Tower Hamlets offers a grim vision of future Britain
Tower Hamlets offers a grim vision of future Britain
Camilla TomineySat, May 16, 2026 at 6:00 AM UTC
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A photograph of the borough’s newly elected council has reignited debate
Tower Hamlets has become a glimpse of a future Britain many politicians still refuse to discuss honestly.
A viral photograph of the borough’s newly elected council has reignited debate about one of the fastest demographic transformations anywhere in the country. Tower Hamlets was once 80 per cent white British. The percentage of the population who identified as White British decreased by 8.3 percentage points between 2011 and 2021. It is today a borough where more than 30 of the 45 councillors are of Bangladeshi descent and Islam is the dominant religion. Around a quarter of today’s population is white.
Predictably, much of the outrage has focused on identity politics and the controversial figure at the centre of it all: mayor Lutfur Rahman.
Rahman’s political career has long been shadowed by scandal. He was removed as Labour’s candidate in 2010 and later found guilty of corrupt and illegal electoral practices in 2015. He was sacked, banned from standing again for five years and struck off as a solicitor.
Yet today he is more powerful than ever.
His Aspire Party continues to dominate the council after making sweeping local election gains, while Labour has been reduced to one solitary seat. Critics issue stark warnings of “Islamification” but they are arguably missing the bigger story.
Lutfur Rahman, the former mayor of Tower Hamlets in east London, was removed from office in 2015 - Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images
The real issue in Tower Hamlets is not sectarianism, although it doubtlessly exists. It is property development.
Rahman styles himself as a champion of the working class, yet his administration increasingly resembles a luxury property marketing agency with a council attached.
This was laid bare at this year’s MIPIM conference in Cannes – known as the Davos of global real estate – where Tower Hamlets pitched itself to international investors. Declaring the borough “open for business”, the council’s glossy “Future Places” report, unveiled at the event, barely disguises its seeming priorities. The aim is to attract as much capital as possible to build luxury developments. So far, so bold and ambitious – yet despite the council’s professed socialist tendencies, residents appear to have become a secondary concern.
Naturally, the report pays lip service to affordable housing. But its tone is unmistakably investor-first. And while ministers and councillors boast about housing targets, the latest figures tell a rather different story.
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Rahman promised 4,000 social homes when he took power in 2022. While Tower Hamlets has the highest number of Greater London Authority-funded completions since 2018 of any borough (5,966), these are delivered by City Hall, not Rahman’s council. Only a tiny number of Tower Hamlets council homes (158) have been built. In the same time, the neighbouring borough of Newham built 839 council homes.
Tower Hamlets has even demolished social-rented homes in order to build homes for sale. This is clearly seen in the demolition of the Teviot Estate in Poplar. There, a whole estate is being razed and replaced with more than 1,500 homes for sale and a few hundred affordable homes. In Stepney, three tower blocks are being demolished and replaced by a new development. A Freedom of Information request later showed that just over half of the new homes would be for sale, plus some for shared ownership.
The real issue in Tower Hamlets is not sectarianism, it is property development - Carl Court/Getty Images
Councils – not just Tower Hamlets – like private developments because they receive large sums of money from developers under Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy rules. This money is designated to be spent on infrastructure and improvements to the local area: often this is used to justify approval for the developments. Then the money is paid to the council, but the promised improvements may never come. Developers often offer bigger payments if requirements for social housing can be reduced.
Suffice it to say this is nowhere near good enough in a borough where nearly 29,000 people are languishing on the waiting list. Tower Hamlets is one of the youngest and most overcrowded places in Britain, with roughly 16,790 people packed into every square kilometre. Single adults struggle to access social housing at all: families are prioritised and yet crammed into subdivided flats.
The borough increasingly feels like a case study in Britain’s wider political contradiction: politicians elected on anti-establishment rhetoric governing in the interests of developers and consultants.
Yet none of this has dented Aspire’s popularity beyond a negligible slide in the party’s share of the vote.
Why? Because Tower Hamlets has become an emblem of identity politics in which traditional party loyalties have collapsed. Labour no longer speaks fluently to the borough it once dominated – indeed Sylheti (a dialect of Bengali) is certainly more widely spoken than “Starmerism”.
The Conservatives barely exist there. Likewise, the Lib Dems have just one seat. Rahman is part populist, part patriarch.
The viral council photograph matters because it symbolises something deeper: the fragmentation of a shared civic culture and the rise of religio-political regimes.
Tower Hamlets today is a warning about the danger of fiefdoms emerging from the ashes of demographic upheaval. And Britain should pay attention, not least with the publication this week of a report by the Henry Jackson Society, which reveals that a total of 574 sectarian-style candidates have been elected across 58 councils and two mayoralties.
After last Thursday, what’s happening in Tower Hamlets could come to a borough near you.
Source: “AOL Breaking”
