Occasionally, there are moments when politicians of all persuasions welcome a result. As David Cameron noted at PMQs this week, Naz Shah’s victory over George Galloway in Bradford West was one of these moments. This morning’s news that Labour’s John Biggs has been elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets is another. Biggs won decisively, with 32,754 votes (including second preferences) to 26,384 votes for the independent Rabina Khan, a former member of disgraced mayor Lutfur Rahman’s cabinet, who stood as an independent. There was clearly tactical voting, with Biggs taking an impressive 90 per cent of the second preferences.
This result will hopefully mark the end of the toxic Rahman era. After the result was announced at the Excel Centre last night — which had a significant police presence, as with all Tower Hamlets elections — Biggs said it was time for the borough to move on, while still remembering what went wrong:
‘What is important in Tower Hamlets is that we recognise the events of the past year or more have caused enormous tension and friction in our great borough and we need… to pull things back together again.
‘Without dwelling too much on the past we should remind ourselves why we are in this position; there was bad behaviour. We need to overcome that, we need to move forwards, we need to recognise that Tower Hamlets is actually quite a magical place… where people come with traditionally quite little and build their dreams.’
Given the strength of the criticism against Rahman by Richard Mawrey QC in his investigation into the borough, it’s hard to see how anyone connected to Rahman could have won. But even in this re-run of the 2014 mayoral election, there were reports of irregularities.
By most standards, elections in Britain tends to be fair and without too much controversy. Tower Hamlets has been a consistent example of a rotten borough and it’s now up to John Biggs to show he can be the new broom. There are still questions to be asked about electoral fraud that took place and wheather the Electoral Commission was sufficiently assertive in Tower Hamlets. As Lord Vinson wrote on Coffee House last week, there is a case for the whole Commission to be scrapped.
Although Conservatives may not be publicly welcoming Biggs’ victory — the Tory Peter Golds came in a distant third place — they will be quietly pleased that the electorate appear to have done the right thing. With more directly elected mayors on the horizon, there is a sigh of relief in Westminster that the Lutfur Rahman era finally appears to be over.
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