Two Mayors; Two Manifestos… and double standards?

A MAYOR will always want to implement their Manifesto – but some, it seems, will find it easier than others. For example…

In 2015, Labour’s John Biggs promised that if he was elected he would give the Rich Mix Centre £850,000. The Council had given the Rich Mix a loan of £850,000 several years before (after hefty grants). Under outgoing Mayor Lutfur Rahman, the Council had begun legal action to get the loan repaid. Biggs promised to write off the loan – effectively giving the Rich Mix yet another grant of £850,000.

Biggs’s Manifesto promise was kept, with little scrutiny or process. This was despite the fact that government Commissioners had taken over the Council’s grant-awarding powers and despite the fact that there were several Labour Party figures on the Board of the Rich Mix. The Commissioners were supposed to be looking into cronyism in the Council, but they had no problem with John Biggs’s largesse.

Things did not go so smoothly when it came to the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). These were schemes that blocked off side roads to traffic, transferring local traffic to the main roads. Often benches and plants were installed in the resulting cul-de-sacs.

LTNs were popular across London – even though they really only moved pollution rather than reduced it (for that, you need better public transport). John Biggs introduced a number of them in Tower Hamlets, mostly so that he could claim to be improving air quality. Queues built up as local drivers found five minute journeys now took over half an hour, and amateur film of ambulance drivers trying to find a way in to Arnold Circus circulated on Tic Toc.

In August 2021, Aspire candidate Kabir Ahmed won a by-election in Weavers ward, home of one of the controversial LTNs, on an anti-LTN manifesto. John Biggs was so disgusted that he walked out of the count – and paused the implementation of any more LTNs for a while. In May 2022, there was a straight contest: Biggs promising more LTNs versus Lutfur Rahman promising to remove them.

Lutfur Rahman won that contest and became Mayor. He began to implement his manifesto promise. He ran public consultations: some favoured their local LTN, and he kept those in place. Where consultations favoured removal, Mayor Rahman hit an unexpected road block.

A group of individuals came together as “Save Our Safer Streets (SOSS)” and asked the Courts to overturn Mayor Rahman’s decisions – a process known as “Judicial Review”. It’s usually good to see residents coming together to form community groups to press their case, but there are two problems with this campaign.

First, it’s not clear who is running the campaign, or who it represents or to whom it is accountable. Its website says it is “Bethnal Green residents and business owners”, while its private Facebook Group has 118 members. This is a problem. It’s not clear how many Labour Party Councillors, officers or members are also members of the SOSS campaign or what influence the Party has, for example.

Second, asking the Courts to overturn such a clear manifesto pledge seldom goes down well with voters who have turned out at an election and in consultations and thought this was how democracy works.

As we now know, the High Court upheld Mayor Rahman’s decision-making process. The Judge turned down all seven of the legal arguments that SOSS put to the Court. And we also know that SOSS will not take “no, no, no, no, no, no, no” for an answer. They are raising funds for an appeal. The crowdfunding page of Save Our Safer Streets in Tower Hamlets Coalition (coalition of what? of whom?) says it has received 1,677 pledges of money, raising £98,793 of its target of £106,000, with over £10,000 coming in over five days before Christmas – which is enough money for SOSS to go ahead and lodge an appeal. This is confusing. The judgement became public on 17th December (going by the date on which Tower Hamlets Council announced the outcome). If £10,000 was raised between 17th and 23rd December, when was the other £79,000 raised? Was that for the costs of the initial case? In the meantime, the SOSS website says they will need around £30,000 “more than we have already raised” to fund the appeal — not £10,000.

No one has yet said who is paying the Council’s costs. We can only hope that these or other SOSS funds are available to pay the Council’s costs of winning the High Court case or the Appeal Court case if the Council wins again. It would be a shame if Council taxpayers had to pay the costs of the attempt by 100 or so residents of Bethnal Green to overturn the election result.

●Read more about it:
More stories about John Biggs
More stories about Lutfur Rahman

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Rich Pickings for Rich Mix?