What do you think?
Local resident Terry McGrenera submitted this essay before the results of the local elections were known
Whilst the rest of the results of the local elections for all of the 1817 seats that are being contested in all of London’s 32 boroughs will show an increase in the number of seats that Labour has won, the results in Tower Hamlets will reverse the swing to Labour. The only other exception will be in Croydon where the Labour Party’s administration declared itself bankrupt after the property company it set up went horribly wrong and cost Croydon millions of money and provided no extra homes for rent. Brick by Brick, the property company Croydon council lend £200 million, is being sold off to recoup some of the losses.
Tower Hamlets Council on the other hand has reserves of £500 million in its coffers yet it pleads poverty. So much so that one of the first decisions the Mayor John Biggs took after being re-elected in 2018 was able to increase the amount that councillors receive financially. One wonders how much of the increase ended up in the bank account of the Tower Hamlets Labour Party in order to pay for the cost of financing their election campaign. Since Labour won 42 of the 45 seats in the 2018 local elections, the contributions made by councillors must have gone a long way to clearing any debts incurred.
The outcome of the election also went a long way to reviving the dominance enjoyed by the Labour Party when I first came to Tower Hamlets. Then local elections were won not on Election Day but on the day nominations closed as many of the seats were uncontested. Democracy was dead as there was no opposition to the Labour Party. The Labour Party won all of the 50 seats.
In order to avoid a somewhat similar outcome – one party having all the power – in the local elections in May 2018 I spend the first week in January writing a proposal which I intended giving to the disputing leaders of the opposition on Tower Hamlets Council. What I wrote covered several pages. I wrote “The magnitude of Tower Hamlets being left without an opposition would see the return of the borough to the bad old days when it was virtually a rotten borough under Labour when I came to live in Tower Hamlets.” I took the opportunity before the start of the full council meeting on 17 January 2018 of handing a copy to the leader of the Aspire group on Tower Hamlets Council and the leader of the faction that split from Aspire. I warned them that unless they stopped fighting among themselves and came to some electoral agreement that Labour would win easily. Neither of the two leaders responded to my warnings. As a result all the councillors of the two groups lost their seats in the local elections in May, except one. After the election she wound up the political party she had founded and joined the Liberal Democrats. Some time after the election the leader of the Aspire group had the decency to tell me that it was a pity they didn’t listen.
The result of the 2018 local elections changed the dynamics of politics in Tower Hamlets. Labour’s overwhelming victory allowed John Biggs to do very much what he wanted as Mayor as he knew that there was no opposition, at least in the council chamber, to any policies or schemes he introduced. The plans for the redevelopment, or gentrification, of Chrisp Street Market, depending upon how you viewed the plans, is a good example of how Labour got their way.
The Strategic Development Committee met on 18 February 2018. The application proposed to build on the area at the back of shops facing Kereley Street and to provide car parking for shopkeepers away from the market. So hastily had the plans been prepared that the location where shopkeepers were supposed to go didn’t exist. It was obvious that the Labour councillors were embarrassed by the flaws in the plans and welcomed a proposal to defer any decision until after the local elections as a vote to pass the plans would have put their re-election in jeopardy. The presence in the council chamber of many of the Bangladeshi market traders opposed to the plans was also a factor that influenced the outcome.
Due to the local elections in May the next meeting of the Strategic Development Committee wasn’t until 24th July 2018. As with the February meeting, the council chamber was packed with people in favour of Poplar HARCA’s plans as well as people who opposed to the scheme. What had changed was the composition of the committee, including the chairman, John Pierce. He began by asking the committee to introduce themselves. They were all Labour councillors. When I saw that the one opposition councillor on the committee was absent I groaned whereupon John Pierce warned me of my behaviour. I was there to speak on behalf of the market traders whose livelihood would be adversely affected by having to move their stalls during the years of building work.
In my address to the committee I mentioned that the plans included no additional social housi