It has the highest rate of child poverty in the country and yet the average salary of those who work in the borough is £58,000, the second highest in the UK after the City of London.
This is a place where many kids sleep six to a room yet the borough has an economy worth more than £6bn a year, higher than places such as Malta or Monaco.
We were told by the Thatcherites of the 80s that wealth would trickle down. Tower Hamlets is proof positive that it doesn't.
If anything, it flows the other way. Have a walk around Bow and Whitechapel and Bethnal Green.
Then go to the great glass towers of Canary Wharf, still in the borough but in all other ways another world completely. No, wealth is sucked upwards, it doesn't trickle down.
Today in Tower Hamlets, rich men live 11 years longer than poor men. And cuts and austerity have a long way to run over the next few years.
But those who caused the economy to impale itself on its own greed remain protected from the consequences of their behaviour. Unfairness needs no deeper philosophy to explain it than this.
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