General Election 2015: Rushanara Ali's campaign to win Bethnal Green and Bow - and undo the work of Lutfur Rahman

Ali seems poised, in a post-Rahman Tower Hamlets, to heal the wounds that have left this community divided

Sitting in a Turkish café round the corner from Victoria Park, east London, Rushanara Ali – smart, truculent, with a newscaster’s steely glamour – is reluctant at first to give an opinion of the news that has rocked Tower Hamlets.

Labour’s candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow, the constituency she has represented as MP for the past five years, which makes up half of the borough that was run by Lutfur Rahman until he was found guilty of electoral fraud and removed as mayor this week, will offer only the blandest of sound-bites.

“The judgment has been made,” she says, just hours after the court ruling on Thursday. “The people want an elected representative to represent them with honesty and integrity. That’s all I have to say.”

But while she is out campaigning on the corner of Mowlem Street, with canvassing leaflets in her hand and a Labour rosette on her jacket, it’s an issue she cannot ignore. Constituents soon approach her and begin revealing their concerns about the controversial figure who has tarnished the area by, according to the Election Commissioner, playing the “race card” to achieve and consolidate his power.

---

Are you undecided about who to vote for on 7 May? Are you confused about what the parties stand for and what they are offering? Take this interactive quiz to help you decide who to vote for...

Click here to launch

---

“What do you think of the judgment today? asks an elderly man. “Is he a crook?” Then a British Bangladeshi man speaks to her in Sylheti about his worry that Bethnal Green’s Bangladeshis might be tarred with the same brush.

Ali says she understands why residents – across all communities – are so disappointed. “What’s really important to me is to make sure we provide reassurance to residents from all the different communities who feel badly let down,” she says.

But it’s also understandable why she wants to talk about other things. There are plenty of big issues this part of east London must handle besides a corrupt politician and his cabal, though the poisonous atmosphere he has left behind could make solving them that bit harder. There’s the acute housing shortage for one – 22,000 people are on the waiting list for social housing. There’s the urgent issue of child poverty – one of the highest in the country – and there’s youth unemployment.

And in a constituency where the Bangladeshi Muslim community – the very people cynically targeted by Rahman in his pursuit of votes – is more than a third of the population, there have been heightened fears of youngsters being groomed for radicalisation, after it emerged that three schoolgirls from the borough had travelled to Syria to join Isis.

“We need to think about and interrogate why this is happening, and keep an open mind to the reasons that lead to radicalisation,” she says. “There are young people who are groomed and exploited and turned into weapons of war... Parents need to be more guarded, teachers need to offer help and guidance, but this is uncharted territory and what I’m hearing from teachers is that they are left to their own devices. They need education and training.”

She adds: “There is confusion out there; I have had parents say to me ‘if I report my child, will I get arrested?’ After the incidences with the girls people were in shock. These issues came up in community meetings. There was a genuine desire to talk about it.”

Ali was seven when her family came to settle near Wapping, from Sylhet, in Bangladesh. Her father found work in the manufacturing trade while she and her five siblings attended the local Church of England school. “There was a very strong sense of neighbourliness and fair-play, but racism was also ever present throughout the Eighties. My parents were very protective and we were heavily supervised, even playing out, because of it. The far right would have protests on certain days. The BNP’s first councillor on the Isle of Dogs was elected when I was 17.”

Her school was 98 percent Asian – “a de facto segregation” – and she credits her teachers for helping her become the first of her family to go to Oxford University. She read PPE at St John’s College, Tony Blair’s alma mater, having already joined the Labour Party, aged 17.

She was elected MP in 2010, winning the seat back from George Galloway’s Respect Party, which “wasn’t easy”, she says – though she did it with a majority of almost 12,000 – making her one of only three Muslim women MPs.

When she sought selection in 2007, she said the community got right behind her, with elderly Muslim men being particularly supportive. “They are used to having women leaders in the subcontinent – there have been female prime ministers in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India’.”

Last September, she resigned, after four years, from the Labour frontbench education team to abstain from a motion allowing military action in Iraq. She doesn’t regret it, as she was “reflecting the concern that people felt” about further bloodshed.

But those who link foreign policy to the radicalisation of Muslim youths are just making excuses, she adds, when asked about any potential correlation. “There are legitimate areas of social concern with foreign policy that we can debate and discuss but I have no truck with those trying to justify acts of terrorism through foreign policy.”

Ali is evidently well-known and loved in Bethnal Green. As she walks up to the school gates on Mowlem Street, residents appear to be canvassing her rather than the other way around. A genial kind of mobbing occurs, with men of all ages bidding her salaam a laikkum, inviting her to meet their families and have a cup of tea. Women in hijab and niqab stop to speak in Sylheti and take a leaflet. Even the newer, gentrifying contingent of affluent, tech-savvy hipsters respond to her presence positively.

The challenge, she reflects, is to join up the gentrified end of the borough with the Bangladeshi, the white working-class and other more traditional communities.

Ali seems poised, in a post-Rahman Tower Hamlets, to heal the wounds that have left this community divided.