DISGRACED former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, has seen his party, ‘Aspire’, win a second council seat – relying heavily on his ‘crooked’ connections and the large Muslim population to beat Labour.
Originally elected as Mayor of Tower Hamlets for the Labour Party, Rahman eventually established his own political party, Tower Hamlets First – a group renowned for corruption and intimidation and for its connections with the Islamic extremist organisation, The Islamic Forum of Europe.
With huge support from the overwhelmingly large Muslim electorate in the London borough, Rahman won a second term before being exposed as having committed electoral fraud in 2015.
Rahman’s criminality and ballot-burgling became the highest profile case of electoral fraud in British history, leading to the crooked politician to go underground for years, leaving the Labour party to once again takeover, and for his friend, Apsana Begum, to become the constituency’s MP.
Yet Rahman is on the rise again, with his party winning a seat in the borough in 2019, and now, just yesterday, winning a by-election that had been called following the death of local Labour Councillor John Pierce.
Kabir Ahmed, standing for Mr Rahman’s Aspire Party, won the previously safe Labour seat in the Weavers Ward with 1204 votes out of the 2607 cast.
The by-election results are as follows:
ASP: 46.5% (+31.3)
LAB: 28.6% (-21.7)
CON: 13.9% (+7.6)
GRN: 7.9% (-1.8)
LDEM: 1.9% (-5.6)
TUSC: 1.2% (+1.2)
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