Tower Hamlets: A bit of a flashback

Tower Hamlets Councillor Rachel Saunders gives her personal take on what has gone wrong with the local Mayoral election.  Hat tip Labour List (and Unmesh Desai!)

"Thursday night, the night Labour lost Tower Hamlets, felt like a bit of a flashback. The venue was different, York Hall instead of Canary Wharf’s Winter Gardens, but Oliur Rahman and Rania Khan were doing V for Victory signs, hard working Labour activists were miserable and Ken Clark (London Labour's regional director) was at the front of the room looking grumpy.

One difference though – in 2006 I went up to a couple of Labour councillors and gave them a piece of my mind for working as a part of a group of Labour councillors who were making deals with Respect and others to save their own skins and knife councillors they disliked. This time Lutfur Rahman was victorious, but no longer in the Labour Party, at last openly supported by Respect and by others who travel through political parties as it suits them.

This election result came after a messy summer, where two separate panels made up of NEC and regional board members decided not to shortlist Lutfur Rahman, but he got on the shortlist through an appeal. Having previously declined to shortlist him, NEC members chose not to accept his nomination by the local party, and voted instead to impose the sitting council leader Helal Abbas.

Abbas is a decent man with an impressive personal story. From his leadership of the local squatters movement in the 1980s, standing up for Bengali families in desperate need who were excluded from social housing, to his record as the first Bangladeshi council leader, Abbas was the best candidate to steer us through the difficult times ahead. Why did he lose?

It will take a bit longer than a day to articulate what went on in the Bangladeshi community over the past few weeks and months. It is important to be clear that our greatest campaign leaders and activists were Bangladeshi, and that Lutfur presented himself as “Real Labour”, exactly like Respect before him – the bonds that tie our party to the east end of London remain strong, and our opponents only win by impersonating us.

I think our loss has two root causes. One, despite London region intending to run a short selection process and leave us a long summer to campaign, the cock ups and conspiracies meant we must have appeared to our electorate to spend the entire summer warring amongst ourselves. Combined with the London mayoral selection and leadership elections that many of us were involved in, we can’t blame our electorate for feeling like we lost our focus on what should really matter. We did continue to run campaign sessions several times a week, but not everyone will have seen us. This will have contributed to the very low turnout.

Secondly, Lutfur’s narrative was up and running before our story had its boots on. Lutfur presented himself as a victim of the evil Labour Party machine. He had much of the Bengali media behind him, and the intervention of Ken Livingstone, who turned up a few days before polling day and did a walkabout with Lutfur that the BBC were available to film, meant that Labour Party process was all anyone could talk about. Added to this was a smear campaign more filthy than I could have imagined – and I’ve seen a few nasty ones since Respect came into town.

Make no mistake though, there is no difference between the coalition of people that came within one councillor of toppling us in 2006 and the people who managed it on Thursday. Previously Ken Livingstone came to Tower Hamlets to slate Jim Fitzpatrick MP and give Galloway a hug, this time he slated Abbas and hugged Lutfur. Siraj of Clifton restaurant was a supporter of Galloway then and he’s a supporter of Lutfur now. Oliur Rahman, the first Respect councillor and opponent of Jim Fitzpatrick in 2005, who has been a member of four political groups in as many years (SWP/Respect, Left List, Labour, Lutfur), was crowing at the Labour defeat.

The selection process was a mess, but the NEC were absolutely right to stop Lutfur being the Labour candidate.

We defeated Respect convincingly in May 2010, and we’ll do it again. We’ll do it in exactly the same way. Again, we have a wave of new activists who are disgusted at what they have seen and want to defeat it. Again, we have excellent local organisation and hard working talented activists and councillors. We’re stronger than before, with two excellent Labour MPs. We’ll win back the hearts and minds of the people of Tower Hamlets through demonstrating that we understand their concerns, and that only Labour can represent the whole of our community.

This time we’ll have to stand up for them in opposition at the Town Hall. If you oppose the politics of hatred and division that Galloway stood for in Tower Hamlets - before we drummed him out - then stand with us".

Oh dear, what a shame, never mind, onwards and forwards

Check out the result of yesterday's election for Tower Hamlets Mayor here.

We live in interesting times in East London.

Lutfur Rahman removed as Labour Candidate for Tower Hamlet's Mayor

I once got myself into a little bit of bother over a post that included the words "However, this being Tower Hamlets the story developed"...

Well, my "inbox" this afternoon has been flooded with emails referring to this statement from the Labour Party NEC. 

"Having received a number of serious allegations concerning both the eligibility of participating voters and the conduct of Lutfur Rahman, the NEC has decided to investigate the allegations made. As a result, administrative action has been taken to remove Lutfur Rahman as a candidate pending the investigation. Nominations for Tower Hamlets mayor close this week and in the circumstances the NEC had no option but to impose another candidate. The NEC has voted to select Helal Abbas Uddin as Labour's candidate".

I understand that John Biggs has stood down as a candidate and is supporting Helal.

Hat-tip Dave Hill's London blog.  Neither Marsha or Andy are best pleased! (neither of whom like me are members of Tower Hamlets Labour Party).  While Ted missed a scoop by going to the Gym.

Lutfur Rahman acceptance speech as Labour Candidate for Mayor

I have just come across this Youtube video of Lutfur Rahman outside the Labour Party headquarters in Bethnal Green last weekend.  He was clearly elected as the Labour party candidate to be Tower Hamlets Exectuve Mayor.  The election is on 21st October 2010. 

Hopefully Galloway will stand as a candidate for Respect but since he obviously doesn't like losing (or rather being trounced) - I doubt it.

Living Wage for London – a huge step forward at last

I first picked this up from Peter Kenyon post about the early Christmas pressie for many Tower Hamlet Council workers and contractors.

The Council had just passed a motion calling for the London Living wage to be implemented not only for all directly employed workers but also for all contractoring staff. It also calls for Best Value contracts to apply a London living wage when they are up for renewal. The current Living wage level is £7.45 per hour (minimum wage is only £5.73 for over 22 year olds).

The Council free newspaper East End Life covers it here . There are some woolly bits in the motion that are a little worrying about “encouraging” contractors to adopt a living wage.

But I am really pleased. This is potentially a huge advance. I went into a Tower Hamlets “Idea Store” (merged library and life long learning centres) and spoke to some people I know. There are agency staff on only £6ph so this will make a huge difference to people’s pay. I know that the Council ALMO Housing agency caretakers are only paid NMW as well. I have posted here and here on this issue in the past. In the past, when I was a member of the local UNISON branch I have also attended a number of meetings with various Tower Hamlets Council leaders on this issue. We were always listened to sympathetically but were always told that it was not legally possible to implement a London Living wage.

The really interesting thing is whether or not similar motions will be passed in the other London boroughs and how effective they are in “encouraging” other employers to pay the same. I have recently asked my employer to carry out an audit about how many workers receive less than £7.45 (mostly office cleaning and security contractors).

I know of some housing organisations that have lost Local authority Supporting People contracts by being undercut by those who pay just above the NMW.

It was good to see that there was cross party support for this in Tower Hamlets, but I seriously doubt anything will happen in Tory boroughs. Peter Kenyon sees this as a return to basic Labour values.

Well done to the new Labour Council Leader Lutfur Rahman (seen in photo with successful candidate Rachel Saunders at the Mile End East By-election).

Fighting the Good Fight in Mile End East

After the Forest Gate South coffee morning with West Ham MP, Lyn Brown, I drove over to Tower Hamlets to help out in the by-election in Mile End East (vote this Thursday). The Labour Party candidate is Rachel Saunders and I had been told to make my way to the Burdett Estate.

I drove along St Paul’s Way looking for Labour canvass teams. Opposite St Paul’s school was the Gorgeous One himself, standing on the pavement shouting into a megaphone surrounded by about half a dozen of his diss-respect acolytes. They were huddled around him trying to hand out leaflets to an empty street.

I slowed down and opened the car window to try and listen what he was going on about. I could not make out any coherent statements only incredibly loud ear piercing electronic feedback noises interwoven with occasional barely recognisable grunts. You could not make out the sentences but it seemed to be all about being aggressive, bombastic, bullying and threatening. You could imagine him sneering “We are keeping an eye on you, we know where you live”. What was amazing was how seriously he was taking all this. He appeared to think he was on a podium addressing a packed rally - shaking his arm up and down while vigorously pointing his finger at an audience of no-one. I thought it was all quite symbolic. A little man in the true sense of the word living on supposed past glories in denial of reality.

The rag bag of supporters gathered around him (nearly all white and male) should have been out on the “knocker” talking to local people and trying to persuade them to support their candidate.

I wondered what the SWP would have made of this when they had been in charge of respect. At least they had the sense to know that such prancing about is no substitute for organised and systematic canvassing. Of course, their belief that such actions were furthering the revolution was equally as deluded as George who believed that diss-respect would replace the Labour Party.

I soon joined up with Labour canvass teams. There was a really good turn out by local members and Councillors. I was sent to join a team which included Rachel herself; Council Leader Lutfur Rahman, A M Ohid Ahmed, Alibor Choudhury, Marc Francis, Shiria Khatun and UNISON member Cllr Sirajul Islam with his 9 year old daughter (get them while they are young). Councillor Carli Harper-Penman was out and about with London Assembly member, John Biggs.

From the top of the blocks you could look around and see small groups of Labour Party canvassers wandering around the estate. There was even a balloon stall. Interestingly I saw no Tory canvassers at all. It may appear that the local Tories have something in common with Galloway and don’t want to support former SWP associates?

The canvass itself I thought went well. It was somewhat surprising (I say no more) that some voters said they had been told that the respect candidate was also the Labour Party candidate?

For the first hour or so I could still hear the whine in the distance of the Respect megaphone. Eventually it died away so peace and quiet resumed. Who knows what when people stir up community politics and hatreds, but I have no doubt that eventually diss-respect will also fade away and become yet another weird and wonderful footnote in extremist east end politics.

Meet outside Mile End Tube (there is only one obvious entry/exist) 6pm tomorrow, 2pm and 6pm Wednesday. People wanted all day Thursday. Contact