Roman Road Market in Bow used to be a bustling high street. Nowadays, it is a dilapidated market, sparsely populated with clothing stalls and a handful of food carts. A building which used to be a bank has its windows boarded up and plastered with graffiti. Here, locals can rattle off grocery lists of grievances across housing, sanitation, safety and support. Some point to an ever-worsening crisis beleaguering the East End: the state of Tower Hamlets council and, at its helm, the polarising figure of Mayor Lutfur Rahman.
The rise, fall and rise of Lutfur Rahman
Rahman has been a dominant force in Tower Hamlets politics for more than 15 years, having first been elected executive mayor in 2010. Then, in last week’s elections, Rahman won again, securing 35,679 votes — 38.8 per cent of the total vote — and a third term as mayor. While far from a landslide — Rahman himself won a stronger mandate in 2022 — it was still enough to retain his grip on the borough. So how did Rahman stay in power despite government intervention, political controversies and a bitterly polarised campaign?
An elderly resident and member of the Safer Neighbourhoods team says Rahman is “a narcissist”. Others who concede that his political prowess has enabled him to retain office despite much controversy, complain about “a lack of transparency” in how his council operates.
“Lutfur Rahman ran an autocratic councli. He doesn’t respect democracy, it’s a one-man show”
One constituent describes “no surprise” and “relief” at the Government’s decision to intervene earlier this year. Local Government Secretary Steve Reed announced his plans to intensify intervention in the council, after raising concerns that the authority had “not understood the severity of its situation”. Based on damning reports and audits conducted in the past few years, that situation includes allegations of rampant “cronyism” that has led to unqualified appointments, a “toxic” and “two-council” culture, as well as general financial mismanagement including a “lack of grip” over consultancy budgets.
Reed said ministerial envoys — who were sent to intervene in January 2025 — had been given further powers across governance, financial management and recruitment, where deemed necessary.
Long-standing Labour councillor, Marc Francis, said the atmosphere in the town hall had become “resigned” to the developments, which he added amounted to “essentially a commissioner running the town hall in all but name”.
‘Ruthless ambition of one man’
An ex-Aspire councillor who defected after disagreements over financial decisions told The Standard Rahman ran “an autocratic council”, and alleges he employed mostly fiercely loyal friends. The councillor said: “He doesn’t respect democracy, it’s a one-man show.”
Rahman was dramatically ousted from public office after a specialist court found him guilty of vote-rigging, electoral bribery and religious intimidation in 2014. In his afterword, presiding judge Richard Mawrey QC wrote that “the alarming state of affairs” could be wholly attributed to “the ruthless ambition of one man”.
After a five-year ban lapsed, Rahman returned with his newly minted Aspire party in a shocking and sweeping victory; replacing the incumbent, Labour’s John Biggs, in 2022. Several residents still believe the ban was insufficient and that Rahman should have been “permanently barred” from standing. At the time, Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution.
Former Tower Hamlets councillor Andrew Wood told The Standard residents have suffered greatly from Rahman’s latest term. He said, “There is a lot of evidence to support the fact that despite being one of the richest boroughs in the country in terms of council funding, we underperform in a wide range of areas, and that underperformance is in part linked to how the Mayor works.”
The central Labour government injected an extra £36.6m into the borough in December last year. The borough is the most densely populated area of the country, with more than 30,000 families on the council’s housing waiting list. In 2023, Tower Hamlets Community Housing was downgraded by the regulator to a non-compliant status. A resident in Bow describes sharing a three-bedroom council flat between six family members. Many have complaints about Clarion, a housing association seemingly notorious for slow repairs, and the purgatorial waiting lists.
Wood said that despite Rahman’s pledge to build 4,000 social homes before 2026, he “is years behind schedule”. He added that many of the completed houses had been approved as part of Biggs’s, albeit unambitious and “flawed”, original programme.
“There is a four-year gap between John Biggs’s old programme, which is what continued under Lutfur Rahman, and the start of a new programme. But other places in London have been a lot more ambitious and able to deliver lots of new homes. I’m not saying it’s easy, because it’s not, but it is possible. And part of that comes back to [Rahman’s] leadership, which is much more a presidential-style system.”
Leisure service workers claim they have faced “unsafe working practices” since the council took its leisure service back in-house in 2024, and are currently balloting for strikes.
‘Residents proud to live here’
A disabled resident told The Standard that she is taking Tower Hamlets Council, among other authorities, to court for “turning a blind eye” to the abuse state schools subjected her autistic child to. She says the £1m High Court case, which alleges the council has withheld funds owed to the child as part of their Education, Health and Care Plan, is not a unique story. “I have at least seven other sets of parents who are also going through similar challenges with the council regarding accountability in EHCP delivery,” she said, adding that the council is ignoring the issue “in order to uphold their Outstanding Ofsted status”.
Others claim that many problems have existed since Biggs’s leadership. On a Facebook group page for residents of the E14 postcode, posters complain about missed recycling collections over several weeks. Tower Hamlets has the worst recycling rate in England, but this was an issue raised during Labour’s control, as waste services have been in-house since 2020.
-(1).jpeg)
Puru Miah, a former councillor who worked under a Labour mayor, said, “The previous Labour administration had its own greatest hits album, [such as] unsigned accounts…”
The former councillor continued, “Residents are, by and large, proud to live in Tower Hamlets. What tends to irritate them more is the outsider perception as if the borough exists solely as a case study in political dysfunction, which has a knock-on negative effect in getting outside stakeholders to engage in the borough.
“The current Aspire administration’s additional investment, such as free school meals for secondary pupils, is the sort of policy that resonates more than yet another round of political mud-wrestling.”
In his first year back, Rahman’s council became the first in England to provide free school meals to all primary and secondary school pupils. It offered “universal” payments of up to £150 for parents struggling with school uniform costs and reinstated the Education Maintenance Allowance, a grant awarded to sixth-formers that was scrapped by the national government in 2010.
Labour undoubtedly holds some responsibility for the outcome of the 2022 election, which saw Rahman nullify his political obituaries and win more votes than his Labour, Tory and Lib Dem opponents combined.
Amid widespread austerity measures, the earlier Labour-led council — acting under direction from government inspectors — enacted funding cuts to nurseries within a region suffering from the UK’s highest child poverty rate. In the wake of the party’s national stance on the Gaza war, support among British Muslims for Labour fell 43 per cent since 2019. Frustrations flared in Tower Hamlets, which has the highest proportion of Muslim residents in the nation.
Aspire was completely homogenous when it won its seats: all 24 elected councillors were British Bangladeshi men who were political first-timers. As of January 2026, four councillors have left the party to work as independents and two positions have been filled by Bengali women. In January, it was revealed that one of those Aspire councillors, Sabina Khan, had campaigned for political office in Bangladesh while retaining income from Tower Hamlets taxpayers. Khan defended her actions, stating, “I have continued to serve my constituents remotely and returned when required.”
Attacks and fake news
Since leaving the party, a former Aspire councillor claimed he has been relentlessly “harassed” by party insiders and supporters online. He described a consortium of local Bengali media outlets funded by Rahman which worked to keep some constituents in the dark.As early as 2014, Tower Hamlets’ only Conservative councillor Peter Golds said that at least £39,500 of taxpayer money had been granted to Bengali media organisations, which he called “Rahman’s media empire”.
Earlier this year, three Aspire councillors were told to delete social media videos linking Labour leaders to an ongoing fraud and money laundering investigation. Aspire distanced itself, saying the posts were not made or endorsed by the party.
The Deputy Mayor Maium Talukdar said, “In my capacity as Chief Whip and agent of the Aspire Group, I have made it clear to members that inappropriate conduct is unacceptable and would invoke disciplinary procedures. Whenever possible, I have asked members and volunteers to keep our messaging on the positive aspects of our administration, delivering frontline services after years of cuts.”
But local WhatsApp groups have become inundated with supporters sharing graphics “attacking” Rahman’s opponents. Some of these messages seen by The Standard depict detractors as “traitors”, “Zionists” and “Labour slaves”. A fake news article accuses an independent councillor of “human trafficking” through a visa scam.
A former colleague of Rahman, who has been campaigning against him, claimed there is “a constant reversion to slander and smearing”. He also refers to a case in 2024 where they agreed to settle with a club owner out of court after he alleged an Aspire councillor had sought to elicit a substantial bribe in exchange for an important licence.
A spokesperson for Tower Hamlets council said: “The judgment made no findings against the council. An independent police investigation concluded that there is nothing to support the allegations, as did two separate internal investigations. The judgment outlines a settlement process for which the parties will discuss costs.”
Recently, a video circulated on social media of what purported to be a leaked recording of an alleged phone conversation wherein a person — whom the video claimed was councillor Amin Rahman — is heard saying, “if we don’t give [the licence] to him, that place will be meaningless for him” and “if he wants it, tell him it’s £20,000”.
Amin Rahman told The Standard that the video was fake and defamatory, claiming it was AI-generated. He said the clip had been submitted to Tower Hamlets council in 2023, but was cleared by several investigators and the police as there was no evidence to connect him to the voice.
“When this recording first appeared, I was shocked and horrified by the lengths some people would go to in order to attack someone’s reputation. After it was confirmed to be an obvious fake by experts, I put it behind me and continued working and serving the community. Now… some people appear to think they can benefit from resurfacing it.” A Met police investigation at the time found “insufficient evidence for a prosecution”.
Lutfur Rahman was born in Sylhet, a northern region of Bangladesh where the majority of Bengali residents in Tower Hamlets hail from, and moved with his family to a council estate in Bow. His is a compelling story of immigrant success — one that is borne out of, and continues to rely upon, the radical history of the East End.
Tower Hamlets has seen several surges of migration, with French Huguenots, then Irish Catholics, then Jews escaping pogroms in eastern Europe. The majority of Bangladeshis arrived from the 1950s through to the 1970s, fleeing partition of India and shortly after, a genocidal Pakistan.
The borough saw the Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888, where 1,500 women and girls went on strike to campaign against dire working conditions, and won. It is where Jewish residents and anti-fascists famously fought the British Union of Fascists on Cable Street in 1936. And where thousands of Bengalis mobilised against racism after a young Bangladeshi textile worker, Altab Ali, was murdered by skinheads just off Whitechapel Road in 1978.
The locals have been repeatedly targeted by far-Right marches and their endless rebrands. Residents locked themselves indoors out of fear from the National Front. Restrictions were placed on an EDL march in 2013, and a Ukip protest earlier this year.
Rahman has been repeatedly accused of using race as a trump card to silence his critics. Investigations, campaigns, reports and governmental interventions have often been spun as examples of institutional racism, effectively galvanising constituents in his defence. The Election Court in 2015 highlighted Rahman’s false allegations of racism aimed at his rival Biggs.
So why did so many vote for him in the recent local elections? A British Bengali living in the borough for 15 years tells The Standard that they “feel safe to exist in Tower Hamlets and live a life of dignity”. Some others are quick to resort to racial generalisations and end up regurgitating Reform top lines that scapegoat communities of colour. The tension between them festers, exponentially worsened by Aspire’s scandal-prone tenure and national culture wars.
But while reporting on Tower Hamlets has certainly invoked negative, Islamophobic stereotypes and dogwhistles about the Bangladeshi community, the most recent criticisms of Rahman’s strategies as Mayor have come from other British Bengalis.
Opposition campaigners claim there is a growing schism, and the notion that the South Asian community votes in a monolithic bloc is far from reality. In fact, the majority of Labour councillors in the borough are also Bengalis.
Insiders admit that Rahman remains “the favourite” to win. The besuited, bespectacled Mayor is widely known to be charming. But there is a growing sense of discontent surrounding the cabinet. One Tower Hamlets constituent says Mr Rahman is “silver-tongued”.
Miah said, “The cut and thrust of accusation and counter-accusation is very much part of the rough-and-tumble tradition of East End politics. In Tower Hamlets, the drama rarely decides the result. The doorstep usually does.”
And this time, despite the interventions, investigations and months of hostile headlines, the doorstep delivered for Rahman once again.
