Tower Hamlets Mayoral Election

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The voters of Tower Hamlets decided to fall in line with the other two East End boroughs and voted to have an elected Mayor back in May. The election will be on the 21st of October.

The Labour candidate (and likely winner) is the controversial Lutfur Rahman; a councillor in Spitalfields and the leader of the council from a factional coup in 2008 until he was ousted in another factional coup earlier this year. Attempts were made to block Rahman from the Labour shortlist, but he had good lawyers, made the ballot and won easily.

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The NEC has struck, and struck out Rahman as Labour candidate in response to yet another set of serious allegations. Helal Abbas (another Spitalfields councillor, and currently the leader of the council) has been selected by the NEC.

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Rahman has filed papers to run as an independent. Which, of course, means that he is no longer a member of the Labour Party.

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Bump. Election is later this week.

Livingstone has been campaigning with Rahman. Technically he should be expelled from the Party as this is a clear breach of the rulebook, but I think that 'probably' won't happen. He's on the NEC himself, after all, amongst other things.

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Magic.

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Um...

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Ah, the good old tactics of Tower Hamlets.

Eh, it's only since the rise of the Poujadists in the late 1970s that this sort of sh!t has been routine. Well, and before the 1950s as well, but the gap is too large to think of a tradition.

Anyone got any predictions for this? I've not got a clue.

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Poujadistes?

The Tower Hamlets 'Liberals'.

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Turnout is apparently very low. Rumours are that Rahman has probably won.

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Rahman by a mile

Rahman 51.8, Abbas 25.0, Tory 11.9, LibDem 6.2, Green 5.1

What'll happen next in this long running soap opera? Will Rahman apply to rejoin Labour? Will he be allowed to? Will there be further defections on the council? Will there be legal challenges over the negative campaigning? Will Livingstone's reputation suffer? Tune in... probably before next week... for the next episode!

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Mayors have even more work to do that MPs. The problem with Galloway was that he never liked his MP work.

In theory; in practice they can farm most of their work out to their cabinet members and council officers. That has usually ended very badly though. Though even that would be far too much work for Galloway; it wasn't just his bizarre TV escapades and those stupid remarks after the bombings that caused his popularity to collapse.

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Exactly.

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Anyway, I've suspected for a while that Rahman is more a Santamaria than a Hatton.

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Anyway, I've suspected for a while that Rahman is more a Santamaria than a Hatton.

Abel or Juan?

B.A.

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Ah. Right. I see. Doubt there'll be genuine Muslim Groupers in British Labour any time soon, though.

That would be very surprising, yeah. But it's a better parallel than the Militant one that some people have been keen to draw.

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Dreadful result for the Tories, no? I suspect Rahman pulled a few Tory voters or was their low result a result of bad turnout and being badly overshadowed by the Labour battle?

Why would any Tory in Tower Hamlets vote for Rahman? The Tory vote mostly comes from the yuppy colonies along the Thames. No, the key point is that turnout was at laughable levels outside the Bangladeshi community. Early rumours from the count was that Rahman won everwhere but the gentrified Isle of Dogs (where the Tory led), which seems a little implausible unless almost no working class whites in Bow voted. Which is possible, I guess.

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The Tories would presumably have gotten a better result if the council had been up at the same time.

Yeah. All the candidates that weren't Rahman would have done.

In 2001 the ethnic breakdown in Tower Hamlets was: White 51.4 (White British 42.9), Bangladeshi 33.4, Black 6.5. The general view is that since then it has become less white and more Bangladeshi, but it's pretty clear that Bangladeshi's are still a minority though perhaps now the largest group overall. It's even clearer that a big majority of the 25% who voted yesterday were Bangladeshis and that white support for Rahman was insignificant. So, yeah.