Tower Hamlets 2026: Siege politics

Last July, a demonstration took place outside Tower Hamlets Town Hall on Whitechapel Road. It was a type of event familiar in this part of the East End: familiar for its theme; familiar for its fervour; familiar for its theatre and farce.

The demonstrators’ displeasure was directed at the plans of the Truman Brewery company, a prominent and successful local business, to put up some new buildings within its leisure, culture and workspace complex on nearby Brick Lane, convert some existing structures and add housing.

The council’s strategic development committee was due to consider the Truman application that evening, although the power to approve or reject it had already been taken out of its members’ hands. That was because Tower Hamlets had taken too long to get round to dealing with the matter. As a result, rather than elected councillors taking the decision, government planning inspectors would do the job.

This information was in the documents on the council’s website pertaining to the meeting for anyone to see. That did not deter the demonstrators, with their Save Brick Lane banners and their fiery denunciations of Truman, from gathering on the pavement outside Tower Hamlets Town Hall, a new council headquarters built behind the preserved facade of the Grade II-listed Royal London Hospital.

I approached one of the more prominent speech-makers, an amiable young man in a suit, and pointed out to him that the strategic development committee could now do precisely nothing to prevent the Truman scheme going ahead. He warmly assured me he had knowledge to the contrary.

Inside, the public gallery was well-populated. There was an expectant and almost holiday atmosphere, with old people and children present and snacks being devoured as those councillors who attended, regardless of party allegiance, went through their reasons why they would have rejected the Truman application had they been in a position to do so.

The conclusion of each speech was greeted with applause. And then everyone went home, having confirmed to each other that they were not fans of the Truman plans and having underlined for me that Tower Hamlets does local politics in its own distinctive way, and that nothing seems able to stop it.

***

That local politics has, of course, been of keen and often disapproving interest to influential greater powers throughout this century – and, for that matter, previous ones – most particularly the Labour Party, more than one national government and the vast battalions of the right-wing media.

Since 2010, the primary focus of those powers has been the borough’s directly elected Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, who is, like it or not, one of the most remarkable politicians in the country. Let’s recap:

Born in 1965 in a village in what was then East Pakistan and has since 1971 been Bangladesh, Mohammed Lutfur Rahman (to give him his full name) came to London as a young child. He attended Tower Hamlets state schools and grew up to become a solicitor, a Labour councillor in Tower Hamlets and, in 2008, the borough’s leader.

At a local referendum in May 2010 – held on the same day as the local and general elections of that year – the borough chose to adopt the mayoral system of local government, as Hackney, Newham and Lewisham already had. Shortly before those local elections, which saw Labour increase its majority, Rahman was the subject of a rather breathless, conspiratorial Channel 4 programme. It claimed he had “links” to a locally-based Muslim organisation which was portrayed as “fundamentalist”.

The programme’s allegations played a part in persuading the Tower Hamlets Labour councillor group to replace Rahman as its leader shortly after the elections. Undeterred, Rahman sought to become Labour’s candidate for the inaugural election for a Tower Hamlets Mayor, set for October 2010.

Despite the Channel 4 programme and his rejection by the majority of his councillor peers, Rahman was the choice of local party members. But their preference was overruled by Labour’s National Executive Committee after it received a dossier of allegations about Rahman and a different candidate was imposed.

Shunned by his party, Rahman decided to run as an Independent instead. He won with ease. In 2014, he won again, this time representing a local party of his creation called Tower Hamlets First. But this time the outcome prompted a legal challenge in the form of an election petition, which led to an election court hearing the following year.

The judgement of the presiding barrister Richard Mawrey is a riveting and persuasive read. He clobbered Rahman good and proper, concluding that his re-election had been secured with the help of “corrupt and illegal practices” conducted by him or his “agents”, meaning people who had acted on his behalf.

Mawrey found that false statements had been made about Rahman’s Labour opponent John Biggs, depicting him as racist, that people were paid to canvass for Rahman, that Bengali media were bought and paid for, that community organisations were bribed, that invalid votes had been cast and “undue influence” brought to bear on electors in the form of harassment at polling stations and pressure applied to Muslim voters to the effect that it was their religious duty to vote for Rahman.

The 2014 election was declared void and Rahman was banned from seeking political office for five years. A fresh mayoral election was held in 2015, which Biggs won. Biggs won again in 2018. But in 2022, his ban spent, Rahman made a comeback, winning the mayoralty again and knocking some shine off Labour’s three big early borough gains in Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet. His latest local party, Aspire, won a small majority of council seats.

That time, there was no election petition. Neither were there complaints about intimidation at polling booths or improper behaviour at the count, as was so glaringly the case in 2014. No ifs, no buts: Rahman and Aspire won fair and square, leaving a vanquished Labour to work out how to beat him next time.

***   

That next time is upon us, and the omens for Labour are not good. The party’s national unpopularity is, of course, an obvious reason for that, with certain aspects of its record of particular dislike in the East End. And then there’s the large truth that even Rahman’s more vituperative critics might have to accept – for all his failings and malfeasance, the Mayor of Tower Hamlets has always been genuinely popular with a large number of Tower Hamlets voters.

The Mawrey judgement is instructive on this point. Damning though it was of Rahman himself, along with one of his key lieutenants and the political culture they fostered, it did not corroborate some of the larger claims about Rahman that were (and, to some extent, remain) in circulation.

For example, a foreground narrative had it that Rahman only won the 2014 election because of voter fraud on a very large scale. But at one point (page 110) Mawrey wrote:

“Even if voter fraud is established, neither the parties nor the court have any idea whether it is the tip of a large iceberg or the few rogue items in an otherwise impeccable poll – or somewhere in between.”

What about those alleged “links” with Islamic fundamentalists or extremists? Mawrey had something to say about that too (page 61):

“It should…be stressed that this court has not heard a shred of credible evidence linking Mr Rahman with any extreme or fundamentalist Islamist movement, something he himself has always denied.”

And Mawrey was scathing (page 77) about Labour’s treatment of Rahman, focussing on the NEC’s decision to dump him as its mayoral candidate.

“The upshot of the meeting was thus that Mr Rahman, completely unaware of the accusations [made against him in the dossier] and given no opportunity to counter them, was summarily sacked as candidate.”

He continued:

“Although this judgment will have to be critical of Mr Rahman in many respects, in the matter of his deselection the court cannot but sympathise with him. His treatment by the NEC was, by any standards, utterly shameful and wholly unworthy of the Party which, rightly, prides itself on having passed the Human Rights Act 1998.”

What accusations did the dossier contain? I got hold of a copy at the time. If I still have it, I can’t find it. But my coverage of it for the Guardian survives. The document was striking for its spelling of “Lutfur” as “Luthfur”, its replication of allegations made in the Channel 4 programme, and its claim that 16 people who voted in the Labour members’ ballot that resulted in the selection of Rahman as the party’s mayoral candidate for 2010 weren’t eligible to vote.

The figure of 16 is significant in the context of the ballot’s outcome, because Rahman won it by a margin of 182 votes. In other words, even if did benefit from 16 member votes that shouldn’t have counted, he would still have won with room to spare. In this instance too, assertions that fake votes and malpractice explain why Rahman won an election do not stack up numerically.

   ***

The facts set out above do not absolve Lutfur Rahman of every charge and criticism he has faced. Alongside its bruising conclusions about the 2014 mayoral election (that now officially never was), Richard Mawrey’s election court judgement observed of him that, during the proceedings, “faced with a straight question, he proved himself almost pathologically incapable of giving a straight answer” (page 96) and as having been “caught out in what were quite blatant lies.” (page 97).

Other parts of the judgement align with claims long made by enemies and opponents that Rahman’s entire approach to running his home borough involves surrounding himself with a tight group of loyalists, shutting out everyone else, and focussing tightly and improperly on nurturing and maintaining the support of his fellow Bangladeshi Londoners, who make up 35 per cent of the borough’s population and are the bedrock of Aspire.

Overwhelmingly, they, like Rahman, are of Muslim background, culture or faith, as are other, smaller population groups in the borough. Forty per cent of Tower Hamlets residents describe themselves as Muslim, the largest proportion of any local authority area in England and Wales.

Not every Bangladeshi or other Muslim Londoner in Tower Hamlets supports Lutfur Rahman: Labour enjoys support from them too, and there are still Labour politicians from those communities on the council, including Rahman’s Labour opponent in this year’s mayoral race, his former deputy as council leader and current Labour group leader Sirajul Islam. Neither is Rahman voted for only by Bangladeshi and other Muslim residents: some others regard him as being desirably to the left of Labour and of having been unfairly picked on (significantly, Jeremy Corbyn has endorsed Rahman and Aspire for the coming elections. See main photo, which appears on the Aspire manifesto).

It is, however, Bangladeshi East Enders who form the foundation of an electoral base that looks strong enough to carry Rahman and Aspire to victory again next week, despite the growing attraction for some of the Greens and the arrival on the scene this year of a new local option on ballot papers, the Tower Hamlets Independents.

Rahman’s relationship with the Bangladeshi community of which he is a product troubles his various critics in various ways. Some years ago, a Labour political rival, caught in a dark mood, characterised his approach as one of “tending little dungheaps”, a reference to mutterings of the time about the nature of some of the community projects he chose to back.

It was not an isolated view. Much the same perspective informed the decision in late 2014 of a Conservative government to appoint commissioners to take over the grant-giving and property transactions of the council following a critical report by financial services firm PWC. That report was entitled a “Best Value Inspection”, a reference to local authorities’ legal duty to carry out its functions well and to improve them.

These issues haven’t gone away. Early last year, Labour announced its own “best value” intervention, citing poor governance, lack of accountability and the need for change in the political culture of the Town Hall. Ministerial “envoys” have been working with the council at many levels and think they are seeing some improvement, though both they and the minister, Steve Reed, a former leader of Lambeth, want to see more.

***

What is the heart of the Tower Hamlets problem? What has led to its elected leaders, representatives and many local activists displaying what so often seems like a closed-in, mistrustful, defensive attitude that extends even to council staff – a kind of siege politics that perpetuates itself and its own shortcomings?

Some clues may reside in the backstory above: Rahman’s ways of doing things has often been poor and inexcusable but also, in view of Labour’s and the media’s treatment of him, perhaps explicable. And, of course, there is the longer, deeper context of the history of racist hostility to Bangladeshi Londoners in the East End, which in the 1970s meant violent harassment, even murder, and a resolute community response whose legacy endures.

Tower Hamlets today is a prime target for Muslim-haters, as most recently seen by the thwarted attempt of the UK Independence Party to hold an anti-Islam protest in Whitechapel in January. Significantly, when the same thing happened in October, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage felt moved to contrive a defence of the party he once led. Rahman, who grew up in the borough in the 1970s, has long presented himself as the defender of Tower Hamlets Muslims against those who hate them. Is it any wonder that lots of them vote for him?

A siege mindset seems also to inform Rahman and Aspire’s approach to the physical development of the borough. Shortly after his win in May 2022, Rahman himself attacked an earlier Truman Brewery plan to build shops and offices on a car park, vowing to “protect important cultural sites in our borough from predatory developers” (the legality of the consent for the scheme granted under the previous, Labour, administration was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court after a local conservationist group challenged it).

In February 2023, the strategic development committee considered an application for continuing the regeneration of the 1970s-built Aberfeldy housing estate in Poplar. The council’s planning officers had recommend its approval as it conformed to the borough’s local plan, and warned that its rejection would be “difficult to defend” if challenged. Previously, more than 90 per cent of the estate’s residents had voted in favour of the plans in a high turnout ballot.

But there were fiery denunciations. There was a protest petition. The committee voted against. Fervour. Theatre. Farce. It was obvious what would happen next. A few months later, Sir Sadiq Khan’s Deputy Mayor for Planning, Jules Pipe, used City Hall powers to “call in” the application, taking it out of the council’s hands and then, in January 2024, giving it the go-ahead.

And then there is the mood on the streets. I had visited Aberfeldy the previous October. It was there that I saw for the first time in Tower Hamlets a flag of Palestine hung from a lamp post following the outbreak of the war between Israel and Gaza. The borough became festooned with them. They lined Whitechapel Road and stayed there for a long time.

I asked Tower Hamlets if it intended to remove them, given that municipal infrastructure is not supposed to be used for displays of political sentiment of whatever kind. I was told that the problem was that many local people felt very strongly about the issue. Be that as it may, unfriendly eyes were once more turned towards Tower Hamlets, its Bangladeshi Londoners, its Muslim East Enders and its embattled but defiant Mayor.

It probably won’t hurt his re-election chances. Back in 2011, a Labour strategist, with rueful candour, acknowledged that Rahman was an adept exponent of what he called “political jujitsu” – the art of drawing strength from his enemies’ attacks. It is a skill that has yet to desert him.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky and at LinkedIn. Dave and elections expert Lewis Baston have compiled the definitive guide to the 2026 borough elections in partnership with public affairs specialist Lowick Hedry. Read it here.

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