Far-right figures involved in 2015 petition that unseated Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman

Key figures involved in a 2015 petition that led to Lutfur Rahman, the Muslim mayor of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, being removed from office had posted racist and Islamophobic material online, an investigation by The New Arab (TNA) reveals. 

The petition was successful, in part, because Rahman - who was born in Bangladesh and is a former solicitor - was judged to have exaggerated the racism he had faced in Tower Hamlets and to have made false accusations of racism against political opponents. 

The revelations of this investigation have particular relevance at a time when efforts are underway to establish new national groupings on the left in British politics, in which Rahman may play a part. 

The petition was upheld in an election court ruling by Richard Mawrey KC, which overturned the local council election result of 2014. Mawrey also found Lutfur Rahman guilty on three other charges besides false accusations of racism: using imams to bring “undue spiritual influence” on voters - a rarely used provision in law - “bribery” and “electoral malpractice”. 

Rahman was barred from holding elective office for five years. His attempts to appeal the 2015 ruling have so far been unsuccessful. In 2018, as a consequence of that verdict, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) struck him off its register for life.

Rising independent candidate

Rahman left the Labour Party in 2010 to run for mayor after it deselected him as its candidate, despite widespread local popularity. He went on to win the mayoral elections in Tower Hamlets as an independent in both 2010 and 2014.

After his ban expired (in 2020), Rahman was re-elected as Mayor of Tower Hamlets - where a third of the electorate is of Bangladeshi origin - in 2022. But, nationally, the Mawrey accusations continue to hang over his head. 

On 12 November 2024, Britain’s Labour government announced that it planned to appoint an envoy to oversee the administration in Tower Hamlets because it was “failing to comply with its Best Value Duty” - a statutory obligation to ensure “it has arrangements to secure continuous improvement in how it carries out its work.”

As with the Mawrey ruling, some among Rahman’s supporters see the latest announcement as an unjust, politically motivated attack on a Muslim politician who has defied the major parties and built an independent power base. 

“Islamophobia is often state led,” Andrew Feinstein, the independent parliamentary candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, the Prime Minister’s constituency, told TNA. “Lutfur Rahman’s case is an indication of how one of the most prominent Muslim politicians in the country is treated by the establishment.”

The EDL: only “a very useful bogeyman”?

Mawrey’s 2015 ruling  described the Tower Hamlet mayor as ”someone who perceives racism everywhere”. 

“Rahman has made a successful career by ignoring or flouting the law […] and has relied on silencing his critics by accusations of racism and Islamophobia. But his critics have not been silenced and neither has this court,” he wrote.

This rallying cry was eagerly taken up by some journalists. 

“Lutfur Rahman’s name should become a byword for bogus allegations of racism or Islamophobia,” wrote John Ware in Prospect.

“’Anti-racism’ has become little more than a swindle,” wrote Nick Cohen in The Guardian. 

Mawrey was dismissive, in particular, of Rahman’s claim that some of his opponents were echoing narratives promoted by the far-right English Defence League (EDL), a now defunct white supremacist anti-Islam group. 

“The EDL have proved a very useful bogeyman with which to affright the citizens, especially the non-white citizens, of Tower Hamlets. In reality the political support for these organisations has long been negligible, verging on the non-existent,” he wrote.

In fact, new research by TNA reveals that two of the seven people involved in setting up the petition that led to the Mawrey ruling had expressed support for EDL leader Tommy Robinson.

Angela Moffat was one of the four signatories to the petition. She was a member of the right-wing pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP). She was also, until 2021, a regular contributor to Twitter, now known as X.

In August 2013 she re-tweeted in support of Tommy Robinson: “@EDLTrobinson gets called racist and gets loads of hate? But has he ever said a racist remark?” The tweet was tagged “#notoenglishsharia”.   

In the same month she tweeted:

She also referred to Pakistanis as “rag heads” and falsely claimed that Shadwell, an area in Tower Hamlets, “was a no go area for soldiers after one got attacked by ‘Muslims’”. 

Moffat’s then partner, and now husband, is Lee Baker. He was one of three men who, in August 2014, established a company called The Tower Hamlets Election Petition Ltd, whose purpose was to promote the petition.

His main X page shows him with Moffat and still references the petition.

Baker's social media activity includes crudely racist and Islamophobic material.

 He too posted in support of Tommy Robinson.

A tweet in 2014 suggested he planned to attend an EDL march in Tower Hamlets.

TNA contacted both Angela Moffat and Lee Baker, seeking their comments on this article, but no response was received in time for publication. 

In his judgement, Richard Mawrey KC praised the courage of the petitioners and rejected outright any possibility of racist motivations.

“If the bringing of an election [petition] requires courage in ordinary circumstances, bringing a petition to try to unseat Mr Rahman required courage of a very much higher order. The Petitioners knew that Mr Rahman would deploy all his resources to defeat them and could rely on the Bangladeshi media to back him all the way. The Petitioners would be portrayed as racists and Islamophobes […] And so it proved,” he wrote. 

Yet Rahman himself never claimed that some of the petitioners could have had racist motivations. He and his legal team were unaware, at the time, of the social media activities in question.

In a statement to The New Arab, Lutfur Rahman said: "It is significant that this evidence has now come to light. It is directly relevant to the litigation, and Richard Mawrey KC should have had the opportunity to consider it before he reached his conclusions. [...] We are currently seeking legal advice on the potential grounds for appeal in light of this new information.”

TNA contacted the office of Judge Richard Mawrey KC multiple times to comment on this story, but he declined to respond.

Two of Moffat’s fellow petitioners, Debbie Simone and local businessman Azmal Hussain, were Labour Party members. The fourth one, Andy Erlam, was a member of the Red Flag Anti-Corruption Party.

Simone did not feature in press photos of the petitioners after the ruling. Contacted by The New Arab she said she had found the experience “traumatic” and had concluded that “an election petition was not fit for purpose as a means of challenging an election.”

The petitioners’ lawyer, Francis Hoar, had also been vocal about his views on Islamism and Tower Hamlets on X/Twitter. 

In November 2012, he described Tower Hamlets as “a Taliban republic”, comparing the borough to Afghanistan under radical Islamist rule. In December that year, he tweeted that “Islam gets a bad name because of evil done in *its* name. And because of other Muslims failing to speak out about it. As for Islamism, it is the greatest evil the world faces today.”

Contacted by The New Arab, Hoar said: “I cannot recall the reason for my expressing an opinion, in November 2012, that Tower Hamlets appeared to have become a ‘Taliban Republic’, although it may have been in response to reports that an unofficial police force funded by the Borough Council had been attempting to enforce Muslim norms of behaviour.”

Rahman has been accused of having ties to Islamic fundamentalist organisations, although even the Mawrey ruling dismissed these allegations as unfounded.  

Hoar added: “As for the second comment in December 2012, I was entitled to voice a concern that evil was being done in the name of Islam.  My opinion that Islamism was the greatest evil in the world at that time was widely shared and indeed somewhat prophetic, given that it was in early 2013 that ISIS began to spread throughout Syria and Iraq.”

In his written response to TNA, Hoar concluded: “That I hold and express opinions on political matters in no way affects or affected my ability to present legal cases fairly based on the evidence presented.  Had there been any concerns about that, they would no doubt have been raised in yet another futile attempt to judicially review the judgment of Commissioner Mawrey QC.”

“The Asian factor”

The judge, Richard Mawrey KC, is best known as a prominent critic of postal voting, which he claims facilitates fraud “on an industrial scale” that would shame “a banana republic”. It’s a view most experts reject.

He first came to prominence as the result of a 2005 election court ruling in which he found seven Asian Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of electoral fraud. In his judgement, Mawrey made reference to “the Asian factor”.

“There is no doubt that this community retains, where others have lost, an ingrained respect for those in the community who are in positions of trust and responsibility,” he wrote. He claimed that this made Asians vulnerable to abuse of trust.

Two of those found guilty in 2005 later had the verdict overturned on appeal. In the case of one of them, Muhammad Azfal, the appeal court ruled Mawrey “did not fairly represent” his evidence. Azfal went on to become mayor of Birmingham. 

In the 2015 ruling, Mawrey found Lutfur Rahman guilty of using imams to bring “undue spiritual influence” on voters. This charge involved resurrecting a piece of 19th century legislation aimed at preventing priests from influencing the Irish peasantry. 

“Though it is true to say that the world has moved on considerably since 1892, there is little real difference between the attitudes of the faithful Roman Catholics of County Meath at that time and the attitudes of the faithful Muslims of Tower Hamlets,” Mawrey wrote.

Some condemned this part of the ruling as racist because of how it resorted to laws that had been used to discriminate against Irish Catholics in the 19th century.

The charge of “bribery” involved, not personal corruption, but channelling council grants disproportionately towards Rahman’s own support base within the Bangladeshi community. He was also accused of making payments to Bengali media that had breached Ofcom regulations on political advertising.

The “electoral malpractice” charges included personation and false registration of voters.

None of the charges in the ruling, though, ever led to any police prosecutions, despite three separate police enquiries. 

Tower Hamlets remains under scrutiny

A routine inspection conducted by the Local Government Association at the end of 2023 delivered a broadly favourable report on Tower Hamlets. “The council is fortunate to have highly skilled, dedicated people who are evidently committed to delivering the best outcomes for the borough’s residents,” it said, adding that “Tower Hamlets has a good record of financial management, with strong foundations in place.”

Nevertheless, the previous Conservative government decided to send in inspectors at the start of 2024 .

Their report accused the council of “a culture of patronage” which, “even if not at play in every appointment, is perceived as pervasive enough to undermine trust between members, staff and leadership, as well as with external stakeholders”.

It further criticised councillors for speaking in “community languages” in meetings. The inspectors admitted they had not witnessed this themselves, but agreed it would be inappropriate if true.

The inspectors also disapproved of the council’s slowness in removing Palestinian flags from lamp posts following the outbreak of the war on Gaza. 

It is on the basis of this report that, in November 2024, the new Labour government decided to appoint an envoy to oversee the council.

In the UK it is unusual for a local authority to be under constant scrutiny from central government in the way Tower Hamlets has been under Lutfur Rahman. The council is currently one of just eight local authorities, out of 317 in England, subject to Best Value statutory intervention. 

July 4 update: On July 2 The New Arab received an email from Andy Erlam, one of the petitioners. He wrote that "it is entirely false to claim that racism was a motivation in bringing the successful election petition in Tower Hamlets in 2014/15. [...] The petition was brought in defence of democracy."

Erlam explained: "We had strong support from members of the Bangladeshi community, who supplied us with key information at some considerable risk to themselves. Some British-Bangladeshi residents received death threats."

With regards to the petitioners, he said that they "came together despite different political views united in rooting out corruption when the authorities failed to do so".

Specifically, Erlam praised Angela Moffat for her "enormous integrity and courage, even though her family and her children were targeted and threatened". 

Fact-checking and copyediting:

TNA Investigative Journalist/Researcher Jonathan Cole 

Editing and supervision: 

TNA Investigative Editor Andrea Glioti

For questions, comments and complaints please email Andrea Glioti andrea.glioti@newarab.com or Jonathan Cole jonathan.cole@newarab.com.

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