I found an article over on the centre Left blog Harry’s Place recently on the subject of the upcoming local elections in Tower Hamlets. It concernss how disgraced former mayor of the borough, Lutfur Rahman is most likely going to stand again under his ‘Aspire’ party vehicle. As many people may know, Rahman was the first directly elected mayor for a London borough and also the first to be removed for electoral fraud.
Rahman was first elected to the mayoralty in 2010 and then re-elected in 2014. However he was removed from his post in 2015 after being found guilty by the Electoral Court of corrupt and illegal practises regarding his election and also ‘personally guilty’ of such fraud rather than being unknowing beneficiary of such fraud. Rahman was banned from standing for public office until 2021 but this suspension has now elapsed and he is now able to stand for the position of Tower Hamlets Mayor in 2022.
The prospect of this appalling character Rahman being able to worm his way into elected office again, possibly by using corrupt and illegal electoral practises has given a lot of people a lot of concern. There has been less mention of this issue and of Rahman in the House of Commons than I would like but in the House of Lords it is a different matter.
The Conservative Peer Lord Hayward did the House of Lords and anybody who respects and wants to protect honest democracy by standing up and excoriating Lutfur Rahman in the Upper House. A lot of what Lord Hayward said about what is going on in Tower Hamlets is extremely worrying. He’s made an allegation that there might be potential vote harvesting from vulnerable people going on there. He said that Rahman appeared on a TV channel aimed at Bengali speaking people and during the conversation someone from a carers group talked about ‘collecting’ votes, presumably for Rahman. Lord Hayward said that he had had the translation of the Bengali word that was used and he said the word definitely translates into the English word ‘collect’. Now there’s a big difference between campaigning for votes and collecting them. The use of the word collect really does suggest that there might be some shenanigans going on in Tower Hamlets with regards postal and proxy votes allocated to those who cannot get to the polling station themselves to cast an in person vote.
Lord Hayward is obviously extremely worried about the possibly of voter fraud going on in Tower Hamlets and that fraud propelling Rahman into public office again. Because of this worry he’s asking the government to bring forward planned legislative provisions aimed at reducing fraud in postal and proxy votes so that they are in place in time for the 2022 local council elections. He’s also asking for the Metropolitan Police to take more of an active role in keeping these elections clean and for other political parties to work together to try to defeat Rahman and his ‘Aspire’ party vehicle.
You can find the excellent Harry’s Place article which also contains the video of Lord Hayward speaking to the Lords vehemently about Lutfur Rahman via the link below.
http://hurryupharry.net/2021/10/23/lutfur-rahman-excoriated-in-house-of-lords/
Lord Hayward’s forceful intervention in the House of Lords over an issue, that of electoral integrity, which his vitally important, is a cracking example of the House of Lords at its best.
I freely admit I have not been a fan of the unelected Lords but its going to be nice if they force the government to live up to its election promise to preserve the triple lock. Just when you have made up your mind on a subject life throws you an unexpected event, who said politics is uninteresting?
The Lords has a massive advantage over the Commons in one key area and that is viewpoint diversity. Freed from the constraints of the party whips and less slavishly tied to party alleigence, the Lords contains a lot of free thinkers.
The Lords has not always been this good, it was a force for reaction in the 19th century and in the early part of the 20th and it became a little moribund in the late 1940’s early fifties but it’s producing those who speak up when needed. We saw this in the 80’s when the Earl of Stockton spoke out against the excesses of privatisation and we see it today with Lord Hayward speaking about and against the appalling Rahman, something elected members of the Commons may not be willing to do for fear of electorally damaging false accusations of ‘racism’. The big change I would like to see inthe Lords is less party donors, more free thinking hereditaries and an additional class of peer, picked at random from the voters register who would serve for a period of ten years. See more on this suggestion here: https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2020/12/31/a-radical-suggestion-for-house-of-lords-reform/