A Tory Candidate Is Selected In Tower Hamlets
This is a guest post by Terry Fitz
It must have seemed a good idea at the time to the Tory Central Office staff or the think tank policy wonks that devised it but the hustings system being used by the Tories to select Parliamentary candidates went seriously wrong on the seventh of this month in London’s East End.
It may well have been a good thing in places like Cambridge, Exeter or Frimley but ,as the leadership of the ultra left Socialist Workers Party found out to their cost, no system is proof against the power of the leaders of the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets to manipulate the block votes under their command.
The venue for the hustings was St Hilda’s, a charitable institution set up by Cheltenham Ladies College in the last century and very near to Brick Lane. As the Bangladeshi family groups arrived they immediately segregated themselves and when the debate started there were about two hundred and fifty people in the hall.
The whole thing was a charade from the beginning and was shown to be so when one of the white candidates, a woman who by her accent would have been much happier speaking to an audience in South Ken or Cheltenham, asked actual Tory Party members to put their hands up. About twenty did so, all white.
As expected Zakir Khan won the nomination with seventy per cent of the vote so avoiding a run off. What was interesting was that there were a number of Labour and Lib Dem members who turned up to vote the reasons for which make the politics of Byzantium positively straghtforward.
It is now possible to state the actually situation in terms of the relative strengths of the pro and anti IFE groups in Tower Hamlets and this is what is at the heart of the campaign over the next eight weeks. IFE is now grouped around Respect and the Lutfur Rahman group in the Labour Party. Of the IFE/Labour group two of those not selected who defected to Respect, Salim Ullah and Fazlu Hoque, if elected will defect back to Labour in order to vote for Lutfur Rahman as leader of the Labour Group. Those of you who saw the Despatches programme will remember him as the shifty character who kept licking his lips and refusing to answer Gilligans questions.
It is vital for IFE to keep Rahman as leader as it is from control of the council and its PVE money and other funds that a great deal of IFE’s money comes from. It is the election of the actual councillors that presents the biggest problem as Rahman and IFE could just end up with enough candidates to retain control of the Labour Group and therefore the leadership.
Questions are being asked as to why more known IFE Labour Cllrs were not deselected by Ken Clark and the London Regional Party. There was always the situation where if too many were deslected they would simply leave with their block of voters, join with Respect and still end up running the borough. Even so London Labour could definately have culled a few more and not provoked a rebellion. In order to appear politically correct they actually deselected a really good white councillor, Alex Hislop, so they wouldn’t be accused of racism.
The Parlimentary race is now a three way fight. Although the successful Tory candidate Zakir Khan has IFE connections, his brother Dilwar Hussein is the current CE of the London Muslim Centre and a first cousin is the current treasurer, he is running his own campaign and has his own political ambitions. The reason that Labour and Lib Dem members and supporters voted for him in the hustings was to try to dilute the IFE vote across the three parties to ensure that the Labour candidate Rushanara Ali is elected.
To give any guarantee of this it was necessary to have a three horse race but at the moment she is so low profile she isn’t even in the radar and while she owes her selection to the chattering classes of Bow, that’s our local Islington, she simply hasn’t been campaigning and has had to rely on outside canvassers from around the Young Foundation think tank of which she is a Fellow.
Her strategy has been to say nothing controversial, in fact she has been totally silent on everything, and rely on the residual Labour vote and the splits in Respect to get herself elected. Some observers see the emergence of Zakir Khan as enough to get her in but others are not so sure, this is Tower Hamlets after all.
Another factor going against Labour is that all of the candidates on the Bethnal Green and Bow slate are Asian in a borough that still has a majority of white people. My soundings in the pubs across the area, always a useful indication of what’s going on, is that a lot of white people just aren’t going to vote at all. Apart from the tactics that the parties use and the morality of them, a population with roots going back many generations now feel totally disenfranchised to the extent that they have just given up. This syndrome is leading, in other parts of the country, to the rise of the BNP, fact that the great and the good have woken up to at last even if a little late.
The biggest danger is from the Mayoral referendum for the whole of the borough which takes place on election day. The yes vote is being coordinated by IFE and is supported by Galloway, Livingston and Andy E Neuman and his fellow Spartists on SU. The no vote is officially all of the other parties but on election day a significant section of IFE/Labour voters will vote yes.
IFE sees the office of Mayor as its number one priority. Elected for four years the post has control of the one billion pound budget that is available at the moment, with more in the pipeline, and as importantly the power of patronage to place IFE members in position of power. While an IFE member of Parliament would be ideal it is only a possibility. IFE have got their options open on the control of the council. Either Lutfur Rahman gets back as leader or the referendum leads to the election of an IFE Mayor with Azad Ali as a possible candidate and a strong chance of winning.
All in all not a good scenario. Direct rule from Westminster? Well it has been used elswhere and might be the last chance and we are definately in the last chance saloon.



