Author’s Note: The U.K. continues to absorb the results of the May 7, 2026, election in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, with Mayor Lutfur Rahman consolidating his control over city hall. He has achieved dominance over the borough despite a history of electoral fraud and a close relationship with the East London Mosque, a hub of the revolutionary Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami.
Having investigated the political dynamics behind Rahman and Aspire’s dominance in Tower Hamlets, I am less concerned by allegations of vote-rigging, questionable stewardship of public funds, evasiveness under scrutiny, and alleged links to revolutionary Islamists than by the apparent indifference of voters to those controversies.
I visited Tower Hamlets on election day to get a sense of how much locals knew or cared about the governance problems in the council since Rahman rose to power there in 2010.
While some voters expressed concerns, most denied the problems altogether, demonstrating that Aspire’s propaganda, much of it delivered in Bengali, has carried the day.
This is what I saw.
***
I’m standing outside the Teviot Community Center, the scene of voting in the May 7 elections taking place throughout the United Kingdom. Iqbal Hossain, an Aspire candidate for Tower Hamlets Council, canvasses voters as they enter the building. He’s dressed sharply in a dark suit and flanked by volunteers. Hossain is part of the coalition that has dominated Tower Hamlets politics since Mayor Lutfur Rahman first got elected in 2010.
He knows his side is going to win and why.
Socialist Freebies
“We are doing a socialist program here in Tower Hamlets. More here
than in any other borough,” Hossain tells me, listing Aspire’s headline populist policies: universal free school meals, uniform grants, undergraduate bursaries, free swimming (with some restrictions), free home care for the elderly, and now subsidized travel and laptops for low-income families.
Access to these services isn’t always straightforward. Hours later, at a Bangladeshi café in Shadwell, a transport hub in the borough, the man behind the counter tells me he tried and failed to sign up for the free swimming classes—one of Aspire’s headline populist offerings.
“You have to use a barcode to register. But when I finally did, I couldn’t book. There were no available spaces.”
“So, because it’s free, it’s oversubscribed?” I ask.
He nods. “I think they just announce these policies to get votes and worry about how it will work later.”
Back at the community center, I press Hossain with a question that has loomed over this election: “Why should anyone vote for a party whose leader was found guilty of electoral fraud?”
Hossain immediately defends Rahman. “He was never prosecuted. There was no evidence.”
As I have documented elsewhere, Rahman was found guilty by an electoral court in 2015—to the criminal standard of proof—of corrupt and illegal practices under the Representation of the People Act 1983. These included personation, ghost voting, illegal registration, bribery through grants, and undue spiritual influence.
He was also found guilty of mortgage fraud and tax evasion by a judge who was seeking payment of the petitioners’ legal costs, which amounted to more than £500,000. Rahman failed to pay, and in November 2015, declared himself bankrupt. After a five-year ban from public office, he won the mayoralty again in 2022 at the helm of a new vehicle, Aspire.
When I push back with the facts, Hossain dismisses the story as politically motivated. “The people who brought the case were political opponents. They just didn’t like a brown or black person being in power.”
When I point out that one of the complainants was Bangladeshi restaurateur Azmal Hussein, he shrugs.
“He was the media’s Trump card,” he says, before deflecting scrutiny:
“Look at Donald Trump. The most fraud allegations are against him!”
This deflection and cynical use of allegations of racism to shut down criticism has long been a tactic of Rahman’s political machine, including against the four residents who brought the prosecution.
“The Petitioners knew that Mr. Rahman would deploy all his resources to defeat them and could rely on the Bangladeshi media to back him all the way,” Electoral Commissioner Richard Mawrey wrote in his 2015 judgment against Rahman and Alibor Choudhary, then cabinet member for resources and now deputy head of the Mayor’s office, whom he described as Rahman’s “hatchet man” and “a wholly unreliable witness.”
“The Petitioners would be portrayed as racists and Islamophobes, attempting to set aside the election (by a large majority) of a Mayor whose government of the Borough had been inspirational, for no better reason than the fact that he was a Bangladeshi. And so it proved.” Most ominously, Mawrey wrote, that even the police know they were “dealing with a man whose hair-trigger reaction is to accuse anyone who disagrees with him of racism and/or Islamophobia.”
Tense Scenes at the Polls
I move on to the Brownfield Cabin polling station on the Aberfeldy Estate, in the Lansbury Ward. The atmosphere feels tense.
Campaigners hand out leaflets while rival volunteers watch each other closely. The Aspire leaflets for Lansbury feature candidate Abul Monsur, despite the party’s claim to have suspended him over allegations that he had shared Facebook posts praising Adolf Hitler and calling the Holocaust a “Holohoax.” On the table just inside the polling station, I notice his name remains on the ballot sheets.
Confusion arises when I ask a staffer what happens to votes cast for Monsur. Moments later, I’m put on the phone with Rob Curtis, Tower Hamlets’ head of electoral services, who tells me I need to leave the building.
“You are committing a serious criminal offence by being in the polling station,” he warns sharply. “If you don’t leave immediately, I will have the police remove you. And I’ll report you to Stephen Halsey, the Election Returning Officer.”
I leave the building to avoid further trouble. Outside, it becomes clear that not everyone in the Bangladeshi community remains loyal to Aspire. A campaigner for Lansbury independent candidates tells me in strongly accented English: “In 2022, the whole community supported Lutfur. Now people are unhappy. Rents are rising. Council tax is rising. Families are overcrowded. Crime is a problem. Cars are broken into every couple of days.”
I query why the “whole community” backed Rahman in 2022. Didn’t they mind his past disqualification for electoral fraud? “No,” he shrugs, making it clear that his opposition to Rahman is based on his failure to deliver the goods and nothing else.
“Well, I’d mind,” I tell him.
“You have your opinion. I have my opinion. We all have our opinions,” he says, embodying the political culture of his native Bangladesh, which ranked 150 out of 182 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
A couple of the candidates running as independent councilors had jumped ship from Aspire after the central government sent inspectors to Tower Hamlets council again in 2024.
One, Kabir Hussein, a former Aspire councilor for Spitalfields and Banglatown, wrote in his September 2024 resignation letter: “I can no longer in good conscience continue in a role where leadership avoids meaningful dialogue, disregards councillors’ views and lacks transparency. The prioritization of personal loyalties over merit, the spread of misinformation and the absence of accountability have eroded my trust in the Mayor’s ability to lead effectively.”
‘People Believe in Him’
Lutfur Rahman. (Photo by Adamkash via Wikimedia Commons)
Hussein’s stand for probity will leave him out in the cold. Neither he, nor any independent candidate will be elected today in Tower Hamlets.
Nearby, two young women in hijabs canvassing for Aspire remain enthusiastic about Rahman’s leadership. “He’s done a lot for the community,” one says. “Free school meals and things like that. People believe in him.”
“Aren’t people worried that Tower Hamlets under Rahman keeps getting investigated by central government?” I ask. “I think the investigation came out clear,” says one. (It didn’t.)
A bearded man in a thawb and skullcap—whom I later recognize as Aspire candidate for Lansbury, Foysal Ahmed—blames previous Labour administrations for persistent central government scrutiny.
“I work with Rahman day in, day out,” he says. “The envoys are investigating because the previous Labour administration had five years of unsigned accounts,” he says.
Reports from late 2023 corroborate his claim that Tower Hamlets council was one of ten public bodies across England whose audits were five years overdue. However, this is more deflection from problems at Tower Hamlet’s under Rahman’s leadership. The government appointed inspectors and later seconded envoys in 2024 to investigate and enforce accountability for governance and financial control issues dating from Lutfur Rahman’s return to the mayoralty in 2022.
Hostile Posters
As I walk through Shadwell, another Tower Hamlets neighborhood, illegal posters near the station portray Jews as “Labour’s Monsters” and accuse the party of complicity in genocide in Gaza.
Propaganda like this doesn’t work on everyone. On the Savile Gardens estate, two young South Asian men say they’ll vote Labour despite Rahman’s spending pledges. “How are they paying for all this?” one asks. “Everything is going up: Council tax, rents. People are struggling. It doesn’t add up.”
Outside Bluegate Fields Junior School polling station, a ten-minute walk from Shadwell station, police tell me they’ve already intervened over aggressive campaigning. I check with one officer whether the tellers—campaign activists who try to canvas voters on election day—are allowed to follow voters into the polling station.
The officer tells me tellers (incorrectly, it turns out) are allowed inside the building but not in the individual voting booths. This appears to contradict the warning issued to me by the head of electoral services that only voters and accredited staff were allowed inside.
Later, Peter Golds, who has campaigned for years about electoral commission and police failings, clarifies: “The only people who are entitled to enter a polling station are voters, candidates, election agents, election staff and people who are polling agents or poll observers, nobody else.”
Golds continues: “You can’t be a so-called ‘teller’ and go in and out of a polling station. We have had corruption in Tower Hamlets for decades. If the Metropolitan Police still do not know who is permitted to enter a polling station, then something is seriously wrong with the Metropolitan Police.”
Bluegate Fields
Back on the ground near Bluegate Fields School, the factionalism and paranoia feel intense for local elections. Liberal Democrat activists allege that some campaigners falsely claimed to support candidate Rabina Khan—a former Rahman loyalist who ran an independent candidate for Mayor in 2015—after police confronted them for harassing voters. When I ask Khan about it, she is wary of talking.
“Be careful, they’re watching, they have cameras,” she says. She will win reelection as Liberal Democrat councilor for Shadwell today.
When I mention the 2015 election court judgment against Rahman and the deputy head of his office to a middle-aged, female Aspire volunteer, she shakes her head.
“If there was evidence of fraud, why is he back now? I wouldn’t vote for him,” she says. “I wouldn’t be standing here today. I would not put myself supporting a criminal.”
“But if there were no evidence of wrongdoing, why would central government keep ordering these costly investigations of Tower Hamlets?” I ask her.
She pushes back: “The fact that there is a brown mayor has an impact. There is negativity. It’s institutional racism.”
Disappointment in Whitechapel Market
At Whitechapel Market, opposite the new £120 million civic headquarters (where Rahman reportedly spent £450,000 on upgrades after resuming office in 2022, converting a former chapel into his office before hiring 38 staff), a South Asian stallholder is unimpressed. “There is no improvement here. No lights. No toilets. No place to rest. Resources should be distributed fairly.”
Despite the misgivings of many that I talked to today, Rahman’s formidable well-oiled political machine, steamrolls such opposition. His supporters or “well wishers,’ include hard-left pro-Gaza Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn, The Islam Channel, the East London Mosque, and eight loyal Bengali language TV channels and numerous social media accounts.
The results are stunning. Aspire candidate for Lansbury Abul Monsur wins his Lansbury seat, despite his suspension for racist Facebook posts. Aspire candidates win 33 out of 45 seats on the council. It represents a terrible betrayal of the Herculean efforts of citizens and local reporters to safeguard democracy and standards of public life in the borough.
