On London Extra: Whose East End?

Tower Hamlets needs a better politics. Plus the Met is still a mess, dining and thinking in Park Lane, the class profile of transport and much more

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Tower Hamlets Council is in trouble with the government again. The list of indiscretions is familiar. The borough's Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, is essentially accused of running a paranoid, introverted, secretive administration, so preoccupied with nurturing its electoral base that other duties are neglected or seen as threats. A "broad and supportive intervention package" will be provided. In other words, Whitehall is taking over, just like it did in 2014 when Rahman was last in power and soon to be removed by an election court.

You can look at this in different ways. One is to welcome action against a form of community politics seen as privileging one group of the borough's residents, Rahman's fellow Bengali East Enders, over all the rest with morally corrupting effects - a tendency, in the past off-the-record words of an opponent, to fixate on "little dung heaps" that grow votes. Another is to decry a top-down interference whose true motive is to impose a local government orthodoxy the electorate didn't choose, fuelled, in this case, by Labour resentment over the comeback triumph of Rahman and his Aspire Party two years ago.

Here come my usual caveats. The first phase of Rahman (2010-2015) left much to be desired, but the more extreme media claims against him - that he was an agent of Islamism and only won two elections because of massive voter fraud - were either wildly exaggerated or never proved (including by the meticulous election court judgement). Also, notwithstanding some dubious methods and supporters, it was plain that Rahman enjoyed genuine local backing, anchored in but not restricted to a particular population group, big and eager enough to give him a mandate. That reality was borne out by his transcendence of past disgrace at the ballot box in May 2022.