Dear Jeremy,
I write to you as someone who has lived, organised and worked in the East End of London for most of my adult life. I am a Bangladeshi by birth, a socialist by conviction and a small part of a community that has spent more than half a century making Tower Hamlets what it is.
Like many in this borough, I have marched against the Iraq war, against austerity and against the genocide in Gaza and many of those marches passed within sight of your shoulder. Please take this letter in the spirit in which it is written – not as an attack, but as an honest disagreement from somebody who is, broadly, on your side of the argument. I write anonymously because I have relatives in this borough and colleagues in our community organisations who do not need to receive the visits and phone calls that would inevitably follow a named piece. That, in itself, tells you something about the politics you have just endorsed.
On 17 April you formally endorsed Lutfur Rahman and the Aspire Party for the May 2026 council elections. You described Aspire as “a clear example of what is possible when local government prioritises social justice”. For many of us in this borough, that sentence didn’t sit right. Not because we have any illusions about the establishment parties that Aspire displaced – we do not – but because we know what Aspire actually is – and it is not a model of socialist municipalism.
Let me explain what I mean from the inside.
Aspire is, in institutional terms, what political scientists once called a clientelist machine. It has no functioning membership democracy. Its decisions are made by Rahman and a small advisory circle – a finding made by the government’s own best value inspectors in November 2024 when they described the council as suffering from a culture of patronage centred on the mayor and his allies.
Its 2022 council slate was almost entirely male and almost entirely Bangladeshi, which is not a representation of our community but a representation of the kinship and mosque-based networks that deliver the vote. Its councillors do not function as policy makers in the way councillors do in democratic socialist parties; they serve at the pleasure of a mayor’s office that last year spent £450,000 refurbishing itself, £50,000 of it on a meeting table and chairs. It is not the Workers’ Party of Belgium. It is not even the early Greater London Council. It is an East End machine operating on the rules of Tammany Hall, with the language of Jeremy Corbyn laid over the top.
A word on the Belgian comparison, because it matters. The Workers’ Party of Belgium, the Parti du Travail / Partij van de Arbeid, the only fully bilingual party in a deeply divided country, has built itself, since its reorganisation in the 2000s, into a Marxist party of roughly 25,000 members, polling around 17 federal seats. It runs a network of community clinics called Medicine for the People that provide free healthcare in working-class neighbourhoods. It has a serious youth organisation. It has internal democracy, programmatic clarity and a class-struggle orientation rather than personality politics. In February of last year it mobilised 100,000 people on the streets of Brussels against austerity. That is what a serious socialist project, rooted in the working class, looks like. A mayor’s office, a refurbished meeting table and an all-male slate of councillors selected by a single man is not even a poor cousin of it. It is a different category of organisation altogether.
Now I want to say something harder, because no Bangladeshi can write this honestly without saying it. The Aspire vote is not delivered by abstract community goodwill. It is delivered, in significant part, through a network of mosques and community organisations historically linked to the Islamist Islamic Forum of Europe and, behind it, to Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh. You will understand if I tell you that this matters to me personally. Jamaat-e-Islami collaborated with the Pakistani military during our 1971 Liberation War. Its cadres helped draw up the lists of Bengali intellectuals murdered in the last days of December 1971. Some of those names belonged to people known to my own family. To find, 55 years later, that the political descendants of that movement are underwriting a ‘socialist’ project in East London – and that the most respected figure on the British left has just blessed it – is not a small thing for us. It is a wound.
I do not believe you intend any of that. I believe you saw a Muslim mayor, a Gaza-aligned council, free school meals and a restored Education Maintenance Allowance, and you reached for the endorsement. But endorsements have content. When you signed yours, you signed alongside a council currently under government commissioner intervention for patronage, alongside a party with no internal democracy – and alongside a vote-getting apparatus rooted in Islamist networks whose ideological lineage spent the 1970s killing people like us.
And you signed alongside your own former staff. Amy Jackson, who was your political secretary, is now Aspire’s chief of staff. Karie Murphy, who ran your leader’s office, has been part of the same orbit. This is not a distant endorsement of a kindred project. It is an endorsement of an operation substantially staffed by the people who once worked for you. Which is to say, when you bless Aspire, you are blessing your own machine in another postcode. You would not endorse a socialist machine in Marseille on the grounds that it ran some good youth services. The standard you apply to a borough led by a Bangladeshi Muslim should be no lower than the standard you would apply to one led by anyone else.
Meanwhile the actual Bangladeshi working class in this borough is almost invisible in this politics. The waiters of Brick Lane on minimum wage and unsocial hours. The Uber and Deliveroo riders circling Canary Wharf for piece-rate fares. The night cleaners in those same Canary Wharf towers. The elderly first-generation migrants in social housing now squeezed by rising service charges. This is the class composition of our community. It is not represented by free swimming sessions. It is not represented by the abolition of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. It is represented, when it is represented at all, by the shop stewards, the renters’ unions, the migrant solidarity groups and by the small, embattled secular Bangladeshi left tradition that has kept the flame of 1971 alive through 50 years of communalist headwinds. It is represented by the trade unionists who came up out of the campaigns against racist violence in the 1970s – the campaigns whose name we still walk past, every day, on the gates of Altab Ali Park. And it is represented by the women’s organisations that have refused to let our daughters’ politics be reduced to mosque committees.
The point is not lost on the British left either. James Meadway, who served as senior economic adviser to John McDonnell throughout the Corbyn years, has joined the Green Party and is standing as a Green candidate in Bromley North ward in this same Tower Hamlets election. “We can’t do Corbynism anymore,” he told the New Statesman last month. The intellectual cadre that helped write the 2017 manifesto is not standing with you in Tower Hamlets. They are standing against you. That should give you pause.
So, my question to you, Jeremy, is this. What would it cost you to organise that community, instead of subcontracting our politics to a machine – even one staffed by your own former office?
I will end with the future, because that is what this election is about. If Aspire wins again on the back of your endorsement, the message to every ambitious figure on the British left will be clear – Muslim and minority-ethnic constituencies are sites of bloc-vote extraction, not class formation. The patronage system in Tower Hamlets will harden. The secular Bangladeshi left will be pushed further to the margins. Our working-class neighbours will continue to be courted as Muslims and ignored as workers. And in 20 years, when this borough’s children look back, they will not find a record of socialist construction. They will find a record of a vote bank traded, again and again, by men in offices, until something cheaper came along.
There is another path. It runs through unions, through tenants’ associations, through the secular political and cultural traditions our parents carried with them from Bengal, through democratic socialist organisation that does not need a mosque network to speak. It is the path mapped, in their different ways, by the Belgian comrades who built a workers’ party of 25,000 thousand from scratch. That path is harder. It is slower. It will not deliver 24 councillors in one round. But it would mean something. And it would mean us – finally – to ourselves.
In disagreement and in solidarity,
A Bangladeshi Socialist in East London
Further reading from TLL editors:
1. Your Party endorses Aspire.
2. Jeremy Corbyn endorses Lutfur Rahman and Aspire.
3. The Wikipedia entry of Lutfur Rahman.
4. Amy Jackson was Jeremy Corbyn’s political secretary for some of the time between 2015 and 2020 when he was Labour Party leader and leader of the opposition (LOTO). In a 1 July 2022 post on Facebook, mayor Rahman welcomed Jackson as his chief of staff. Elsewhere, a document calls Jackson “a key political appointee and senior adviser within Mayor Rahman’s team, with responsibilities spanning strategic management, political coordination and community engagement”.
5. Jackson is also a close political associate of Karie Murphy, who was executive director of Corbyn’s LOTO operation and is a key unelected insider at the top of Your Party. In a February 2021 article, Jackson was listed as director of executive policy for Unite the Union that was headed by general secretary Len McCluskey, the long-time partner of Murphy and a close associate of Corbyn.
6. For more on New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall organisation, check out its Wikipedia entry here.
8. Watch this recent video titled “The Most Controversial Street in London” by Evan Edinger on how Rahman broke an election promise about creating safer streets.
