Trial by Jeory

This is probably a little bit cheeky of me but I’m sure The Guardian’s Dave Hill will understand that copy and paste is, digitally speaking, the sincerest form of flattery.

I’m going to reproduce here his two very interesting and lengthy interviews with John Biggs and Lutfur Rahman, whicht he published last week.

I’m told on pretty good authority that Lutfur wasn’t at all happy with the Biggs piece (which is good and measured) and that it was part of the reason he pulled out of yet another debate with the Labour man on a Bengali TV station on Friday night, this time ATN Bangla.

Dave’s interview with the Mayor is also good and Lutfur comes across well in his opening answers. He’s confident on his well practised turf, on issues such as housing. But when he’s put under questioning on the more controversial stuff, he flounders…just as he did with John Ware in the Panorama programme. It’s something that I’ve noticed time and again in the years I’ve known him: he’s just not quick on his feet. I think this is the real reason why he limits his risk for on the spot public scrutiny in debates and at council meetings. I think he lacks confidence in himself, weirdly. He’s not a great public speaker.

What’s missing from both interviews, frustratingly, is the issue of racist accusations. Dave doesn’t really probe either candidate on this, despite it being the main line of attack against Biggs from Lutfur’s camp on the doorstep. I understand from Dave he’ll be addressing this topic in a future piece.

As I warned these pieces are long, so I may be wrong to publish them together, but hey, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend and Liverpool don’t play until tomorrow night…

Here’s the Biggs interview:

The main challenger to the East End’s independent mayor makes a trenchant yet measured case against the way the Town Hall in distinctive part of London has been run

The first time Tower Hamlets voted for an executive mayor, in October 2010, the Labour candidate Helal Abbas was heavily defeated by his independent rival Lutfur Rahman. This time the contest could be much closer.

Four years ago, the mayoral ballot took place in isolation. This time, it will be held on the same day as the votes for borough councillors and members of the European parliament. This should produce a much higher turnout, which, according to orthodox opinion, would help Labour’s 2014 candidate John Biggs. Tower Hamlets politics, though, are nothing if not distinctive.

I spoke to Biggs for around 90 minutes last week, initially at a nice but rather noisy cafe near Bethnal Green’s Museum of Childhood and then at the Labour Party office on Cambridge Heath Road. Aged 56, he’s an experienced politician who became a Tower Hamlets councillor in 1988 and led Labour in opposition from 1991-94, a period when the council was run by a controversial Liberal Democrat administration, which Biggs wryly characterises as “a sort of bolt-hole for the League of Cockneys”.

It was during this period that a BNP candidate won a by-election in the borough. “It was quite a rough time,” says Biggs, who led Labour to a huge win in 1994 only to be deposed as leader by fellow Labour councillors the following year. But he plays down the borough’s enduring reputation for political viciousness. “It’s not that bad here, really,” he says, perhaps surprisingly.

Biggs grew up in Barnet, studied chemistry at Bristol University, and then moved to the East End which, he says, “politicised and energised” him. He went on to work as a financial analyst in the City of London. Since 1990 he has represented Tower Hamlets, along with Newham and Barking and Dagenham, on the London Assembly and he is deputy leader of the Labour Group at City Hall.

Our conversation covered housing, employment, schools policy, how politics and religion should co-exist, fostering harmony in a diverse and largely poor part of the capital, building an ‘outward-looking’ attitude among the borough’s people, and the repeated allegations made against Rahman that he fosters a culture of favouritism towards his fellow Muslims with the help of questionable friends. Some of Biggs’s views may surprise. Now read on…

Dave Hill: Is Tower Hamlets a badly-run council?

John Biggs: By and large, no. In its day-to-day services it’s not catastrophically bad. It’s quite good in a number of areas – education’s improved massively over the years, though that’s been a 20-year journey. No individual mayor or leader can take credit for it. There are a number of areas where there is anxiety. One is that this area is going through massive change. A lot of that is about property development and demographic change. The price of land is going up and people are being squeezed out.

The other thing that sits alongside that, and has done for over a century in East London, is the way in which different communities work together, which can sometimes be a cause of tension. Quite often external people will stir things up, whether it’s Oswald Mosley or the BNP or George Galloway. But people come to East London because they’ve got a hunger to get things done and they feel quite often that they are competing for opportunities with other people. So what is needed is a leadership here that understands that and is seen as fair. And the big problem we have here at the minute is that the council leadership is not seen as being above the sometimes divisive inter-community competitiveness.

Has the running of the council deteriorated under the current mayor?

My fundamental critique of the current mayor is that he’s so preoccupied with little things and with his own insecurities that he’s not offering the leadership the council needs. We have a number of problems, which need to be sorted. One is that the senior management team is very unstable here. Because of the stand-off between the [independent] mayor and [majority Labour] councillors there’s been a failure to appoint permanent staff. Another is that the signals coming out from the politics discourage good people from applying for jobs here.

We’re at risk of playing a kind of lowest common denominator politics, with the mayor, because of his insecurities, playing to his core vote. His people are interpreting that point as me in some way trying to divide people, but I think it’s them doing the dividing. And if you knock on doors around here I think you’ll find people feel that the council isn’t standing up for everyone. I’m part of a party that is deeply rooted in all the communities in East London, in terms of socio-economic groups and ethnic groups. I think it’s very important that we reach across and provide some kind of united leadership. I’m aware that that can sound like a nicey-nicey soundbite, but it is actually crucial to getting the area to prosper.

Your manifesto implies that Lutfur Rahman hasn’t done enough to help young Tower Hamlets people secure Olympic-related jobs. What should he have done and what could you do better?

There’s a whole lot of things that sort of hang off that, but one is that the borough left to its own devices can be a very inward-looking place and the politics can become very E1-focussed – the City fringe area, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Whitechapel, the big mosques and so on. But the borough consists of E1, E2, E3 and E14, basically. So the east of the borough can become quite neglected and that’s where the Olympics were. The community politics can become so inward-looking too that people can forget they are sitting on the doorstep of the biggest city in Europe and so many opportunities. So it’s about the inward versus the outward-looking perspective.

Tower Hamlets was the only borough where unemployment rose during the Olympic games. You could blame everyone but the mayor for that, but it was on his watch so you’ve got to ask what he could have done that might have made a difference. There was an initiative to promote Brick Lane as the Curry Capital, but the amount of business in Brick Lane went down during the Olympics. Now, there was a pattern across London where people were busy watching sport instead of stuffing themselves in eateries but even so everything sort of happened in spite of Tower Hamlets rather than alongside Tower Hamlets.

We have an enormous advantage here compared with other parts of the country where there is high unemployment, in that there are so many jobs around. There’s a whole lot of good reasons why people might not be working – lack of skills, lack of language skills, childcare difficulties, health issues and so on – but brokering the sorts of skills that will improve people’s employability is one of the key things we haven’t done enough of.

We have an organisation called Skillsmatch but Robin Wales in Newham has Workplace, which is bigger and better. If you talk to the corporates – who are all very polite people and who want to get on with the mayor whoever he is – Lutfur seems to want to do things that involve having his photograph on them but aren’t really partnerships. Many people seem angry that the mayor wants to have his picture everywhere – they’d like fewer images and more action. And that’s what I would provide. I have the intrinsic advantage of being ugly, of course. But the point is it doesn’t bloody matter what your mayor looks like. What you want is to have your bins emptied and your kids in jobs.

You talk in your manifesto about the need for more school places in the borough. Free schools are about the only game in town just now. Are you going to encourage them?

I don’t like the free schools programme as a principle because it enables opting out of the co-ordination and planning that’s required to make a complicated area work. You can end up with free schools that have two percent free school meals in an area where 20% of kids qualify for them. But with the school leaving age rising to 19 there may be real opportunities to have free schools which provide specialist niches for kids who maybe aren’t going to follow an academic course but could do well at other things. There’s lots of young people who are really switched on by music, for example, which can help them acquire skills in other areas too. So as mayor I’d want to hold useful free schools close, if they want to be held close, and create a situation from which both sides benefit. As with academies we shouldn’t get too transfixed with the structures and we should think more about the partnerships we can build.

You say you want to build 1,000 new council homes. How would you achieve that and over what time period?

There’s a limited amount of available publicly owned land in the East End, but there’s still quite a lot of it. We think that without creating problems on existing housing estates and by using other land we could build about 1,000 homes over the next decade. Within the first four years we’ll identify where they are going to be and should have built several hundred of them and know where the rest are going to go. We think providing council housing should be part of the offer and the current mayor has failed to do this.

He’ll boast about the Poplar Baths deal and one or two others, but they are very clumsy deals. We think he could have put more effort into it. He boasts about 4,000 affordable homes being built, but they’ve been built by private developers and are the skim off, if you like, as part of the planning consent. Not only were they happening in spite of the mayor, but a lot of them are affordable only according to the Mayor of London’s definition, which is actually unaffordable even for teacher couples, for example.

It needs the mayor to do some thoroughly boring stuff, which is to sit in the Town Hall, not having his photograph taken, roll his sleeves up and actually think about the bloody policy in order to broker the best possible deal for local people. We need to look at all these other ways of making our housing more accessible including to some people on middle incomes. To an old child of the sixties like me, that sounds outrageously pragmatic but that’s also the world we’re living in.

Do you mean assisting the middle-classes with subsidy? How scandalous!

I think helping aspiring people on to the housing ladder, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you look at travel patterns in London you’ll find that the long distance bus routes like the 25 or the 149 are packed with cleaners in the early mornings because they can’t afford the train fares and they can’t afford the housing in central London like they used to be able to.

Your manifesto talks about stopping the over-commercialisation of the borough’s public spaces. Can you elaborate on that?

One of the bugbears is Victoria Park, with people who live up there feeling they are overburdened with late-night, under-regulated events. Clearly, you’ve got to raise revenue from your open spaces if it helps to cushion your budgets. But you’ve got to get the balance right, and there’s a perception up there that money is raised in the park yet not spent in the park.

And I read that you intend to stop the council charging people for pest control services.

One of the problems if you start charging people for dealing with their mouse infestation is that poor people will stop getting it done. Again, how do you get the balance right on that? These are the sorts of things we need to think hard about.

Is the Mayor’s educational allowance – his version of the educational maintenance allowance – a bad policy?

EMA was a good policy of the Labour government and if we can find ways of replicating it, then we should support those. Lutfur Rahman has done that, though with the help of Labour councillors. I would like us to do it and more effectively, but over the next few years we have some pretty horrendous cuts coming, regardless of who the mayor is – about £80m. So I don’t think you can guarantee anything. But one of the fundamental principles of a Biggs administration should be a series of policies challenging some of the problems of inequality and lack of income. They could include helping people in their relationships with private landlords, skills advice, and providing free school meals for primary school kids. It’s about the mix and you can’t do everything. You can’t have the penny and the bun, as someone once said.

The mayor has been criticised for promoting himself through the council’s free newspaper East End Life, but he’s not the only mayor to do that. A recent Newham Mag is packed with pictures of Newham’s Labour mayor, Sir Robin Wales.

Robin’s a mate of mine but I’m not his cheerleader. He can look after himself. I’m very clear that the role of a council newspaper is not to promote the mayor or the leader of the council but to inform people about the services they can access through the council. I find offensive the idea that you should use council money to provide propaganda on the rates.

The recent Panorama programme about Mayor Rahman focused on his allocation of grants to local organisations, alleging that he’s favoured Bengali and other Muslim groups in order to benefit politically. He’s countered that he’s spent the money where the need is greatest. What principles would inform how you allocated that part of the mayor’s budget?

What we’re talking about is grants for adding value in the community, doing things the council can’t do itself. Those should all be about improving the capacity of people to get on with their lives. It’s about doing the things that help to support a strong civic society in the borough. In a multi-faith, multi-ethnic community everyone who gets a grant must buy into the principle of community cohesion, which doesn’t mean they have to be totally secular – I don’t agree with Robin’s approach on this – but people do need to understand the importance of being outward-looking in a borough like Tower Hamlets and not creating inward-looking bunkers, whether they are ninth generation cockneys or fourth generation Bengalis.

I think Lutfur has taken too much of a micro-managerial interest in the grant-making decisions. When you look at the amendments he made [to the advice of his officers] I don’t think he has ever properly justified them. It is the right of a mayor to make such changes, but when a mayor has that power there is a potential to abuse it and I don’t think he has answered his critics.

Certainly I have come across organisations who have been reluctant to talk to me because they think they might not get a grant as a result of being seen to be too close to someone who disagrees with the mayor. Certainly there have been luncheon clubs across the borough, which have been presided over by the mayor’s councillors and seem to be working on a sort of reward-and-punishment basis in the way in which they hand out their meals to elders. There seems to be an unhealthy focus in some of those decisions.

The council should be about providing services to people without favour. I think he’s got a case to answer. I don’t want it to become personal and I don’t want it to become racially polarised either. But there are quite a lot of poor white people in the borough. There are certainly a lot of poor Somali people and a great number of poor African people. There’s quite a lot of poor older people on limited pensions and with a very limited support network.

You could bring all this down to an absurd level and say, well, we’ve got ten lumps of money and 30% of the people here are Bengali so they must have three of the ten lumps and so on. That would be wrong too wouldn’t it?

You raise an important point and, yes, that would be wrong but not necessarily completely wrong because not only do you need to have an approach which is transparent and justified, it also needs to be seen to be fair. I spoke to a pensioners’ group in Bow, which is predominantly white, and they do get a grant, but they look covetously down the road at what they perceive to be the grants received by other people. Now, I think there’s a certain amount of disinformation there. But the perception of unfairness is very real.

Is it possible to define principles and clear criteria for grant-giving and, if so, what should they be?

The principles need to be about what the basic purpose of the services is, and it’s about helping to provide the glue that helps make strong communities. All communities should recognise that they need to be outward-looking as well as supporting themselves. I’m very clear that Bengali elders will tend to stick together – they have kinship, memories, language and so on, and that’s perfectly reasonable. We shouldn’t force people to have a multi-racial luncheon club, though it would be great if there were more than we have at present. But that doesn’t mean we should be facilitating ghettoisation.

I think we have a duty in London, in the UK, in a multi-faith, multicultural community to try to tie people together, recognise common interests, provide coherent leadership and create a very strong sense of fairness and that we’re looking after everyone. Lutfur shows a misunderstanding of his role. He’s created a culture in which people are looking over their shoulder, wondering what they need to do to please the emperor.

You have some thoughts in your manifesto about the management of Brick Lane. There’s been plenty of rubbish written and broadcast in recent years describing Tower Hamlets as an Islamic Republic or claiming that no white person dares to walk down Whitechapel Road in case some mad mullah attacks him, yet Brick Lane on a Friday night is full of people boozed up to the eyeballs.

Well, Tower Hamlets is not full of mad mullahs and all people, I think, can feel safe walking down the streets apart from those who represent a threat to the rest of us. The Brick Lane area up into Shoreditch has become one of the three night time hotspots in London, alongside the West End and the Brixton area. There’s a lot of trade there, a lot of potential, a lot of money’s being made. A lot of it is very pleasant and enjoyable. But there are problems with uncontrolled street drinking and people pissing in doorways, which causes massive offence. It needs proper Town Hall management and better partnership with the police.

The other thing about Brick Lane is that it’s still seen as the heart of the Bengali community. You’ve got the Brick Lane mosque, you’ve got the curry trade, you’ve got some lovely cafes down there. It’s being squeezed by the rising rent levels. Also, if we’re going to have a thriving curry business there, some of it needs to be better than it is at the moment.

If we’re going to retain Brick Lane as the heart of the Bengali community, in the way that, say, Chinatown has maintained some character, then it needs a lot of long, hard talking about how we sustain that in the context of ever-rising property prices. We need to give the curry business some support, and the current council has done very little about that. The mayor talks about it, but it needs some disciplined leadership because the traders themselves often have difficulty reaching agreement. It’s a big piece of work, but the community feels strongly about this and we need to see what we can do.

Why do you think Lutfur Rahman has been a successful politician? Why do people vote for him?

He very successfully managed to position himself in 2010 as a victim in a contest with a low turnout that looked like a contest between two Bangladeshi factions in which the rest of the community didn’t have much interest. Plus a lot of people, I think, didn’t realise how powerful a mayor could be.

You’ve said to me before that you recognise that plenty of voters here in Tower Hamlets see him as their champion, a success story they can call their own. And doesn’t he seem to be sticking up for them in a wider context where the media is full of stories about sinister Islamist plotters and when certain politicians are busily assertingfor electoral gain that this is a Christian country? Isn’t that part of why people voted for him in 2010?

We need to have a values-based political system. I don’t think that religious affiliation should form an important part of that in what is, essentially, a secular community. The story of Bangladesh is a story of secular struggle against the oppressive Pakistani government in support of peoples’ right to develop their language and so on. So the religious argument, in my view, is a red herring other than in terms of the values of mutuality and respect. I live by very strong Christian values, even though I’m not an active Christian. And I think those values are pretty universal, actually.

But his success is symbolic of something, isn’t it? And he has some good principles, doesn’t he?

Yes, I’m sure he has. And it’s very lazy politics to say, you know, Margaret Thatcher will steal your children and sell them into slavery, or that Lutfur Rahman will convert the borough into an Islamic Republic. All that sort of rubbish. And it is rubbish. From what I know of Rahman, he’s a pretty secular guy. He has formed affiliations with people who are not very secular, and I think that’s a little bit suspect because I think that, while respecting peoples’ faith and their particular values, he needs to say it shouldn’t be part of the deal here, you’ve got to subscribe to something bigger. Everyone goes through the motions of that, but some organisations don’t really follow it to the letter.

Our community in Tower Hamlets is a pretty secular community, in which people knock around together pretty well. I think within the Muslim community there is anxiety about Islamisation and the risk of it. I think we should be alive to that, but I wouldn’t want to overstate it. I will hopefully win the election and reassert strong secular values in an administration which nurtures and supports and encourages our strong faith communities but also creates greater cohesion. We won’t be tolerant of groups who seek to divide. Rather than any Islamisation of the council, I think there has been political opportunism in which people have turned a blind eye to some of the more questionable practices of some people affiliated with some religious groups. And I think a lot of people in mosques would agree with me on that.

One influential organisation based in Tower Hamlets, the Islamic Forum Europe, is frequently described by some people extremist. Is it?

I remember a meeting on one of Ken Livingstone’s campaigns with a bunch of people from IFE and one guy opened a briefcase and took out a list and said these are our members and each of them will be expected to bring out 20 voters in support of you, Ken. Now, if I was a conspiracy theorist who thought the country was being Islamised I would see that as evidence of people wanting to build an Islamic Republic. But I don’t think it was anything of the sort. I really don’t.

Imagine you’re a young Muslim person growing up in a predominantly Christian country. Your parents came here with all sorts of expectations, some were fulfilled, some weren’t. There’s a struggle for identity in a complicated world. I see the IFE at its core as being a forum where people can share ideas and understand the relationship between their faith and their role in society.

Just as monks did years ago some people may conclude that they should withdraw from society and become exclusively devoted to their faith but most will find a pragmatic accommodation between their faith and their values and the way in which they get on in society, bring up their kids and so on. A forum is not a re-education camp. There are doubtless people affiliated to the IFE who’ve got other agendas. But I think predominantly it’s not an organisation that’s trying to take over the world. 

Why should Bengali voters here, many of them very politically engaged, vote for you rather than for Lutfur Rahman?

Because I’m a Labour politician committed to respecting communities, faiths, and diversity, but also part of the mainstream, which is what people came here to be part of. I’m a respectful, decent bloke who’s got a track record for delivering and I will roll my sleeves up and get on with the nitty gritty of providing opportunities and school places and trying to challenge the rough edges of the housing market, rather than getting preoccupied with some of the niche issues that have preoccupied so much of Lutfur Rahman’s administration.

And here’s the piece with Lutfur:

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