation which is now underway.
“I have concerns regarding the conduct of certain officers who are approaching and questioning tenants,” Ghafoor wrote, seeming to suggest he would be treated unfairly by those carrying out the investigation. “While this may be presented as due diligence, I believe it forms part of a wider, systematic attempt to identify issues following this unfortunate incident, which could then be used for political advantage.”
Does Ghafoor have a point? In Oldham, it’s certainly plausible that a local politician might be the victim of a toxic smear campaign. The borough’s politics have been characterised by intense in-fighting, ad-hominem attacks and dubious stories about paedophile rings for years now, as Mill readers are very much aware. The mud-slinging on all sides makes the prospect of establishing facts more difficult.
Oldham’s recent history is eventful. There was the candidate who dropped out of last May’s elections after his mother’s garden was torched and his car was petrol-bombed. There were the councillors who squared up against each other midway through a 2024 council meeting about Green Belt land (the same meeting during which Independent Marc Hince claimed he was called a Nazi “without any provocation” and the police were called). Go back a little further to 2021 and you get Shah herself experiencing the petrol-bombing of her car. Further still, to 2019, when a pig’s head was thrown through an ex-councillor’s window. That’s the heavily abridged version.
In the background to all of this is the multi-year campaign waged by Raja Miah, an online rabble rouser whose posts have been widely circulated by Elon Musk, and who believes the Oldham Labour Party knowingly covered up the sexual abuse of minors to avoid losing Asian voters. Miah’s intensely personal campaigning - prosecuted mostly via Facebook live streams and viral posts on X - helped to unseat three consecutive leaders of Oldham Council.
Stepping into the fray this year is independent candidate Irish Imy (real name: Mohammed Imran Ali), with his promise to “Make Werneth Great Again”. Imy has been busy assuring voters that his colourful past — involving prison sentences for trafficking heroin and acting as Dale Cregan’s getaway driver after Cregan shot three people and blew up their bodies with grenades in 2012 — is very much behind him.
When I asked one well-known Oldham politician what effect the mud-slinging in the wake of the building collapse could have on an already toxic situation, he said: “Someone’s going to get shot…Please don’t put my name to that.”
When the news emerged, the day after the collapse, that Ghafoor was one of the directors of the company that owns the building, two significant figures in Oldham’s politics had their keypads ready and primed.
Raja Miah, who The Mill has been chronicling for years, reminded his 110,000 X followers of the time Ghafoor left his Rolls Royce parked in front of a war memorial, and demanded Greater Manchester Police open a formal investigation into the collapse. Separately, Irish Imy described Ghafoor in a Facebook post this week as a “scumbag slum landlord”. For his part, Ghafoor told us: “in situations such as this, there can often be speculation or misinformed commentary, particularly while facts are still being established.”
Miah and Imy are by no means friends — far from it — but they have common cause here. The situation, two opposed independents taking the same position against another prominent independent, paints a picture of how bitty and messy Oldham politics is now. You’ve got Miah (critical of Labour over their alleged ties to South Asian biraderi networks, not to mention how the party has highlighted his failed free schools), Ghafoor (critical of Labour due to their weak stance on Gaza) and Irish Imy (critical of Miah’s anti-Asian positions and Ghafoor’s alleged slum landlordism) among others. In Oldham, the fringes are devouring the centre with abandon.
A collapsing street
In the days following the collapse, much of King Street is cordoned off. The landlord of the Bank Top Tavern has heard that less than a month ago “a resident contacted 999 and the fire brigade arrived and concluded it was unsafe”. He tells us this information was passed on to the landlord: Ghafoor. Meanwhile it has been widely reported that a safety complaint was made on 1 March. Ghafoor’s argument is that surveyors came in and said the building was liveable, hence why he didn’t evacuate.
Outside Mecca Bingo, we meet two women who have heard the issues were known way before that: a crack in the wall along the side of 31 King Street had been reported nine months ago (indeed, the cracks started showing in 2021). “We’ve been aware [of the situation] since we saw the last one drop [in 2016]...we literally saw the last one drop,” one of the women says.
The woman is referring to another King Street building, 33-37, which did indeed ‘drop’, back in 2016. Its owner, Riaz Ahmed, ended up being sentenced to eight months in jail when it transpired he had hired builders with no experience who demolished almost every internal wall.
In the same year that Ahmed’s building fell down, Ghafoor purchased King’s House, alongside his business partner at KKS Investors, Sameer Zulqurnain (a man whose year of birth ranges between 1975 and 1979 on Companies House). King’s House was the building evacuated in 2025, but for the five previous years it had been used by the council as temporary accommodation for homeless people.
Over that period the council paid Ghafoor and Zulqurnain £234,000, despite the fact Ghafoor already had a chequered record in the rental market. In 2013, inspectors visited a Ghafoor-owned property on Villa Road in Hathershaw and found faulty dials on the cooker and smashed electrical sockets. The house was unfit to live in, but Ghafoor ignored a number of written and verbal warnings and was eventually fined.
Nonetheless, Ghafoor is adamant the King’s Hall evacuation was a political move engineered by his enemies. In an email to The Mill he said he is “pursuing legal action against individuals” over the matter.
It’s not difficult to imagine what the average person in Oldham sees, though: a street on which two separate buildings have been so badly maintained they collapsed in on themselves, and another building where a prominent councilor has earned more than £200,000 of public money running an HMO where inspectors found dead rats and leaks.
In February, Oldham’s Labour MP Jim McMahon called for “national action” to tackle the HMO crisis. He described the rise of HMOs as blighting communities across Oldham and said “landlords are getting richer at the cost of local communities who see neighbourhoods rapidly change, waste and parking pressures and a loss of much needed family homes”.
There are estimated to be 384 HMOs in Oldham, a 25% increase from 2020. Of these, 185 changed from a single family home to an HMO. But as ever in Oldham, there are nuances. For one thing, Labour’s own crusade against HMOs is complicated by the fact their deputy Leader Abdul Jabbar was linked to a recent six-bed HMO conversion in Royton which drew 40 objections from residents.
A collapsing trust
Oldham’s politics is unusually alert to the notion of a corrupt elite. While there’s obviously nothing innately corrupt about owning an HMO, this being so widespread local politicians is not reassuring the townsfolk. That word, corrupt, has historically been directed by the likes of Miah at Labour politicians in the context of grooming gangs. It’s the thing that breakaways and insurgents, in all their guises, have benefitted from. The Ghafoor situation shows us that independents are no longer immune to the consequences of a game they started.
Lib Dem leader Howard Sykes doesn’t believe Ghafoor is a slum landlord, and says he only started hearing that term levelled at him after his founding of the Oldham Group. A Labour source tells me he thinks it's an accurate label, but accepts his party ought to tread lightly given the close relationship between their party leader and the convicted criminal Imy.
Yesterday, we visited a few of Ghafoor’s properties to look for ourselves. After a couple of fruitless visits, we reached 38 Roland Street, once a pub serving Waterhead’s residents. In 2023, Ghafoor’s business partner submitted plans to develop the building into an 18-bedroom HMO. Councillors opposed the proposal, saying prospective residents would be like “animals in little kennels”. The property was approved, and is now amongst the largest in Ghafoor’s glittering portfolio. A campaign banner promoting the Oldham Group hangs on its outside wall leading up to the Bilal Jamia mosque.
The front door is ajar and inside a tidy corridor is lined with prams. We bump into one resident holding a sleeping baby. He’s been living in the property for eight months, the man says, adding: “This place is good if you are studying, or applying, and you don’t have a good job”. He rents an apartment with a living room, bedroom, and a small kitchen (he shares a toilet with other residents). He has no complaints: it’s warm, dry, and functional.
There are signs of creeping mould along the corridor windowsills, and we couldn’t find the cinema room promised by the original plans, but the property doesn’t look too far off the kind of modest studio that would fetch a four-figure rent in West Didsbury. “No one here is unhappy”, he says. “I don’t think anyone here has any problems, everyone’s okay”.
It’s only one example, but the building doesn’t scream slum landlord. Nonetheless, Ghafoor is now being widely labelled with the tag across social media, which won’t do his party any favours going into May’s council elections.
In 2022, The Mill wrote about the “paranoid style” in Oldham’s politics. Back then, it was Raja Miah’s personal crusade against Labour “elites” that defined the borough’s conspiratorial bent. It was centred on one key question: did the party in charge ignore sexual abuse claims for political benefit?
Now, it feels like the whole well has been poisoned. Any incident like this week’s building collapse immediately descends into a farcical social media contest before facts can be established. Imy blames Ghafoor, and sees him as a slum landlord. Raja Miah claims it runs deeper: a politics in which South Asian politicians are protected by the sinister workings of the Biraderi system. Ghafoor thinks he’s the victim of an ongoing stitch-up because he dared challenge the Labour machine. And even the wind is in on it.
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