ABSTRACT
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is a favourite site for research on ethnic minorities because, in its Bengali Muslim population, it is home to an exceptionally concentrated ethnic minority group. The story of the East End Bengalis and the Labour Party is one of a liaison that has turned sour. And like in many more personal relationships, the forces that finally drove the parties apart are the same that first brought them together. Now, as in the past, the main force behind East End Bengali politics is a community-based pragmatism, and the emergence and subsequent evolution of this can be understood by looking at it in the context of wider developments in progressive politics. For the earliest immigrants, however, the focus of political activity, as of their lives more generally, was their East Bengali homeland, compounded in the period following World War II with immediate concerns over immigration.
