The town hall dictator taking over near you Unlike a normal local authority, where the leader has to retain the confidence of councillors, and can be removed by them, a mayor cannot be sacked, except by the voters every four years. Whereas power is normally shared between councillors of the ruling party, a mayor is an elected dictator, with control over finances, policy and senior appointments. Councillors remain, but their only real power is to vote down the mayor's budget once a year, for which they need a two-thirds majority. The Government says mayors boost local democracy, give councils a face, attract better candidates and create a more powerful voice to lobby investors and Whitehall. But, especially in smaller places, the mayoral system can allow commercial, sectarian or even criminal interests, if they are sufficiently well-organised, to hijack government. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, a man closely linked to a Muslim extremist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), was elected mayor with the votes of just 13 per cent of the electorate. Because only a quarter of the population turned out to vote, Mr Rahman needed just 23,000 votes to win. Twelve months before his election, undercover reporters for The Sunday Telegraph and Channel 4's Dispatches filmed an IFE activist, Abu Talha, discussing its plans. The mayor is going to have a lot more control. That's why we need to get someone, one of our brothers, in there. Which we will do," he said. The IFE, which believes in turning Britain into an Islamic state under sharia law, used a law stating that if more than 5 per cent of the local electorate petitions for a referendum on having an elected mayor, a vote has to be granted. Another IFE activist, Abjol Miah, also a councillor for George Galloway's Respect party, organised the petition with a local businessman, Shiraj Haque. More than 99 per cent of the signatures on the petition were Asian, in a borough which is only a third Asian. Council officers found that almost half were "invalid," with entire pages of names and addresses written in the same handwriting and around 5,000 not appearing on the electoral register. Nonetheless, enough of the signatures were ruled valid. The referendum was granted and passed after an intensive campaign involving the IFE and funded by Mr Haque. Mr Rahman's campaign coordinator, Badrul Islam, who later fell out with him, said that during both campaigns "most of the campaigners were either Respect or IFE activists." Since his election 18 months ago, Mr Rahman has sought to "Islamicise" Tower Hamlets, clamping down on strip clubs and a gay pub, and using his extensive powers to attempt to make his position impregnable. He has channelled large sums of public money to IFE front organisations, appointed key IFE activists to council posts and rewarded his backer, Mr Haque, by making him chairman of a council-sponsored festival. Mr Rahman has also launched what can only be described as a cult of personality, with his face plastered over council dustcarts, lampposts, stationery and a weekly newspaper which is delivered to every house. His advisers are paid up to £1,000 a day, his office has doubled in size and he has acquired a Mercedes and chauffeur at taxpayers' expense. Tower Hamlets councillors can do nothing but look on. The IFE was also involved in Mr Galloway's recent by-election triumph in Bradford, one of the 10 cities holding mayoral referendums next Thursday. Abjol Miah spoke at a by-election rally. Bradford is in less danger of a takeover than Tower Hamlets - the council is more than twice the size, including large suburban and rural areas, and has 550,000 people. But several of the referendum cities - including Coventry, Wakefield, Nottingham and even Newcastle - have populations of only around 300,000, not much more than Tower Hamlets or Salford (Newcastle and Nottingham councils cover only a relatively small part of their wider conurbations.) Islamic extremism may not be a danger in any of these places, but low turnouts, coupled with the anti-politics mood, could put bad guys in charge. Doncaster (population 290,000) already has an elected mayor - a member of a fringe nationalist party called the English Democrats. This caused such friction that it, too, will hold a mayoralty referendum next Thursday - to decide whether the post should be abolished. In London, a place of seven million with no democratic citywide body before, the mayoralty has worked. There have been real, if relatively small, improvements to life in the capital. In other really big cities, like Leeds and Manchester, it might work, too. But elsewhere, the change simply isn't worth the risk. In the 13 other places where they've already been tried, elected mayors have been democratic flops and no one inspiring has emerged. In Salford, the main alternative to Paul Massey is Labour's Iain Stewart, a former backbench MP, whose campaign pledges, in full, are to "work hard and listen to your views," "put the residents of Salford first," "bring regeneration and jobs into our city," "demand a better deal" from government and "ensure that Salford provides efficient, value-for-money services." These utterly empty "policies" tell you everything about how little elected mayors are improving the political landscape.