Tagged with Tower Hamlets

Some Labour councillors join Lutfur Rahman’s cabinet

Four Labour councillors in Tower Hamlets have decided to join the cabinet of Lutfur Rahman, who was overwhelmingly elected Mayor of Tower Hamnlets as an independent after being replaced as Labour’s candidate by the person who had come third in the ballot and had made as yet un-investigated allegations against him. The Labour Group had previously decided not to participate in his administration and is now understood to be considering taking action against these councillors — Labour Councillors Abdul Asad, Shofiqul Haque, Rofique Uddin Ahmed and Shahed Ali. Continue reading →

Andrew Gilligan’s continuing vendetta against Lutfur Rahman

A friend has just forwarded an extraordinary splenetic blog piece by the journalist Andrew Gilligan, who is apparently getting his knickers in a twist because the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, recently took a couple of bus load of supporters up to Leicester to help Labour’s by election candidate, Jon Ashworth win the seat. Rahman was of course expelled by the Labour Party after a pretty shoddy campaign of attrition — since de-bunked by the same NEC that disciplined him in the first place. Continue reading →

Living in the shadow of the Bankers – and paying the price for their greed

When the Chief Executive of Barclays Bank, Bob Diamond, made his appearance in front of a House of Commons Select Committee recently, he said that “the time for remorse was over” for the bankers who had driven the Western economies to the edge of the precipice. Last month it emerged that Barclays Bank paid only £113 million in corporation tax last year despite making billions in profits. So it becomes slightly difficult to know whether Bob Diamond has ever shown any remorse at all.

As I write this from an office in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London, I can see Barclay’s looming headquarters, looming over the other tall blocks that populate what used to the capital’s busy docks. If I walk to the other side of the office, I can see a smaller row of ugly tower blocks, probably built in the 1960s and 1970s to house some of the poor who had been relocated due to slum clerarance. By happy or unhappy coincidence, Barclays Bank has its base in this, one of the poorest boroughs in England. Continue reading →

Tower Hamlets: membership inquiry reveals no conspiracy

Lutfur Rahman, Tower Hamlets Mayor

Labour’s national executive yesterday received a report into “alleged membership abuse” into Tower Hamlets which contained nothing that could be regarded as evidence of a conspiracy by anyone. Complaints made against Lutfur Rahman, then the candidate chosen by Labour’s members as their candidate for Mayor, then debarred pending an investigation and subsequently elected as an independent candidate for Mayor, included allegations of membership abuse. However, the investigation produced no evidence of any wrong-doing by him and made clear that, if there were any irregularities,  they made no difference to the outcome. Continue reading →