While Cllr Rabina Khan has spent the last full week of the campaign concentrating on how to create more jobs for unemployed women, Labour candidate John Biggs (a Member of the London Assembly) is working hard on getting a second job for himself. Biggs has been consistently clear that his second attempt to be elected mayor in Tower Hamlets is firmly based on opposing much of what Mayor Lutfur Rahman stood for. “Everyone in Tower Hamlets has been let down by Lutfur Rahman,” he points out on his website. To make himself more accountable than his predecessor, John Biggs has promised that he would spend a whole year organising “question time”-style meetings around the borough. John was first elected to the Greater London Assembly in 2000 – and in the 15 years he’s been representing the people of Tower Hamlets since then he’s not held any “question time”-style meetings for his electors to hold him to account – clearly this is a new tactic for a new (second) job. For four years, the Conservative Councillors in Tower Hamlets demanded that Mayor Lutfur Rahman answer questions from councillors in Council meetings. Mayor Rahman preferred that his Cabinet Members answer questions: they were not token appointments but hands-on leaders of areas of work, so they should answer the detailed questions. Now John Biggs has bowed to Tory demands and made it clear that he would answer questions in Council as well as his Cabinet members. John Biggs explained the rationale behind his pledges. “For too much of the time under Lutfur Rahman, decisions were made behind closed doors, with people pushed out of the decision making process.” Mayor Rahman took decisions at public Cabinet meetings and they were reported to the Council’s Overview & Scrutiny teams and to the full Council – both of which met in public. Decisions were also taken at ward forums, which the Mayor set up and to which he gave money to spend on local priorities. It is not clear which decisions Mayor Rahman took behind closed doors – apart from how much sugar he took in his tea, which was never reported to Cabinet and which, we assume, we’ll never find out now. It is not clear how John Biggs would improve on that practice. However, he has indicated that he would spend a great deal of time in the first year of being Tower Hamlets Mayor (if he was elected) holding meetings around the borough to keep in touch with electors. He would also have to attend to his other job of being an elected member of the Greater London Assembly – while he would devolve chunks of the Mayor’s work to three deputies he would appoint: Cllr Rachael Saunders, Cllr Shiria Khatun and Cllr Siraj Islam. Although the three deputy mayors would be handing a great deal of the mayor’s workload, there is no provision for the public to have a vote on who the deputies would be. •To find out more about John Biggs’s policies, go to: www.johnbiggsformayor.com.
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Other candidates for Mayor are: Elaine Bagshaw (Liberal Democrats), Andy Erlam (Red Flag – Anti-Corruption), John Foster (Green Party), Peter Golds (The Conservative Party Candidate), Vanessa Hudson (Animal Welfare Party), Hafiz Kadir (Independent), Rabina Khan (Independent), Nicholas McQueen (UK Independence Party [UKIP]), Md Motiur Rahman (Independent).