The lion lies down with the lamb, owls hoot at noon, up is down – and left is right.
Observers of Newham’s political scene may have noticed some strange shifting of alliances over the last few years, but perhaps none stranger than the recent amity between the left-wingers now departing the Labour party in a flurry of online resignation letters, and the last men standing (yes, they are all men) from Sir Robin Wales’s cabinet.
This improbable friendship had its genesis in the infamous ‘dirty thirty’ letter, when a number of councillors wrote an open letter to the Newham Recorder to express dismay at the mayor’s plans to address the borough’s terrible air quality with an emissions-based scale of charges for resident parking. The letter was widely celebrated by most of Mayor Fiaz’s political antagonists, who felt that in the face of the worst air quality in London, the policy of Newham Council should be to… continue providing free car parking to every resident, a policy not offered by any other borough in inner London.
Newham’s Twitterati will have cleaned their glasses and wiped their screens when the resignation of the Labour whip by Cllr Quintin Peppiatt (East Ham South) prompted admiring remarks about his integrity and principles from anonymous accounts Newham Resists and Newham Socialist Labour. As lead member for education under Robin Wales, Cllr Peppiatt oversaw and encouraged the academisation of many of Newham’s schools as part of Wales’s ‘resilience’ programme – something the tweeters behind both Newham Resists and Newham Socialist Labour claim complete opposition towards .
Cllr Patrick Murphy (Royal Docks) beat Cllr Peppiatt to the punch, resigning the Labour whip the day after Fiaz’s reselection was announced and claiming that the Labour party had “ignored” or “condoned” unspecified criticisms of her leadership. Long-standing readers of this blog will remember Cllr Murphy’s role as the Procedures Secretary who oversaw the ill-fated first trigger ballot for Newham Labour’s Mayoral candidate selection in 2016 – in which he saw no conflict of interest with his position as a ‘community lead councillor’, appointed at Sir Robin’s pleasure and with a special responsibility allowance of over £6,000 a year.
Despite their closeness to the mayor knighted by Tony Blair, Cllrs Murphy and Peppiatt found an unlikely champion in left-wing scandal-blog Skwawkbox, which expressed outrage that Cllrs Murphy and Peppiatt were not able to resign the Labour whip without also having their Labour party membership withdrawn. Clearly, Skwawkbox has more confidence in Cllr Murphy’s ability correctly to interpret the Labour rulebook than most party members in Newham would share.
Meanwhile, Open Newham, a recent local addition to the scandal-blogging scene, has taken a break from nudge-nudge, wink-wink Islamophobia and personal attacks on the borough’s women of colour to express their solidarity with that persistent irritant of the Fiaz administration, Mehmood Mirza. The site, of which the only named contributor is former Wales ally Clive Furness, has experienced a change of heart towards Mirza, taking up his case after he was blocked by Newham Council on Twitter following a years-long campaign of obsessively replying to every post by the Council with a stream of photos of fly-tipping sites. “You don’t have to like his politics,” Open Newham coyly opens “to know that Mehmood Mirza has been the most consistent and energetic campaigner against fly-tipping and rubbish in the borough”. How touching to see them offer support to a man whom, three years ago, they were not-so-implicitly accusing of antisemitism.
Chairs of West Ham and East Ham CLPs, Carel Buxton and Tahir Mirza, plus a couple of branch chairs, recently resigned from the Labour party announcing their intention to stand candidates again Labour in the local government elections in May, under the flag of ‘Newham Socialist Labour’.
Are the last of Sir Robin’s lieutenants intending to stand – or fall – with them?
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