1825 Hrs GMT
London
Thursday
15 July 2010
Editor © Muhammad Haque
The No to a directly elected mayor in Tower Hamlets principle is VINDICATED again. Here we relay some 'news' from external sites
[To be continued]
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From
The London GUARDIAN web site at 1820 Hrs GMT Thursday 15 July 2010
QUOTE:
Tower Hamlets: Labour's mayoral selection re-run rumbles
[some plugger bits left out]
Until 6:21 on Monday evening it all appeared straightforward: this Saturday Labour Party members in Tower Hamlets would choose from a shortlist of three contenders to be their candidate to become the borough's first executive mayor; those contenders were Councillor Shiria Khatun, former Council leader and now London Assembly Member John Biggs and Councillor Sirajul Islam; I'd already carried an interview with Biggs and had one with Islam lined up for launch at around half past seven. Then an email arrived from the London Labour Party:
Following a complaint regarding the procedure to select Labour's candidate in this autumn's elections for the first directly elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets, the Labour Party's National Executive Committee has this evening agreed to re-run the shortlisting process.
The complaint has been looked at carefully. While the Labour Party does not accept that it has any substance, to ensure transparency and fairness to all potential candidates, all long-listed candidates will be re-interviewed by a different panel to be appointed by the NEC. A new time-table will be announced in the coming days.
Here's a statement of the very obvious: this borough's politics are never straightforward. The "complaint" was made by Councillor Lutfur Rahman, who'd been the leader of the Council until after the 6 May borough elections when the majority Labour group replaced him with Councillor Helal Abbas. Both Abbas and Rahman were interviewed by the mayoral shortlisting panel but failed to progress. Abbas appears to have accepted his understandable disappointment, but Rahman mounted a legal challenge.
I don't know the precise details, but there had been rumblings about one member of the four-person interview panel being Len Duvall, who is the London party's chair. He is also, of course, the leader of the London Assembly's Labour group and therefore a close colleague of Biggs, who is the group's deputy leader and whip. Whatever, as you might have deduced from its statement, the London party's view was that fighting the legal challenge would be more trouble - and expense - than it was worth. Hence, a completely new panel has been assembled and has invited all those interviewed the first time round to have another go.
The decision to re-run the process has been hailed in some quarters as a popular triumph over corruption and racism, though others attribute it to Rahman having some wealthy and powerful local friends. Biggs expressed his feelings about the re-run in an email to party colleagues, subsequently published by local resident and journalist Ted Jeory. The original contained the following sentence:
I am disappointed that, as appears to be the case, a person or group of people with access to enough money to threaten the Party with legal action it cannot afford if they do not get their way, can hold the party to ransom.
This was omitted from a subsequent version (Biggs says the first one was sent out in error). I don't yet know how Councillors Islam and Khatun feel about the re-run, but I'm guessing that neither is overjoyed. I'm also assuming that both will accept to invitation to the shortlisting re-run*. Health service manager Rosna Mortuza and Helal Abbas have both told me that they'll be making their cases again and I'm told that - surprise, surprise - Lutfur Rahman will too.
I'm bound to say I hope Sirajul Islam is again put on the shortlist - it's a shame to see an interesting interview go to waste.
*Update, 12:10. Shiria Khatun has called to confirm that she'll be attending Saturday's shortlisting interviews.
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Dave Hill's London blog
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Thursday 15 July 2010
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Boris Johnson: the women behind his Olympian erection
My favourite bit of the Mirror's "Bonking Boris" story today is where it says "there is no suggestion of an affair". And there isn't, of course. No indeed. The bit that most intrigued me - will you please stop that sniggering? - was this:
The London Mayor's friendship with Helen [McIntyre] intensified when he gave her an unpaid job as a fundraiser for an iconic attraction in the Olympic Park. Helen later convinced [her then partner] Canadian Pierre [Rolin] to donate £80,000 to the Greater London Authority to study the attraction's design - which turned out to be the £20million, 400ft ArcelorMittal Orbit tower.
As Adam Bienkov points out, there has been no formal or public announcement by City Hall that Helen McIntyre had been given her unpaid role. Doesn't transparency - something Boris campaigned on profitably in 2008 - demand that there should have been?
The Mayor's spokesperson thinks not. He confirmed that McIntryre had indeed been appointed last May as a "fund-raising champion" for the Olympic Park attraction and had been given a letter to prove it. Another bearer of such a letter is art collector and Kentish Town gallery-owner Anita Zabludowicz. The letter explains that the role of such champions is to approach potential private donors and to solicit funding commitments. "It's really a sort of letter of introduction," I was told.
It was further explained that this type of arrangement was admirably of a piece with the Mayor's enthusiasm for private philanthropy and his related commitment to saving taxpayers' cash. Moreover, any demands that fund-raising champions and suchlike ought to be appointed by way of formal processes open to public scrutiny were, the spokesperson thought, only likely to be made by individuals of an anally retentive nature. I'd like to offer an opinion about that, but have suddenly become too inhibited.
6 comments
Posted by Dave Hill 13.57 BST
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Tower Hamlets: Labour's mayoral selection re-run rumbles
Until 6:21 on Monday evening it all appeared straightforward: this Saturday Labour Party members in Tower Hamlets would choose from a shortlist of three contenders to be their candidate to become the borough's first executive mayor; those contenders were Councillor Shiria Khatun, former Council leader and now London Assembly Member John Biggs and Councillor Sirajul Islam; I'd already carried an interview with Biggs and had one with Islam lined up for launch at around half past seven. Then an email arrived from the London Labour Party:
Following a complaint regarding the procedure to select Labour's candidate in this autumn's elections for the first directly elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets, the Labour Party's National Executive Committee has this evening agreed to re-run the shortlisting process.
The complaint has been looked at carefully. While the Labour Party does not accept that it has any substance, to ensure transparency and fairness to all potential candidates, all long-listed candidates will be re-interviewed by a different panel to be appointed by the NEC. A new time-table will be announced in the coming days.
Here's a statement of the very obvious: this borough's politics are never straightforward. Continue reading...
8 comments
Posted by Dave Hill 11.23 BST
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Wednesday 14 July 2010
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Boris Johnson: the politics of spending cuts
Not for the first time in recent months Boris Johnson today protested his determination that London should be spared the cruellest of the new government's spending cuts. Also not for the first time the City Hall debating chamber was the platform for a delicate piece of political self-positioning by a Conservative Mayor who knows that the greatest danger to his remaining in his post after the next London elections in May 2012 are his fellow Conservatives upriver in Westminster. Continue reading...
3 comments
Posted by Dave Hill 15.40 BST
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Tuesday 13 July 2010
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2102 Olympics: will East Londoners be winners?
I'll enjoy the running and jumping but if the answer becomes a "no" then for me the Games will have failed. Judging progress towards those fine regeneration goals is no piece of cake, thanks largely to the plethora - sometimes it seems like a dog's dinner - of bodies, agencies, departments, companies and committees involved in the giant enterprise. Stuart Watson at Regeneration and Renewal has done a heroic job in sorting out the many different strands. He writes:
London 2012 has been billed as the regeneration Games. Since it was awarded the Olympics five years ago, bold, albeit often vague, promises have been made about how the Games will transform the lives of east Londoners. The focus on legacy makes it all the more surprising that it has taken so long for any concrete plans to emerge about the transformation envisaged to follow the Olympics and how it will be delivered. But over the past year there has been some significant progress.
Read the whole piece. It mentions a document drawn up by the five Olympic boroughs called the Strategic Regeneration Framework, which you can find here. Concerns about regeneration progress will, time permitting, be aired at Mayor's Question Time tomorrow by Conservative AM Andrew Boff. He has a question about the cost of building the Olympic stadium and also this one:
Will you review the plans for social apartheid on the Olympic Village post-2012?
Hey, get off the fence.
6 comments
Posted by Dave Hill 17.02 BST
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Ken Livingstone in the Evening Standard: an error and an odd omission
The Standard's editor Geordie Greig has been to see the former Mayor and met his snakes, a further indication that the days of the nasty old Evening Boris are gone. Greig's achievement in salvaging the paper after its ruinous Daily Mail period has been recognised in his inclusion in the MediaGuardian100 though I'll bet not all the panellists approved. You can read more about other recent activities of the one I have in mind - go to the bottom of the list - here, here and in lots of places here. Continue reading...
1 comment
Posted by Dave Hill 14.11 BST
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BBC follows right's agenda in London
For the second day in a row BBC coverage of stories in London has got up my nose. Yesterday, BBC Radio London "followed up" the Mail on Sunday's shock-horror front page treatment of a freakish and utterly untypical Central London housing benefit situation. In so doing it endorsed the agenda of the right, the government included, which is to distort the debate about London's housing crisis into an ugly row about "spongers", when it should be focusing on the lunacy of a system that too many landlords exploit and the chronic shortage of homes ordinary people can afford to live in - a shortage the present government seems unlikely to end. Continue reading...
16 comments
Posted by Dave Hill 13.17 BST
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Monday 12 July 2010
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Rachel Johnson: she agrees with Ken
As George Osborne's friends in media assist him in his noble work of shrieking about extreme examples of housing benefit payments to help justify his plan to cut the incomes of tens of thousands of low paid Londoners and pensioners and hold them responsible for crazy private sector rents rather than the landlords who charge them, it's good to know that not everyone in the smarter sectors of London society is persuaded by this poisonous exercise in victim-blaming. Continue reading...
14 comments
Thursday, 15 July 2010
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