I’ve written this in today’s Sunday Express. Readers of this blog, who will be well aware of more complex and subtle factors, should note it’s for a national audience. However, there is a lesson for other areas about the Tower Hamlets experience.
WITHIN hours of his breathtaking victory in Bradford West 10 days ago, George Galloway will have first taken something to calm his understandable excitement (a fat Cuban cigar, no doubt, although contrary to his “I’m a good Muslim” claim to be a teetotaller, it could also have been the glass of wine his aides once told me he occasionally drinks in private) and then sat down to plot his next moves.
Yes, he would have salivated over topping up the Parliamentary pension pot he lost two years ago and yes, he would also have thought about his maiden Commons speech in a fortnight’s time but those around him would have concentrated his mind on a far more important goal: the forthcoming local council elections.
For on May 3, thousands of councillors will be elected to positions that will give them control over hundreds of millions of pounds of public cash and community grants that are too often distributed to those who have helped them into power.
Forget the easy and frothy headlines of Rise in Council Tax, the real story of local government is the small “c” corruption of public cash for votes.
There is far too often a tendency to view councils through a simplistic Westminster bubble, that they are a test of national opinion on the state of Downing Street.
The big-hitters help sustain this because it allows them to create an easier-to- understand national narrative.Last week, for example, David Cameron, the supposed champion of “localism”, launched the Conservatives’ local election campaign by pledging “a flat-out, full- throttle fight” for Britain’s town halls… only to highlight a range of policy initiatives such as high-speed rail, welfare reform and cuts to public sector pensions that are all controlled by Westminster.
No wonder turnouts at local elections are low when the message from the top is so mixed. Cameron’s words do local democracy a disservice.
THIS IS a tragedy: a lack of engagement at the local level leads to distortions in the democratic process and to a lack of scrutiny and accountability of those responsible for the collection of rubbish, the state of our roads and the cleanliness of our streets. Which leads us back to Respect and George Galloway…
I was deputy editor of the local paper in Tower Hamlets, east London, where Galloway was MP for Bethnal Green and Bow between 2005 and 2010. As such, I got to know his team and their tactics well.
Galloway himself was uninterested in local issues and increasingly shied away from even attending weekly constituency surgeries. However, he was aided by a brilliant assistant named Rob Hoveman who knew exactly how to tap into the grass roots: forge a good relationship with the local paper (and that means tip-offs about those in power) and use the resulting headlines to mobilise a small but influential opposition of disaffected activists.
By chance Rob, who lives in east London, always had a holiday home in Bradford and he was heavily involved in Galloway’s latest triumph. It is certain he will be co-ordinating Respect’s next targets there.
Due to a lack of time and resources the party is only fielding 12 candidates on May 3 but something else is also happening that day which could be more significant.
Bradford is one of 12 cities in England holding a referendum on whether to move from a traditional leader and cabinet style of local government to a powerful, directly elected city mayor.
This is the big prize (maybe Galloway himself might want it) and one that Respect effectively seized two years ago in Tower Hamlets, a borough Communities Secretary Eric Pickles now views as Britain’s biggest basket case.
Because this could happen in any area, it’s worth examining how Respect did it. All that is required under local government legislation to trigger a referendum for a directly elected mayor is a petition containing five per cent of an area’s electors. In late 2009 Respect, having toured dozens of grass roots community groups, housing estates and mosques, handed such a petition to the town hall. It contained 17,200 signatures, or 11 per cent of the electorate.
However, almost 7,000 of those were ruled invalid, with entire pages written in the same handwriting according to observers.
Despite such huge doubts about its authenticity the petition was allowed and within six months Lutfur Rahman, a solicitor who had been expelled by Labour and then backed by Respect, was voted into an office in charge of a £1billion budget – on a measly turnout of 25.6 per cent.
Look what has happened since. Within a few months of victory Lutfur leased himself a top-of-the range Mercedes for £72 a day (to be chauffeured around a borough well served by Tube, buses and the Docklands Light Railway), then told the ceremonial council mayor to take minicabs to civic events, and then ordered a major revamp of his office suite at a cost of £115,000.
A whole new set of community groups are being established to take advantage of the millions of pounds of grants under council control.
In almost all of this, opposition Labour councillors are powerless to stop him, while the decline of a cash-strapped local media means little journalistic scrutiny.
In effect, a clever mobilisation of a small but concentrated number of activists has completely changed the way a borough is run and how taxpayers’ money is spent.
Tower Hamlets should be a warning to everyone: voter turnout is vital.
Trial by Jeory 
If Bradford is voting on proposals for a directly-elected Mayor hopefully there will be sufficient local longer-term residents who will remember how Eric Pickles railroaded through local democracy on his/their own council and how one man’s control of power can lead to many abuses.
PS It’s a pity Cameron didn’t mention policies that he’s introduced such as changes to the planning framework, changes to welfare support, and changes to the local public health services that will surely give local government much to tackle over the next 4-5 years.
I don’t like this obsession with turnout re 2010 Mayoral election in Tower Hamlets.
The turnout in that election was greater than or equal to the turnout for the first mayoral elections in Lewisham, Newham and Hackney. No one ever bemoans it there.
In fact, in Newham forget the local media, the Mayor doesn’t even get scrutinised by council as all but a handful of councillors have been given SRA paid jobs by Robin Wales.
Of course Eric Pickles doesn’t like our borough – he’s on record in the Standard a couple of weeks ago as saying “Tower Hamlets seems to be living the ultimate champagne socialist lifestyle, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.” He probably doesn’t like the fact that the current administration does things like reinstate the EMA – the only authority to do it so far in the country, although strangely you didn’t think it was important enough to warrant an entry on your blog.
Steve Disco may not like the obsession with the 2010 election, but the vast majority of the people of Tower Hamlets now are, becuase we feel cheated.
We feel cheated becuase the referendum was not genuine – raising fundemental questions about the authenticity of a significant number of the signatures
We feel cheated becuase questions remain regatding Lutfur Rahmans election spend
We feel cheated becuase Lutfur Rahman is being directed by the extremist IFE – leading to biased resources and services to this group and their supporters
We feel cheated!!!!
What you refer to as an obsession, is in fact a genuine and entirely justified concern that the electoral process (inherent in our democracy) is undermined if those empowered to vote – don’t vote. Plain and simply, without majority participation, democracy fails. This is a major concern, and if you can’t accept this fundamental concept of representative democracy you are in the wrong country.
The inadequacies of regimes in adjacent boroughs is no excuse or justification for failures in our own borough.
The question of the EMA is irrelevant to this argument. But as you mention it, the EMA has not been reinstated, it was replaced by an admirable scheme that unfortunately has been used to promote the Mayor’s personal profile, i.e., the Mayor’s Education Award (MEA).
My heart bleeds for the nice middle class white boys in Labour – they created the monster (at every level as it happens).
Stewart Rayment
So once again the voters take the fall for the failures of the political class! Once in power politicians can do as they please. Labour had its chance, years of dominance in Tower Hamlets just as it has in Newham where every single councillor is Labour. Yet voter apathy is greatest in these Labour fiefdoms. This is the question Labour has to ask itself. Why has it so signally failed to create popular enthusiasm? It is all very well to blame low voter turnout.
In the last few years when I came to live in Tower Hamlets after living in the other Labour fiefdom, Newham, I faced a council, then Labour controlled which launched a building project at the local school which quite simply lied about the project and claimed local residents had actually supported it. Now when we try to get some slight changes made the school and council officials say they are unable to do anything at all!
In Newham I faced a council which used our estate and its residents, which was being knocked down to make way for the Olympics, as a bargaining counter in negotiations with the LDA to get increased nomination rights to ‘legacy’ housing.
There is an irony in the fact that having the right to vote also implies the right not to use your vote. After all if you have to use it then it’s not really a right but a duty. When people exercise their right not to vote politicians should take note. It is a way of making a point.
Rather than blaming voters for not voting maybe politicians, particularly Labour politicians, should ask themselves why they have so signally failed to enthuse local people in boroughs like Tower Hamlets and Newham. After all this is home territory where in the past, as today in Newham, Labour has held every single seat in the borough. Yet it did this on miserable turnouts. The right to vote implies the right not to vote and politicians, particularly Labour politicians in a borough which they have dominated for so long, have to ask themselves why voters are deciding voting is pointless.
I think it was the Labour policy of dealing with “community leaders” (as in Bradford) who can “deliver” votes which has been the problem. If you are liaising with such people then you focus your attention on what THEY want for their community rather than looking at the electorate as a whole.
Many non-Bengali people in Tower Hamlets have seen how THLP has become a vehicle only for pursuing minority interests and that (together with a sense of betrayal about Tony Blair) many former Labour voters have stopped voting altogether because they do not feel any of the party’s now represent them.
Labour has got itself unstuck because it happily abandoned its unfashionable but loyal traditional working class voters in favour of new ones it hoped to more easily control but did not expect another party to come along (Respect) which could better appeal to the more nationalistic (right wing) aspirations of many young Muslims and snatch half of those new voters away from it.
Hence Labour is so frequently now left with nothing. I think Labour needs to focus on its maligned traditional supporters, go to the council blocks, speak to the many poor socialist pensioners locked in there who don’t vote any more and convince them to come out….
The dangers of directly elected Mayors and how what in principle seems to be a good idea falls down when the factor of ethnic groups voting en bloc occurs has been dealt with over on Andrew Gilligan’s blog.
Interesting that Hoveman has a house in Bradford. Your analysis of the Respect regime in Tower Hamlets is correct but events in Bradford will be different in some respects, no pun intended.
Galloway will certainly neglect the constituency as he did Bethnal Green and Bow but Hoveman will play a much smaller role as he was expelled from the SWP when he decided to follow the Galloway shilling rather than the party and there is no far left involvement as far as can be seen.
The Bangladeshi power brokers ran rings around the SWP in Tower Hamlets and their equivalents in Yorkshire don’t have even that problem. Respect up there is a totally Kashmiri family affair this time running an entire city and not just a borough.
Is that council tenant Rob Hoveman who has a second home in Bradford when there are thousands on the waiting list in Tower Hamlets?
Is that the same Graham Taylor who was Lord of the Manor in the local Labour Party – divided on almost everything but united in opposition to academies – whilst steering the school whose governing body he chaired to academy status, having gobbled up loads of ratepayers’ cash at the expense of other schools more local to the TH education family?
An excellent article in “International Socialist” about the inherent racism of Respect (including references to Abjol Miah) …
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=396
When discussing some early leftwing objections to the Respect project, Chris Harman says: “There were also more principled people in favour of working with Muslims, but worried about working with people from
organisations influenced by historically right wing versions of Islamism, such as that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.6 Against these views we argued that some of those influenced by such organisations were being opened up to new vistas by their involvement in the movement against war, as well as the struggle against Islamophobia, alongside socialists, trade unionists and people of other religious beliefs or none. Only the course of the struggle would show whether particular individuals’ horizons had been widened enough for them to be drawn to the left”.
Several years after the experiment, I’d like to hear how Respect people assess this point. Do you think the horizons of people from these historically rightwing Islamic groups were widened? Do you think Abjol Miah, for example, can be said to be part of the left?