We, the undersigned residents of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, are proud to have re-elected our executive mayor, Lutfur Rahman, on 22 May.

 Lutfur has led Tower Hamlets for the last six years as the most progressive council in Britain. He has not closed a single library – unlike Labour’s Brent which closed six – but opened a state of the art new one in Watney Market. He has not closed a single children’s centre or youth club – and has increased investment in youth services.  

Tower Hamlets under Lutfur has been recognised by central government as building the most new homes in Britain, including 4,000 affordable homes – and Lutfur has pledged to build another 5,500 affordable homes in the next four years. Unlike neighbouring boroughs, not a single family has been shipped out of London due to benefit cuts. This is due to his Emergency Homeless Fund and the council has also absorbed the cuts to council tax benefit. Lutfur pledged during his election campaign not to evict any family hit by the bedroom tax.  

Our schools have risen from the worst performing in Britain to achieving spectacular GCSE results well above national average, and have been praised by the Institute of Education, former education minister Estelle Morris and playwright Alan Bennett. This success owes much to the hard work of teachers, headteachers, pupils and parents but also to Lutfur’s policies such as reinstating the scrapped EMA, providing university bursaries for poor students with high aspirations, providing 1:1 tuition and introducing free school meals.  

Tower Hamlets won the Keep Britain Tidy award for the cleanest streets in Britain and has been recognised by Stonewall as one of the best councils in Britain for LGBT equality. Lutfur has protected local heritage by saving the Bancroft Library and will soon reopen the famous Poplar Baths, derelict for 25 years.  

Tower Hamlets has always been ahead of the curve under Lutfur, such as when he made the council the first Living Wage borough in 2008.  

We look forward to an exciting and innovative four years which will see, among other things, the ambitious Whitechapel Vision masterplan – a redevelopment on a scale not seen in the borough since Canary Wharf. This will safeguard small businesses and local markets while founding a new hub for creative industries and technologies, and moving the current, inaccessible rented Town Hall to the historic former Royal London Hospital building in Whitechapel.  

We made our views abundantly clear in the election on 22 May. Despite media coverage, Tower Hamlets had the most robust procedures against electoral malpractice in Britain and these were observed first-hand by the Electoral Commission on the day. Hundreds of allegations of electoral fraud in previous elections were investigated by police and a 48-page report available online shows no evidence was found for any of them. The suggestion that we were intimidated into re-electing our mayor is laughable and an insult to our intelligence. The ballot is secret and if any of us had been intimidated, we would simply have voted against those intimidating us behind the curtain of the voting booth.  

We will not be cowed by vicious smears in the right-wing media and cynical attempts to question the electoral result by a few sore losers in the local opposition parties. We are proud that this most diverse of boroughs has re-elected Britain’s only black mayor, and stand united – black and white; Muslim, Christian, Jew and Atheist; Gay and straight – against these attempts to paint the borough we love as something it is not and never will be.        

 
Stephen Beckett

Former Labour Councillor and secretary of Tower Hamlets Labour party