Tower Hamlets election: can Labour triumph?

Labour’s first big election challenge since May’s national calamity is not a typical test case. Voters in the London East End borough of Tower Hamlets will vote today amid high police security following the recent removal of Lutfur Rahman as executive mayor due to an election court finding that he had retained the post last May with the help of “corrupt and illegal practices.”

The prelude to today's vote has had a wearily familiar character: allegations are made about dubious postal votes and non-existent people on the electoral roll; an appalled media report the allegations; the police are asked to investigate. Usually, no criminal charges result. Rahman was brought down by the findings of an election court rather than by a criminal one. He is considering challenging these, but meanwhile the police are examining whether to bring charges for electoral fraud.

Andy Erlam, the campaigner who led the election petition which led to Rahman's downfall, is standing as a candidate. He’s already handed police a dossier of what he says is evidence of electoral malfeasance. But Tower Hamlets returning officer John Williams has insisted that robust checks are in place. The count will be held outside the borough to avoid any repetition of the boisterous scenes that characterised last year’s, which led to complaints of intimidation and pressure being put on staff.

Rahman has been barred from the race, but a protégé, the cabinet member for housing and development Rabina Khan, is standing as an independent. Khan, whom Rahman has conspicuously backed, will hope to mobilise support as effectively as her former boss did. If she succeeds, it will be impressive: Rahman was an accomplished grassroots campaigner. Yet Khan, with her Muslim headscarf and determined manner, has a certain presence.

While insisting that she is her own woman, she has pledged to continue Rahman’s flagship policies of providing education grants and free school meals for primary school pupils. She has also promised to provide GP surgeries funded by contributions from property developers and create more nursery places for two year-olds. A working mother of three, she says she will introduce a women’s employment hub with childcare provision. She has presented herself as a beacon of resistance against austerity and a vengeful establishment.

Labour’s candidate is again John Biggs, a pugnacious former leader of Tower Hamlets council who now represents the borough and two others in East London on the London Assembly. He offers experience, know-how, and a promise to “provide leadership that once again restores the trust of the local people we’re here to serve.” He says he’d clamp down on rogue landlords and improve conditions in private rented housing, maintain the improving standards in the boroughs schools and, pointedly, “have an inclusive vision that looks to the future.”

Biggs attacked Rahman during last year’s campaign for being too pre-occupied with his own survival to help residents embrace a booming London’s economic possibilities. Both candidates say they’ll provide greater transparency, though Khan has been criticised for missing hustings and declining an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme. Biggs claims it’s been said, quite wrongly, that he plans to close mosques—something he’d have no power to do even he wanted to. The election court found that he’d been falsely called a racist. It’s not been pretty in Jack the Ripper territory.

It all raises perturbing questions about the integrity of democratic processes, the politics of faith and ethnicity and the power of executive mayors in the UK. The election court judgment stressed that the exact number of invalid votes cast for Rahman had not been determined, but, as with previous cases, showed how the rules can be abused. Rahman was found to have bypassed the proper council processes for allocating community grants, favouring organisations serving fellow Tower Hamlets residents of Bangladeshi descent.

For critics of the mayoral system, Rahman has demonstrated vividly that it places too much power in the hands of one person: that what might be gained in terms of getting things done is outweighed by what is lost in checks, balances and accountability. Advocates hope that mayors lessen the potential for disruptive in-fighting among party groups, which Tower Hamlets has a torrid history of anyway. But what’s gone on since 2010, when the system was adopted, has been rather less than tranquil.

Why did Rahman prosper in the first place? The East End has a long legacy of autonomous and sometimes rough street level politics overlapping with religious activism. Historian William Fishman and novelist Simon Blumenthal documented vividly and realistically the Jewish radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One version of an old joke is that the initials of the former Stepney Borough Council could have stood for Sullivan Brothers and Cousins, so dominant were London Irish Labour families.

Rahman drew on this past, in particular the 1936 Battle of Cable Street against Oswald Mosley’s fascists, to nourish the support he has enjoyed from the Labour left and beyond, most notably from Ken Livingstone and George Galloway. It wasn’t only Bangladeshis who voted for him. The parallels are limited and often sentimentalised, but there’s a potent common thread linking those distant times to the struggles of Bengali migrants in the sixties and seventies against poor housing and the attentions of the National Front. Today, Tower Hamlets borders the City and contains Canary Wharf, yet has Britain’s highest rate of child poverty.

The circumstances repeatedly exist for Labour’s customary dominance of this part of the capital to be disrupted—and that is what Rahman has done. He was crudely dumped as Labour’s candidate for the inaugural Tower Hamlets mayoral contest and punished the party by running as an independent, winning by a mile. A consummate populist, he has positioned himself as the defiant underdog, the victim of bigots and smears, the local boy made good who sticks up for his own.

Politicised Islam, influential local businessmen and questionable electoral practices are all part of the landscape in which he’s thrived, but wise Labourites know that such factors preceded his rise and don’t alter the fact that he attracted genuine support on a large scale. Even if one in five of the first preference votes he was accredited with last May were dubious, he would still have outscored Biggs on that measure. Whatever you make of his methods or the battering the court gave him, he knew how to enthuse a critical mass of the electors—he knew how to win.

The Biggs camp is cautiously confident, but in no way assuming victory, even if their man hogs second preference votes under the supplementary vote system as he did last time. A Mayor Biggs would need to reach out, heal wounds and show that Labour is the best bet for the marginalised and angry. A Mayor Khan would need to demonstrate competence, uprightness and inclusivity. She may not be Rahman, but if she replicates his reach she may like, him, confound the party of the poor.