Newham 65

Guest post by Josephine Grahl What should Labour supporters and politicians in Newham learn from the May 2022 local election results?  Following conversations with members, candidates and activists from across the Labour Party, I’ve tried to summarise some of the key takeaways. (Of course, despite helpful input from many across the party, the conclusions are […]

In recent weeks there has been an astonishing fluctuation in the fortunes of progressive politics in France. After years of disunity and splits, a green-left unity emerged following a disastrous Presidential election. This unity, around an electoral label roughly translated as the ‘New Popular Social and Ecological Union’, has resulted in gains for its constituent […]

Newham65 previously reported that the Green Party councillors had been allocated two (2!) places on the licensing committee while there was no room for them anywhere else except an inevitable place on Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee. A damage limitations exercise must have been undertaken as a late supplementary paper to yesterday’s Council meeting revised […]

The arguments in favour of the Silvertown Tunnel are hopeless and can be quickly refuted. Due to lack of competition, it is fairly easy to identify the slightly more convincing point amongst the arguments advanced. The challenge we all have to address is that heavy goods vehicles with a height of more than four metres […]

Further to Josephine Grahl’s piece yesterday, it appears the Green Group have been excluded from most of Newham Council’s committees. In papers published for the Council’s annual meeting, the Green Group have been allocated no places on any planning committee (there is space for 21 members across two committees), and have been kept off the […]

Guest post by Josephine Grahl Newham Labour are still reverberating from the shock of losing two seats to the Green Party – as reported on the New Statesman website. Successful Green candidate Nate Higgins makes it clear that their victory was primarily down to straightforward hard work:“An undertold story is the electoral professionalism that’s grown […]

UPDATED Newham’s opposition, the Green Councillors for Stratford Olympic Park, have written to the Council’s monitoring officer about the Mayor’s party political tweet – about their ward – being retweeted by the Council yesterday. The letter asks many of the right questions regarding the council’s apparent promotion of a political party. They are also on […]

UPDATED It isn’t unusual to see the official communications channels of Newham Council promoting photos of the Mayor of Newham. This weekend Rokhsana Fiaz tweeted photographs of herself wearing a Labour Party rosette, distributing Labour Party leaflets about herself in Stratford Olympic Park. But why is the presumably politically neutral Newham Council twitter account retweeting […]

The Mayor of Newham has announced her new cabinet today. Terry Paul and James Beckles had already announced they were leaving the cabinet. Other cabinet members have been shifted around and titles have changed. James Asser becomes Deputy Mayor. Adult Skills seems to have moved into the education portfolio, after a term of the Mayor […]

Guest post by Josephine Grahl One of the notable outcomes from last Thursday’s local election was the disparity between the council results and the mayoral result in terms of vote share. Rokhsana Fiaz polled 56.2% of first-preference votes in the mayoral election – enough to get her comfortably over the line in the first round, […]