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Four years ago, during her campaign to become the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, Rushanara Ali began to hear a line of her biography that she didn’t recognise. From somewhere, the story emerged that Ali had “illegitimate” children. She read about it in the comments section of a Muslim website and sensed that it had spread in the half of Tower Hamlets she was running to represent. “Bastard children” was the pejorative of choice.

As it happens, Ali didn’t have children, but the story was hurtful and may have damaged her at the ballot box. “It seemed to say ‘she’s not respectable because she’s not married and she’s got kids’,” says someone who observed the bitterly fought election. Other comments described her as a “sinner” who lacked “ethics or morals or manners”.

“The way these things are done is by word of mouth on the doorstep, in the community centres and by a small minority of political activists,” Ali told the Standard. She has been very careful about commenting on the issue and speaks about it only rarely. “In the past it used to happen with Respect party supporters, and this is a more elaborate version of it.” Respect did not answer the Standard’s invitation to comment.

Ali, who was born in Bangladesh and has lived in east London since she was seven, won that poll with a healthy majority, becoming the first person of Bangladeshi origin to take a Commons seat, and is now a shadow minister for education. At the time the hurtful allegations made against her were regarded as personal slurs. Local blogger and journalist Ted Jeory wrote: “There can be no other MP who has to deal with the kind of vile personal abuse and smears that she does just because she is a thoughtful and secular Muslim woman.”

But the recent elections in Tower Hamlets brought memories of 2010 back to mind and put the borough’s eccentric political culture under the microscope again. And above the council’s various controversies hangs the uncomfortable question of why so many people who venture into politics in this key borough — located on the edge of London’s finance and technology industries and with a sharply divided population, a third of whom are Bangladeshi — end up with tarnished names and trashed reputations.

May’s mayoral and council polls in the borough are now marred in numerous allegations of fraud and electoral misconduct, which have seen two arrests and further investigations from the police and the Electoral Commission. In addition, a court petition is formally challenging the result. Last week a report from the Electoral Commission criticised the council’s handling of the vote, recommending that all election officials and agents should speak English in future to prevent suspicion of wrongdoing.

But among the detritus of the most controversial and poisonous British election for many years there exists the fear that the modern tradition of aggressive smearing in the borough is rearing its ugly head again. In recent years local politicians — some of, though not only, those standing against the controversially re-elected mayor Lutfur Rahman and his allies — have found themselves labelled as wife-beaters, paedophiles and, most problematically of all for community relations when the General Election is less than a year away, racists.

The latest person tarred with that brush has been Rahman’s Labour opponent for the mayoralty, John Biggs, who finished a few thousand votes short of beating the incumbent. After he told the BBC that “all of the mayor’s [Rahman’s] Cabinet are Bangladeshi and his primary policy focus has been the concerns of one community”, Rahman’s campaign manager, Cllr Alibor Choudhury, reported Biggs to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for “racially charged comments” which he said represented a “clear appeal to racial prejudice”. On Facebook, Choudhury referred to Biggs as “John Bigot”.

Biggs told the Standard he thinks the notion was spread that he is racist among the borough’s Bangladeshi community.

“I’ve had youngsters come up to me in the street saying: ‘But you’re a racist, why should we vote for you?’ So there was an irresponsible tactic, I think on the part of people close to the mayor’s administration. Irresponsible in the sense that we’ve spent years together building good community relations, only for them to label someone in order to try to get an advantage. I think that is cynical and unpleasant — it’s personally upsetting, though you get over it. And it’s in no way conducive to good community relations. That is a small part of a campaign that has been very effective at polarising opinion in the East End.”

A spokesperson for Rahman’s party Tower Hamlets First told the Standard: “There is no culture of smear in Tower Hamlets politics, just the usual exchange between passionate local politicians. Mr Biggs’s comments were made at a time when the English Defence League was planning to march through Tower Hamlets.”

The party sent the Standard a long list of alleged smears against them, including quotes from a Labour councillor who said Tower Hamlets “needs clean politics and clean streets”, adding: “With the current mayor and his friends, it has neither.”

But according to a long-time Tower Hamlets veteran who is no longer involved, the tone of the borough’s politics has been markedly unpleasant for more than a decade.

“It was really after the invasion of Iraq and the emergence of the Respect party that it got bad, with a truly awful campaign against Oona King,” he says. “I think the only equivalent I have seen is Liverpool in the Eighties.”

Examples aren’t difficult to find.

During a comically rowdy council debate in March, a video of which exists online, Choudhury pointed to a Labour councillor who was wearing a black cardigan in private mourning for her ex-husband whom she had just buried, and said: “Oswald Mosley had the black shirts in the Thirties; John Biggs has the black cardigans.” The slur caused shock in the chamber and led to Choudhury admitting that he was “mortified” by the statement. Not all of those caught in the Tower Hamlets slurring game have achieved such retractions.

Labour’s former mayoral candidate Helal Abbas was branded a “wife-beating candidate” and a “racist” in a mysterious advertisement in a “special issue” of the London Bangla newspaper during the last election. The newspaper, which refused to reveal who had funded the ad, backed Lutfur Rahman. A Tower Hamlets spokesman maintained the party’s stance that “this has nothing to do with Tower Hamlets First”. It is worth noting that at the time of the ad, Abbas had accused Rahman of being “infiltrated” and “brainwashed” by religious extremists.

Labour councillor Joshua Peck says he forced a local Bengali newspaper to retract an article alleging that he was racist, and says he thinks it has been damaging to his work.

“At the last election four years ago I received several hundred fewer votes in my ward than the other Labour councillor who I sit alongside, and the only reason I can see for that is this suggestion,” he told the Standard. “It is both a personal insult and very politically damaging. Unfortunately you become used to it in Tower Hamlets.”

Peck says he’s experienced very personal slurs from people associated with a mainstream party too, whom he thinks told voters on the doorstep “that I was Jewish and I was trying to shut down mosques”.

Michael Keith, a veteran politician in the East End for 20 years and at various times leader of the council in Tower Hamlets, who now holds a chair at the University of Oxford, was the victim of a very serious and personal slur which he declined to repeat to the Standard on the record this week, or to suggest where he thinks it came from, for fear of resurrecting it.

Biggs says the re-emergence of a generalised culture of unpleasant smearing could prove to be a major setback for an area that has made good strides in its relations recently.

“I feel extraordinarily sad about that,” he says. “I think Lutfur Rahman is at risk of having led a campaign that has re-energised the polarisation of our community. And it requires good-spirited persons like myself and ideally him — but I think not — to work hard to bring people back together again.

“There are people in his party who in my view should be ashamed of the politics that they have engendered and fought for, and in particular they should be ashamed of the views they have encouraged to be held among young people, which are a very poor piece of leadership for the future.

“I am very concerned about the culture of smearing,” says Ali. “What happened recently is very worrying. It can be poisonous, often a slur or outright lies about someone’s character or personal life. They play into a set of assumed prejudices and fears and then spread those fears and prejudices. It gives a bad name to the area.”