Hundreds of council tenants have kicked off the festive season in London’s multi-cultural East End by celebrating a faith that’s not their own.

The local authority’s housing wing, Tower Hamlets Homes, asked families on housing estates in Bethnal Green and Wapping to help organise parties to improve interfaith understanding.

Groups run by non-Muslims organised three Eid parties earlier this year, with residents from all backgrounds joining in.

Muslim groups returned the invitation this week with Christmas celebrations, when the Dorset Community Association in Wapping held a joint event with Bethnal Green’s Columbia Tenants’ Association.

Youth worker Angela Brown, who held the shindig in Wapping, said: “We had 200 children and their families joining Santa which made it a Christmas to remember.”

Tower Hamlets Homes put up the cash for the Christmas beano as part of its Regeneration programme aimed at bringing different East End neighbourhood and ethnic communities together.

East London Advertiser, 20 December 2012

Could this be the same London Borough of Tower Hamlets where, if you believe witchfinder general Andrew Gilligan, mayor Lutfur Rahman’s administration has been pursuing “the politics of racial separation”? The above report is of course from an entirely different Tower Hamlets – the one that exists in the real world rather than in Andrew Gilligan’s malignant imagination.