Sometimes a picture just says it all.
This bin-bag is marked, “Waste enforcement investigation in progress” and has been slapped with an £80 fine.
It is outside an end-of-terrace house in Deal Street, Spitalfields.
Guess who owns it…
Yes, Mayor Lutfur Rahman, the man responsible for wasting taxpayers’ cash on iPhones, Mercs and very plush offices.
He rents it out (see his register of interests via this link), but according to neighbours, he doesn’t seem to have been the most active of landlords – because his current tenants appear to have been leaving the area like a tip.
This is what one neighbour told me:
“The property has a small garden at the front next to the pavement. Neighbours keep their front gardens tidy and use Tower Hamlets Council bins and bags for refuse and waste food collection.
“The Mayor’s tenant has persisted in throwing unsealed bags of refuse and food into the front garden which is then not collected by the council. The rubbish invariably gets blown into neighbouring gardens and attracts vermin and flies.
“They also dump waste on the pavement outside, which usually spills across the road and is a menace to pedestrians. There’s a school opposite. The question is why won’t the Mayor be a good neighbour and a responsible landlord by ensuring his tenant follows the council’s domestic waste disposal rules?
“The front garden is a disgrace with old shoes, litter and unsightly weeds. Perhaps we should report this eyesore to the council’s new Find It, Fix It scheme which is designed to combat grime in the borough.”
Here’s another picture of the house to give it a wider context:
And here’s another one for even wider context:
When is he going to get his house in order?
UPDATE – July 21, 5.45pm
Amusingly, Lutfur wrote the following letter in today’s East London Advertiser:
I am saddened, in response to the letter from Garry Wykes, by the attitude of some people towards dropping litter (“Younger generation often guilty of littering our street”, Advertiser, July 14).
We live in a great borough and it is simply unacceptable to have Tower Hamlets blighted by litter. That is why tackling littering and protecting the public realm is a key priority of mine. The council is addressing this by providing 358 additional litter bins, stepping up enforcement activity
through the fixed penalty notices for litter as well as clearing problem areas with organised litter picking through our volunteering coordinator.
We have recently launched the ‘Find it–Fix it’ scheme which will sort out problems, whether on council or private land. We are also looking to work with schools to develop antilittering messages so that the younger generation can be taught not to litter.
All of this work is in vain if we do not all take responsibility for keeping the East End litter free.
The eyes of the world will be on us next summer with the 2012 Olympics. I want visitors to remember Tower Hamlets as a place to visit—not the litter on its streets.
Lutfur Rahman
Mayor of Tower Hamlets
Indeed.
Trial by Jeory 
Maybe he should have asked his chauffeur to pop by whilst waiting for him to finish one of his meetings and tidy up a bit.
Hypocrite
noun /ˈhɪp.ə.krɪt/ n [C] disapproving Definition
“someone who says they have particular moral beliefs but behaves in way which shows these are not sincere”
I am surprised by this. I was under the impression that he had sold the house to pay back some of his debts to Mr Curry King. Time for a look at the deeds I think, and I don’t mean William. Shurely shom mishtake.
Ted
This comment is linked to another comment left by someone on a previous blog.
We all know Lutfur is not on your Christmas/Ramadhan list and when you report on certain aspects of his mayoral tenure, I agree (very rarely) with you for example, like why he spends money on a driver and car when a) mayors from the neighbouring boroughs get on fine without a driver and b) he owns a swanky new Chelsea tractor (Range Rover for those who might not know).
Going back to the link I mentioned, you stated you have a day job and were too busy to blog about the potential EDL march planned for a couple of days after Eid in Tower Hamlets, yet you found the time to blog about a signpost in Bow and now, this silly post about your not so favourite person and litter being left not by him, but by tenants of his.
Now you claim to watch over East End Politics and you say you live in Tower Hamlets, so I’m a little worried about what you find more important to leave your busy schedule for, clearly signposts and tenants leaving litter is much more important then a potentially explosive march planned in a couple of months.
Does your non-blogging of this means you support the march?
Do you not agree that if you are sooooo busy with your day job to write about the EDL coming to march, so busy that you asked someone else to write about it, that the Mayor might be too busy with being driven around in his Merc to go and see to his tenants and given them a ticking off???
Sheraz, I think you can do better than that.
It’s precisely because these past two posts are so silly that I found time to do them; the EDL march merits more consideration to say something beyond the fatuous ‘it is bad’. Why don’t you submit something – email me your credentials.
Having said that, silly these past two posts might be, they do highlight something intriguing. On the question of the signs, here we have a council and the ODA claiming they care about the local area, yet they manage to cock up in a quite basic way.Think about the process that led to those signs being erected. Someone would have come up with the idea, what they should say, where they should point, what distance they should state – and all that to be approved. How could they get that so wrong? Perhaps they don’t really care as much as they say – and that’s worrying for the bigger picture.
And I know if I rented my flat out I’d care very much how my tenants were treating it. If Lutfur doesn’t care about his own property, doesn’t that say something about the bigger picture? Again, it all starts at home.
If this incident was a one-off you might have a point. However as part of a culture of arrogance and contempt for those outside his own circle of cronies, backers and accolytes, this is illustrative of Mayor Rahman’s real sense of his relationship with this Boroughs citizens.
Looks like Ted has been staking out mayor Lutfur with his telescopic lens! So that’s what gutter journalism is LOL! Your Lutfur On Trial blog is doing an ace job, keep it up. There are no bigger issues or matters of importance in Tower Hamlets other than how to bring Lutfur down, never mind the EDL.
Oh, I’m terrible with long lenses, Adrian. I don’t need them: there’s a whole load of spies out there.
….. and Ted, I’m sure you can do better than using that old line of ‘the story needs to be given a lot of devotion as it’s so important.
I could not read anywhere in your babble, the statement that you do not agree or support the EDL march, it does not take that much of an effort to pause from taking pot shots at a mayor to do that at least.
Instead, you are asking me to do it for you – I do not have any credentials to email you, you however claim to be watching the world of east london politics…. watching peoples front doors for rubbish I suspect by this latest blog.
You talk about councils getting signage information wrong, every council up and down the land get these wrong, ‘speeling’ errors on road markings, stupid signs erected when there is no need, so are you going to write about every council?
I’m not going to defend the mayor as he get many things wrong but one thing I will credit him with is his maverick attitude to reporters like you, now whether you believe me or not, one of his comments to someone I know was ‘I couldn’t give a damn what the like of these reporters write’ – his only problem is that he does not know how to, or does not want to finesse the media like others do and he has done well sticking to his strategy and all those who states his strategy was sometimes unlawful, then they would have proved it and he would have or should have been held to account, which he has not…..yet.
But you are not going to oust him from power with stories of what his tenants are doing, or how much money he is spending on hiring and firing, your comments do not get to the ears of those who voted for him and who will vote for him again in 2014 if he stands, because if they did, it clearly has not worked.
So getting rid of Lutfur being more important than just blogging about the EDL is actually, firstly quite silly and secondly a wasted exercise as you ‘aint gettin rid of him’ anytime soon….. unless you catch him with his pants down, with a hooker, at a plush hotel paid for through council expenses or you link him somehow miraculously to all this phone hacking business, or bribing FIFA officials or…………. well you get the drift.
Then clearly you haven’t read my blog closely enough to know what I think of the EDL. I suggest you try again.
Do what you do best and provide a link, or better still, pull a Gilligan and mention something briefly then state you will write about it in detail later, something like
“The propsed march by the EDL should be banned blah blah, but more of that in the coming weeks”
How long would have that sentence above taken out of your busy schedule to state to me when I first asked?
Feel free to use it, no intellectual property rights reserved on a few words taken about 10 seconds to write!
Tedious.
Sheraz – the way blogging typically works is like this
1. Create a blog
2. Put some time and effort into creating lots of content that people find interesting / stimulating / thought-provoking
3. Get lots of comments and/or subscriptions from people who find your blog interesting / stimulating / thought-provoking
4. Get fed tit bits of information by readers – some turn into blog posts and some don’t.
5. Become somewhat puzzled by people who have a message to get out and who want to use your blog to advertise their point of view. Often because they don’t want the bother of having to go through stages 1 and 2 to create reputable content
This isn’t Twitter. Bloggers don’t do requests to retweet the message of others. Content and tone is set by the author not the reader. Readers are not editors and don’t dictate content.
If you have a point of view which you think is important, there’s nothing to stop you starting your own blog. Lots of people do. You will however have to put in the time and the effort – but if the message is important you won’t have any problem with that will you?
So Sheraz – do you have a blog? One that takes more than 10 seconds to write……
Thank you for saying this “You couldn’t make it up!” , it means I don’t have to.
Me too
Well it needed saying! 🙂
These freeloaders disrupt the conversations and make it difficult to follow the tenor of the RELEVANT comments on a post.
Speaking personally, I’ve always considered that all comments on a blog post need to relate to the topic. Hence off-topic comments run the risk of not being published. Depends in part on how they’re written. Duplication/repetition of off-topic comments certainly don’t get published on my blog.
His comments won’t be published if off-topic.
I am in agreement with the last three commens about Sheraz. My question would be however ” what is his point” ? He hops around all over the place with no obvious point to what he is saying.
He seems to be an apologist for the Islamists or the extreme leftists that support them, although they have been quiet lately with more and more evidence od corruption at Tower Hamlets coming out on an almost weekly basis. The tactic is to pick on something that the blogger hasn’t done but the critic thinks should and then ascribe ulterior motives to it.