Site visit and residents meeting - 10 Victoria Street

Following a visit to residents homes with officers from Newham Council I spoke yesterday at a lively but constructive residents meeting in Stratford Library.

Lots of things to do to improve our service and offer. 

Many thanks to housing campaign Group  @FocusE15 for helping to organise and Chair the visit and meeting. 

"Newham Deselection Was A Sign Of Democratic Change – Not A Power Grab"

Very good article on LabourList by Newham resident Maya Goodfellow

"Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, a narrative has endured regardless of how well the party’s done at the ballot box or how many new membership cards are issued: he’s capturing the party and his supporters are slowly taking over branches and CLPs.

This makes it sound like a hostile and importantly undemocratic takeover. And pundits say, almost on autopilot, that it spells the end of the Labour party. When Labour’s general secretary Iain McNicol announced he would be standing down, one standard response was riven with this thinking; it was a sign the party “takeover” by Jeremy Corbyn was “almost total”. And when Labour members in East London chose Rokhsana Fiaz as their mayoral candidate over incumbent Robin Wales, one journalist described it as a “coup”. Flip the narrative on its head, and you might find another story altogether.

To understand exactly what I mean, take a closer look where I live, Newham – the site of an ongoing struggle for change. In May, this part of East London will choose who will be its next mayor. Though no position is guaranteed, Labour stand a good chance of winning because this borough, one of the country’s most diverse, is solidly red. Last time around, all sixty of its councillors and its mayor were Labour.

But choosing a mayoral candidate isn’t a straightforward affair. Instead of a process where anyone can run to be Labour’s contender, the party’s internal rule book dictates that there has to be a ballot deciding who can run: wards and affiliates vote on whether there should be an open selection or if the incumbent is automatically the candidate. At the end of 2016 Newham went through this process and, by a slim margin, an open selection was voted down – making Robin Wales, the current mayor who has effectively been in charge for over twenty years, the candidate once again.

All didn’t run smoothly. A group of Labour members got together to question the way the process was run; they claimed procedural rules were “breached” because they were applied differently to different affiliated organisations. Some trade unions with several branches had voted more than once while others with more than one branch believed they only had one vote, which potentially tipped the vote in Wales’ favour.

Opposed by Wales and brushed to one side by officials, up to 30 local party members fought to make their voices heard. After a sustained grassroots campaign and threatening to take the party to court, they were finally successful; the party decided to run another trigger ballot. This wasn’t a Labour party taken over undemocratically by the left, but local members launching sustained resistance for months to get basic democracy.

The rerun decided it: members wanted Wales to be challenged. And the outcome of the trigger ballot saw Rokhsana Fiaz – who promised, among other things, to have a referendum on the mayoral position itself – win with 63 per cent of the vote. It shouldn’t have taken so long to get to this point. Labour has long been, to some extent, a top-down machine. This only got worse in the Blair years, when power-hoarding and leader-led politics were the norm. Newham is a prime example of that; as the Focus E15 grassroots group has shown, Wales has operated a top-down hierarchical operation for years, which appeared to show little regard for some of the borough’s poorest residents.

This should bust the myth that deselection is always some shadowy, unfair process. Fiaz has not become Labour candidate through an undemocratic takeover – quite the opposite. In much the same way, it takes a catastrophic misreading of the past few years to see increased democratic engagement with Labour while it moves to the left as Corbyn surreptitiously taking over the party. Change that involves contestation doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of democracy.

Labour is the biggest left-wing party in Europe. Its members and supporters are not just there to deliver the party’s message on the doorstep or turnout to vote every five years; they are people who can shape those messages and the party itself. After decades of managerial politics being parroted as the only pragmatic way to win elections, the last election showed creating more space for bottom-up politics is both a matter of justice and expediency. What’s happened in Newham is a sign that focussing on the changes in Labour as a Corbyn power grab is not only incorrect, it ignores an interesting, productive struggle over change that’s taking place at the party’s grassroots".

Focus 15, Occupation and the Carpenters Estate

It was good to read on Friday that Newham had managed to let out some of the long term void properties on the Carpenter Estate to homeless residents.

I had received a large number of complaints by ward constituents and many other people about the way that the Council had dealt with the occupation by Focus 15 mothers and their supporters of 4 flats on the Estate.

At the Full Council meeting on 29 September, Cllr Rokhsana Fiaz OBE and I raised emergency formal questions to the Mayor, Sir Robin Wales.  After the meeting there had been unacceptable violent and aggressive scenes outside East Ham Town hall by some supporters of the occupation.

Later that week on the way home from work, I went to visit the occupation with my fellow West Ham ward Cllr, John Whitworth. A number of Newham Councillors had visited the site.  Relatives of Councillors and local Labour Party members were also assisting the occupation.

John and I spoke to Focus 15 Mums and supporters in what turned out to be a 30 minutes long outdoor discussion on the future of affordable housing in London (and elsewhere).  This debate was at times passionate and pretty lively but generally polite and constructive.

My basic argument was that it had been accepted that Newham Council had not always acted properly with the Focus 15 Mums (the Mayor has apologised) the problem of affordable housing is a wider political issue. To make housing affordable in a high rent area such as London someone has to subsidise the cost. In the past the State used to accept responsibly for ensuring that its people had access to safe, secure and (truly) affordable homes. Even the Tories in the 1950s used to compete with Labour on who could build the most homes each year on a social rent (50% of market rent).

Councils and Housing Associations can always manage their stock and developments better but until the State puts its hand in its pockets and takes its responsibly to people seriously again then we will not solve the housing crisis in this Country. Instead of wasting money on housing benefit we should be investing this in homes but this will not be enough. Subsidy requires money....lots of money. This is a political truth that we will all have to grapple with.

Unfortunately John and I were not able to actually visit the block since by the time our discussion was over the campaigners were holding an urgent meeting to discuss legal issues regarding the pending court case by the Council to recover the properties.