Editorial of the Socialist issue 1363
The stand of Socialist Party member Hugo Pierre for the mayor of Tower Hamlets, backed by seven other council candidates under the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) umbrella, is a controversial one.
The victory four years ago of the Aspire party’s Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets’ mayoral contest was a stand-out moment in the 2022 local elections. Aspire also won a majority on the council, with 24 seats to Labour’s 19.
What role Lutfur Rahman and Aspire could play in the fight for a new, mass vehicle for working-class political representation across Britain was still to be determined. But right-wing Labour had been defeated in London’s poorest borough – the site of the famous Poplar council rebellion in the 1920s, which Lutfur Rahman himself frequently references – and the possibilities were immense.
So with Aspire seeking re-election in May, is it right for socialist candidates to be on the ballot paper too?
Aspire’s record
Over the past four years the council has implemented many policies which the Socialist Party fully supports. Meals on Wheels have been reintroduced and free homecare for residents in need, with only one other council in England offering this service. A £1,500 grant University Bursary Programme has helped 2,400 students, while 2,800 16 to 18-year-olds in Further Education have received a £600 Education Maintenance Allowance. Tower Hamlets was also the first council to bring in free school meals for all primary and secondary school students.
But nevertheless, Tower Hamlets has not been able to escape the effects of the austerity squeeze on local councils’ spending and the services they provide, from both the Tories and now the Starmer Labour government. There are still over 25,000 people on the council home waiting list, for example, while the borough has the seventh-highest private rents in the country, the highest proportion of overcrowded households, and the greatest levels of child poverty. There have been above-inflation hikes to both council tax and council rents too.
It was cuts in other services – the placement of homeless families – that produced the first split among the Aspire councillors. Now, this May, two councillors elected for Aspire in 2022 are standing for the newly registered Tower Hamlets Independents party in a borough-wide challenge.
Unfortunately however, neither of these local ‘community independents’-style parties sees the fight for resources for Tower Hamlets as part of a national battle against austerity, mobilising the working class in the borough and linking up with struggles elsewhere. That’s the critical argument that socialists will bring to the election campaign.
Vultures circling
Alongside extreme poverty, the borough also has extreme wealth flowing through it, with the Canary Wharf district within its boundaries home to numerous global banks and financial institutions. The rateable value of Tower Hamlets businesses, for example, is six times greater than the London borough of Lewisham just across the River Thames. Councils only retain a small proportion of the business rates that they collect but it has provided Tower Hamlets with a relative cushion – but not indefinitely.
The recent news that the giant JP Morgan bank, with a net income of $57 billion (£43 billion) in 2025, is seeking a business rate discount before building a new UK headquarters in Canary Wharf, is a sign of things to come, certainly as the world capitalist economy heads for stormy times. The Labour government, always putting the interests of big business first, is pushing the council to offer “up to 100%” for “a period of years”, on a site that would otherwise generate £1.6 billion in rates over 25 years. The fightback cannot be limited to Tower Hamlets alone and needs a national political vehicle too.
But in its four years in office, what has Aspire done to build a national movement against austerity? Or to contribute to the struggle for a new, mass party of the working class?
No chance to debate
In the 1980s, Liverpool council, led by Militant the predecessor of the Socialist Party, defeated the then Tory government of Margaret Thatcher by mobilising the city’s working class, with mass meetings, strikes and demonstrations alongside electoral victories, and spreading its campaign beyond. The Poplar councillors too did not limit their struggle to the council chamber or to their own borough.
In 1922, two of the rebel councillors were elected to parliament and used that as a platform to advance the struggle in Poplar and at the same time build what was then the still newly developing working-class based Labour Party. And yet Aspire did not even contest the 2024 general election, in Tower Hamlets or anywhere else.
But couldn’t these arguments about how to defend what’s been gained in Tower Hamlets have been made within the Aspire party rather than in an election campaign? Unfortunately, however, contrary to how it is perceived outside the borough, Aspire does not provide a forum for workers or their organisations to debate and discuss the way forward. There are no branches in a borough of 319,000 residents, or public meetings held. In Aspire’s 2024 annual report to the Electoral Commission for example, it recorded “no visible activities during the year”, with the councillors’ group the only organised party unit. How can that be the basis to mobilise the Tower Hamlets working class to resist the coming attacks?
Compare this to Poplar, with nearly 70 trade union branches affiliated to the Poplar Trades Council and Borough Labour Party during its fight, or Liverpool with its 400-delegate strong District Labour Party meetings, which decided what the councillors should do, not the other way round.
The Your Party national officers informed local members by e-mail just days before nominations for the council elections closed that the party was “endorsing” Aspire candidates, without consultation, debate or even an online vote. That too is not a method that will enable a movement to be built to beat back the new local austerity agenda, but instead will prepare a new defeat.
That’s why, when the alternative is an enforced silence before the Tower Hamlets working class, it is right for socialists to be standing in the elections in May.