Why are sections of the right-wing media targeting Tower Hamlets to inflame community tensions and portray the borough as politically dysfunctional?
The Daily Telegraph, GB News, Camilla Tominey and the Rage-Bait Industrial Complex
In 1997, the British sociologist Arnold Hunt published his influential paper, “Moral Panic and Moral Language in the Media.” Hunt examined how journalists, academics and politicians deploy moral language in public debate, particularly as a mechanism for manufacturing outrage through constructed moral panics.
Hunt’s argument can be understood clearly through the conduct of newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph and media conglomerates such as Axel Springer SE. His central claim was that modern media institutions do not simply report moral anxieties; they actively construct, shape and legitimise them through editorial framing, selective emphasis and the amplification of social fears.
In the British context, the Daily Telegraph provides a striking example of how conservative newspapers oscillate between condemning “moral panic” and actively generating it. The paper frequently frames social and political developments within narratives of national decline, institutional collapse or cultural fragmentation. Isolated events are transformed into symbols of wider civilisational anxieties. Through repetition, commentary and editorial campaigns, specific local issues are elevated into moral dramas about threats to social order, tradition or British identity.
It is in this context that Camilla Tominey’s latest intervention should be understood.
The Daily Telegraph and the Politics of Race Over Class
On Saturday, 16 May, the Daily Telegraph published an opinion piece by its associate editor, Camilla Tominey, expressing outrage over a photograph released by the Aspire Party showing its victorious candidates. Tominey framed the image as evidence of “the fragmentation of a shared civic culture and the rise of religio-political regimes”.
The argument fundamentally misidentifies class politics as identity politics. Rather than examining the class composition of the candidates or the socio-economic structure of the borough, the article fixates on ethnicity and appearance. Yet, as argued previously, the demographic composition of Tower Hamlets means that parties seeking electoral success must select candidates rooted in the same communities and housing estates as the electorate itself.
When I was elected as a Labour councillor in 2018, I recall a conversation during the campaign with James King, then Labour’s candidate for neighbouring Limehouse ward. He remarked that our colleague Gabriela Salva was the first white Labour candidate in living memory to have been born and raised on a local council estate.
That observation matters because it reveals something deeper about class representation in Tower Hamlets. National parties such as the Labour Party possess the organisational infrastructure to parachute middle-class candidates into boroughs and compensate for their lack of local roots through money, staffing and national campaigning machinery. Local parties such as Aspire do not have that luxury. Their candidates emerge directly from the borough because they must.
What Tominey interprets as sectarianism is, in reality, a reflection of the borough’s working-class social composition.
Misidentifying Labour Neoliberalism as Aspire Politics
Tominey then pivots into a critique of neoliberal redevelopment and estate demolition, particularly regarding the regeneration of the Teviot Estate. Yet the irony is difficult to ignore: these policies were not created by Aspire. They were advanced under Labour administrations and by housing associations operating within a broader neoliberal model of urban redevelopment.
When I was elected as a Labour councillor in 2018, I was already aware of Poplar HARCA’s plans concerning Teviot. I subsequently requested a meeting with its then chief executive, Steve Stride, to make clear that the Burdett Estate in Mile End should not become part of a similar programme. I argued instead for investment in repairs and refurbishment, particularly to address severe damp and water ingress affecting many flats. Although delayed by COVID-19, those remedial works were eventually completed after I stepped down in 2022.
This followed earlier campaigns opposing the redevelopment of Chrisp Street Market, where campaigners warned that public housing stock was being systematically run down to justify demolition and redevelopment. The pattern is familiar across London: estates are neglected, residents decanted, and redevelopment schemes presented as inevitable. Public land is then leveraged for private gain, often resulting in a net loss of genuinely affordable housing.
This model of municipal asset stripping is hardly unique to Tower Hamlets. It has appeared repeatedly across Labour-run London boroughs and has been criticised by organisations such as the Institute of Race Relations and the Public Interest Law Centre.
The contradiction at the heart of Tominey’s article is therefore striking. Policies associated with Labour-led neoliberal urbanism are rhetorically reassigned to Aspire to sustain a broader narrative about ethnic politics and communal dysfunction.
The Decline of a British Institution and Eventual Foreign Ownership: The Daily Telegraph
My relationship with the Daily Telegraph goes back to when I was 13 years old. As a paperboy, I delivered the newspaper door-to-door before school each morning. At that time, the paper’s circulation approached one million readers.
Over the decades, however, the readership declined alongside broader changes in British journalism. Investigative reporting and serious political analysis increasingly gave way to outrage-driven commentary and culture-war provocation. The logic of digital media rewards emotional reaction over accuracy, nuance or intellectual seriousness.
It is therefore difficult to separate the Telegraph’s editorial direction from the wider economics of the modern attention economy — what might reasonably be described as the rage-bait industrial complex.
The paper’s current ownership structure also symbolises a broader transformation in British media: once-national institutions increasingly shaped by international capital, declining circulation and ideological polarisation.
It’s only fitting, given such a trajectory, that the German-based Axel Springer Group now owns the newspaper. Mr Springer, the founder of the Group, in the 1930s, did a stint as a member of the Nazi Party and as a member of one of its paramilitary groups, the National Socialist Motorist Corps. After the war, he, along with other members of the paramilitary group, was rehabilitated. Some became prominent West German politicians, with one even ending up as Chancellor of West Germany.
Tower Hamlets, Moral Panic and Historical Memory: No Passeran!
Manufactured outrage against migrant communities is not new. Throughout British history, moments of economic insecurity and political instability have often produced attempts to redirect public anger towards minorities and newcomers. Yet there has also existed another tradition: one grounded in tolerance, coexistence and solidarity.
On 1 May 1517, anti-immigrant riots erupted in London against Flemish weavers. Thomas More, then serving as Sheriff of London, confronted the rioters and condemned the violence. Decades later, the most English of bards, William Shakespeare, immortalised that speech in his play ‘Sir Thomas More’.
As the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street approaches, Tower Hamlets should remember that history carefully. The borough’s political culture has long been shaped not only by migration and diversity, but also by traditions of anti-fascism, trade unionism and working-class solidarity. Keeping out the ghosts of Axel Springer and his coterie from stalking our streets.
That history matters because moral panics do not emerge spontaneously. They are constructed, circulated and politically weaponised. When commentators reduce Tower Hamlets to caricature and communal spectacle, they are not engaging in serious political analysis. They are participating in a long-established tradition of media sensationalism that privileges division over understanding.
In the end, the current state of the Daily Telegraph arguably says more about the crisis of British journalism than it does about the politics of Tower Hamlets itself.
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