Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has condemned an e–petition on the Downing Street website calling on the Prime Minister to “abolish plans to build a £100 million mega Mosque”.
The petition follows a series of emails which circulated earlier this year which inaccurately claimed the Mayor was planning to fund the construction of Mosque which would be “Bigger than St Pauls”.
The Downing Street petition states “we the Christian population of this great country England would like the proposed plan to build a Mega Mosque in East London Scrapped. This will only cause terrible violence and suffering and more money should go into the NHS.”
A spokesperson for the Greater London Authority has issued a strongly worded statement rebutting the claims:
“The Mayor wishes to make it absolutely clear that these reports are entirely untrue. There are not now, and have never been, any plans by the Mayor or Greater London Authority spend any public money on such mosque. Indeed, it would be illegal for the Mayor of London to do so. Suggestions of a link between plans for a mosque and the 2012 Olympic Games are equally untrue, as are suggestions of the enormous size of any planned mosque.”
Equally, there is no current planning permission or application for a mosque and Newham Council do not expect a planning application in the near future.
‘These facts have been in the public domain for a considerable period of time. The circulation of these manifestly untrue reports seems to be designed to bring influence to bear on a petition in relation to such a mosque on the No10 Downing Street website.
It is quite clear that the circulation of untrue information of this kind can damage good community relations.
All religious faiths have the equal right to construct places of worship, subject to the appropriate planning permissions. The particularly vicious nature of the campaign against a possible Muslim place of worship in East London should be condemned by all of those who support the long established right of freedom of religion in this country, and all the more so as it is based on information which has long been established to be factually untrue.”
