Lutfur Rahman is toast. But picking up the pieces in Tower Hamlets will be hard
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Version 0 of 1. And so, after five years of allegations, investigations and complaints, Lutfur Rahman, the East End politician who defied the might of the Labour party that forsook him, the interventions of a Conservative secretary of state and the findings of a nine-month BBC Panorama probe to twice be elected Tower Hamlets mayor, has finally been prised out of the borough’s town hall. An election petition – a legal challenge to election outcomes – brought by four residents of the historic London borough has persuaded Richard Mawrey QC to declare the second of Rahman’s triumphs void and bar him from office. There may be a criminal inquiry. This is to put matters clinically. Expressed another way, Mawrey has reduced Rahman to toast. The conclusions of his 200-page judgment are scathing. He finds that Rahman engaged in corrupt practices in relation to the election, was involved in vote-rigging, sought to bring “spiritual influence” to bear on how fellow local Muslims voted and colluded in his Labour party rival John Biggs falsely being called racist. En route to these conclusions, Mawrey slams Rahman as an “evasive witness” of “ruthless ambition” and a shameless player of the “race card” to silence opponents. He adds: “This attitude has been adopted by his close associates, for whom a cry of ‘racist’ is usually the first reaction to any criticism of Mr Rahman.” He describes his deputy, Alibor Choudhury, also barred, as his “hatchet man” and an “unsatisfactory witness” who was “arrogant, indeed cocky, and did not hesitate to tell bare-faced lies”. Not every claim of the election petition was upheld, but there’s no question that the result is a triumph for the petitioners – an unlikely coalition of a lefty anti-corruption campaigner, a former Labour council candidate, a restaurateur who once supported the Respect party and a member of Ukip. It is also a vindication of Biggs, who is racist like I’m Britney Spears. Where does this leave Tower Hamlets, its 256,000 people and its often troubled politics? A mayoral by election will soon be held, which Labour, a close runnerup last year, will surely win. But wise heads in the local party already recognise that while they’ve long regarded Rahman as a wrong ’un, his rise cannot be ascribed to electoral bad business alone. Its effect on the mathematics of last May’s result was beyond the scope of the court to quantify, and where false registrations were concerned, Mawrey found that the number was “not large, certainly under 100”. A point about Rahman that even some of his bitterest foes privately accept is that, by whatever means, he has captured the loyalty of a substantial section of the Tower Hamlets electorate, which, rightly or wrongly, felt that Labour stuck up for it less than he did. The majority of these are Bangladeshi Londoners, who comprise nearly one-third of Tower Hamlets’ population. Rahman, a lawyer who was born in Bangladesh and moved to London when he was a child, also appealed to fellow Muslims of different backgrounds and to a constellation of voters and activists on the left, from the Labour fringes and beyond. A similar coalition carried Respect’s George Galloway to victory in one of the borough’s two parliamentary seats in 2005, riding a tide of opposition to Tony Blair taking Britain to war in Iraq and defeating Labour’s Oona King. Like Galloway, but in his own backyard way, Rahman has been an effective populist campaigner. To walk the streets of Whitechapel with him at election times has been to accompany a beaming, gleaming, grassroots star. People crossed the road to shake his hand. Rahman’s rise took place against the backdrop of years of Labour infighting in Tower Hamlets. Race and, especially lately, religion have been fraught ingredients in these inglorious wrangles. Where Rahman is concerned, the party’s top brass have not helped. Mawrey describes as “utterly shameful” the way Labour’s national executive committee dumped him as its candidate for the first Tower Hamlets mayoral election in October 2010, largely on the strength of media allegations that he was the creature of sinister Muslim plotters. Mawrey stresses that the court had “not heard a shred of credible evidence linking Mr Rahman with any extreme or fundamentalist Islamist movement” and even praises Rahman’s “courage and resolution” in going it alone as an independent in 2010, an election he won at a stroll. So there are lessons for Labour in the judgment too. It’s easy and, in some ways, justified to depict Tower Hamlets as a borough of unhappy contrasts: it contains the glass money stacks of Canary Wharf, adjoins the historic megawealth of the Square Mile, yet has the highest rate of child poverty in the country. It is also a special place, steeped in Labour and progressive social movement history, largely as comfortable with its kaleidoscope of cultures as any other part of the capital, and far from being the hotbed of villains and fanatics it has too often been portrayed as recently. Its politics need not be a snakepit, but changing that will be a difficult job. If Biggs, a thoughtful and hard-working politician, becomes the borough’s mayor at the second attempt, let’s wish him all the best with that task. |