Opinion by Mathew Carr
The polls indicate the Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman remains the favorite, though his Bangladeshi block has split, with a new group called the Tower Hamlet Independents fielding a bank of candidates, including for executive mayor.
Rahman now faces a big challenge “from within.”
Councillor Ohid Ahmed, who defected from Rahman’s Aspire Party in 2024 to sit in the Tower Hamlets chamber as an independent is retiring at these elections and not facing a vote. He spoke to me yesterday by phone.
Another councillor running tomorrow in a Tower Hamlets ward for the independents group no longer trusts the mayor, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Ahmed said as he shifted away from Rahman because of the mayor’s lack of accountability and transparency. He was unwilling to properly share power and listen to others, enough, he said. To be sure, he was a bit reluctant to criticise Rahman publicly, but I talked him into it.
He was critical two years ago, like this:
Things have not really improved at the council since 2024, he said. “The toxic culture is there. Nobody can deny it.”
Rahman only saw the building of about 1,000 homes in the borough in the past four years vs the 4,000 he was striving for.
The mayor has to deal with envoys deployed by the national Labour administration.
“If he was doing the job properly, if he was accountable, open and transparent and did everything by the book, you would not have envoys and he would have been able to do more” (for the Tower Hamlets people), Ahmed said.
Labour candidate for mayor Sirajuj Islam said last week at a hustings that the envoys were needed and not part of some witch hunt against Rahman.
See here…Aspire and Tower Hamlets Independents are under column B:
JL Partners polling
If the numbers in the chart above turn out to be right AND the Aspire vote splits in half, the Green candidate Hirra Khan Adeogun might win.
Labour is still in with a chance. Reform appears to be spending big, online.
I pressed Ahmed on whether he thought the Independents might even take half of Rahman’s votes? He declined to answer, and would not even say which way he was going to vote personally, which is his right.
There are 8 other candidates vying for the mayoralty in the first-past-the-post race, so the winner might win with a low vote share.
Still, with much of the fight secretly taking place online and many people deciding only on the day, it’s difficult to know if the polls are close to being accurate as a measure of tomorrow’s voting intention.