There is a huge opportunity now to move Tower Hamlets forward.
The election, on the 11th June, for a new mayor, has been called because Lutfur Rahman was removed from office by an election court.
The rot was exposed in Tower Hamlets when George Galloway became the member of parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005. He won through an intensely divisive form of politics which was designed particularly to mobilise anger about the Iraq war. It was based on Socialist Workers party machine organisation, and on a number of self-interested networks of business people and a few voluntary sector and religious networks who saw an opportunity to seek patronage. That combination of identity politics, fuelled by corrupt networks of patronage and backed up by violence, threats and intimidation, mutated into ‘Tower Hamlets First’, and Luftur Rahman’s election as mayor. Four brave petitioners exposed corrupt electoral practices, Lutfur Rahman and his election agent, Alibor Choudhury, have been removed from office and barred from standing again, and Labour has an opportunity to clean up the mess and seek to regain the trust of local people.
It has been claimed that Lutfur Rahman ran a leftwing administration. He did not. He cut funding for benefits and financial advice, the biggest cuts in the poorest wards, at the time when families needed it most, when the government brought in the bedroom tax and other cuts that sliced at our safety nets. He has privatised homecare services, with few safeguards now in place for vulnerable older people. He tried to close nurseries for disabled children, and only u-turned after months of campaigning led by local mums, supported by Labour councillors and MPs. He cut mental health services, cut support for children leaving care, cut street cleaning, cut programmes for tackling drug dealing on estates.
Every east London borough seized the enormous opportunities of the 2012 Olympics – apart from Tower Hamlets, where unemployment went up in the summer of 2012. Lutfur Rahman’s choices – inward looking, grants for mates, refusing to answer questions in public – have brought shame to our borough.
Lutfur Rahman has sought to anoint a successor – Rabina Khan, previously his cabinet member for housing. She has her own poor record. Decent Homes works, which should have been an opportunity for celebration for social housing residents, have been a disaster, with poor quality works for tenants, and furious leaseholders with high, implausible and opaque bills. She opposed Labour’s support for cyclists. Worst of all, it is under her that developers have been allowed to run rampant across our borough. In an administration that is more interested in PR than local people, huge numbers of units have been built, many to a shocking standard. Week in, week out, I meet local families who escaped from over crowded accommodation, only to find themselves in new blocks where the ‘poor door’ has already broken, the plumbing does not work, the lift is broken and the walls cave in if children lean on them. Rabina will take credit for the housing numbers, but no responsibility for the misery of the families, and the scars on our communities of poor design and inadequate school places, transport and National Health Service provision.
Labour does have the solutions that Tower Hamlets needs. John Biggs is a strong, well known candidate for mayor that the party has united behind. Sabina Akhtar is an excellent candidate for the Stepney Green ward, and winning there would give us a majority on the council.
We need to rebuild trust.
We will make change in Tower Hamlets if we back the people who know best how to build our communities – the people that live here.
Our strength in Tower Hamlets is the diversity of the skills, knowledge, experiences, ideas that our people bring, through the many different routes that brought us here to the east end.
The greatest human tragedy is when those talents are wasted, through the wreckage of human potential of poverty, ill health, poor education, overcrowding, unemployment.
Money flows through Tower Hamlets – Crossrail, Canary Wharf, the Olympics on our doorstep. It is Labour that will fight to make sure local people benefit.
Half of the children in Tower Hamlets grow up in poverty. We need your help to campaign to win for Labour on June 11th, so a Labour council can fight for them against the attacks of this Conservative government.
The election is four weeks today. The Labour party is based at 349 Cambridge Heath road, near Bethnal Green tube – come any time, bring friends. Stand alongside us in our fight to take Tower Hamlets forward.
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Rachael Saunders is leader of the Labour group in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. She tweets @RachaelSaunders
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