UK: Elections Have Taken On a Third-World Edge

Tower Hamlets Elections: Riot Police, Warning Signs, and a London Borough on Edge

TOWER HAMLETS, London, United Kingdom – Riot vans cruise menacingly through the streets and uniformed officers guard the entrances to polling booths. These are familiar sights at elections in any politically turbulent third world country, but they were quite alien to British democracy until now.

Thursday the 11th June was an historic day for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Residents had the opportunity, today, to elect a new Mayor in the wake of the much publicised High Court action against former Mayor Lutfur Rahman and his aide, the ex-Councillor of Stepney Alibor Chowdhury.

And this is no small, local role. The Mayor of Tower Hamlets controls a budget of over £1bn a year, in an area of widespread social deprivation, and where mass immigration has turned White British people into a minority of only 30 per cent of the population.