Why we must all put Tower Hamlets First

Well, here we are; three and a half years later, and it doesn’t seem like five minutes since 300 people stood on a frosty Old Ford Road at gone 2am one Friday morning in October 2010 and cheered their heads off as Lutfur Rahman came out of York Hall, the first directly elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets. And for that matter it doesn’t seem five minutes since London Labour Party Director Ken Clark came out of Labour Party HQ on Cambridge Heath Road on 4th September 2010 and declared Lutfur Rahman the victor of a procedurally sound Labour Party selection contest and, therefore, Labour’s official candidate in the mayoral election – the choice of local Labour Party members.
The six weeks between those two events form one of the most important periods of time in Tower Hamlets’ political life.
After the selection, a dossier of allegations arrived at the national Labour Party head office. And it sat there for a week and a half. And no one put the allegations to Lutfur Rahman and gave him an opportunity to respond. And no on investigated those allegations. Someone, or some people, sat on them. And whipped them out at the Labour Party National Executive Committee meeting on Tuesday, 21st September. The Executive – or, that is to say, the majority of it – decided the allegations, just the allegations, made Lutfur Rahman a dubious candidate and they would instead turn the man who had come third in the contest (and who had made the allegations against his victorious rival in that contest) into the candidate.
With nominations closing at midday on Friday, 24th September 2010, Lutfur Rahman’s choice was simple: connive with the national Labour Party Executive in overturning the vote of its local members in Tower Hamlets, or stand as an independent candidate in the mayoral election, knowing that he was the local members’ choice. Lutfur went for the principled option and stood as an independent candidate, pulling a campaign together in 24 hours which led to his convincing victory a month later. He made it quite clear to those Labour members who had supported his campaign to win the Labour selection that none of them need jeopardise their own positions by backing him if they did not wish to do so. To their credit, eight Labour councillor comrades and the secretary of the Borough Labour Party supported Rahman in terms incompatible with Labour Party membership, and they were joined by others later.
When he stood, Lutfur could not predict that he would win: standing alone was no guarantee of victory in a borough with a long tradition of voting for the party ticket. Indeed, one fine former Labour Party member standing as a jobbing leftie once collected only nine votes in a council by-election – although ten local voters had signed her nomination papers. So Lutfur stood on the principle of supporting local selection and local accountability and the voters understood that and stood up for those principles too. Feeling was strong because a remote, white-dominated committee saying it has the right and the power to decide which man of Bangladeshi origin shall stand as a local candidate smacks of colonialism, not the kind of support for equality and diversity that we have come to expect in the twenty-first century.
And it was a political decision. The fact that party officials sat on the allegations for ten days (while at the same time preparing the eventual candidate’s Labour nomination papers) makes that quite clear. The fact that the party committee chose the candidate who came third in the selection rather than bumping up the second placed candidate proves it too. Just think for a minute: if someone had bunged in a set of allegations against Jim Fitzpatrick, would the Labour Party have told him to get on his bike while they handed his seat over to the person who had made the allegations? (We stress that there are no allegations to be made against Fitzpatrick, and this is a purely hypothetical example.) The allegations were only “successful” because they were made against someone the party hierarchy  was happy to see the back of. That’s not being democratic: it’s manipulation.
Just as the national Labour Party and its local supporters felt that local members had selected the wrong candidate, so the Party was cross that local voters elected the wrong candidate too. Their response to the election result has been bad tempered and spiteful and it has played into the hands of those with a racist and Islamophobic agenda and hurt the Borough and its people. The Labour Party is quite prepared to go into coalition with other parties elsewhere in the UK and it should have accepted the voters verdict and worked with Lutfur Rahman, not against him, for the last three and a half years. They should be ashamed of themselves. And unless and until Labour can understand what it has done, it remains, alas, an apartheid party.
Incidentally, the Labour Party still doesn’t trust its own members and every Labour candidate standing in this election has been chosen not by local Labour members but, again, by the national Labour Party’s representatives. This is despite the local Labour Party having audited its own members in the months leading up to those candidates being chosen and having declared its membership essentially sound. That the national Labour Party still does not trust its own members is bad enough. But it also means that those Labour candidates who are elected will not be accountable to local members for the next four years but to the national party which put them in place. Why any local Labour Party member bothers still to pay their Labour Party membership fees each year is a mystery – certainly to those who remember the old adage “no taxation without representation!”
The fact that Lutfur Rahman stood on a principle of local accountability makes him a hero. Those others who supported him are heroes too: all of them men and women of principle in a world where the principal politicians cast off their principles in favour of political expediency years ago. It is no surprise that Rahman and his supporters have governed Tower Hamlets on the basis of Labour’s policy traditions, which arise out of those principles too. Those ideals were, ironically, re-established in modern times by Lansbury and the Poplar Councillors, who understood that sticking by your principles when all around have abandoned theirs will bring its own reward – because it is the right thing to do.
Labour’s campaign this time around has been lacklustre and bad-tempered, pulling in endorsements from Labour shadow ministers (who?) and rent-a-celebrity types and concentrating on let’s give the Borough a jolly old spring clean, together with a small platter of uncosted and implausible promises. Rahman has learned a great deal over the last four years, and his manifesto is full of empathy with his voters and practical measures to make a real difference.
In October 2010, the people spoke. Next Thursday, the people must speak again if we are to determine our collective futures in Tower Hamlets. Put Tower Hamlets first: vote Rahman and Tower Hamlets First Council candidates. Go out and do it. Make sure everyone you know does the same. The last election was the dress rehearsal: now it’s showtime.