A New Official Opposition Party????

We learn that Mayor Fiaz is endeavouring to have three miscreants suspended from the Labour Group. You will recall that Cllrs Kamali, Chadha and Masters all abstained on a vote against a Green motion.

Now that Labour conference is over, she and Chief Whip Anamul Islam can get down to sorting out business at home. High on the list is who to suspend. Here are our predictions. 

Fiaz will seek to prop up her failing authority over the group by suspending Kamali, Chadha and Masters.

Labour didn’t need their votes to defeat the Green motion, but it was an embarrassment that they didn’t follow the party line. It is not unexpected that the Whip will seek to discipline those who fail to follow the whip, at least when this is done without prior discussion, say over matters of conscience or matters that affect the councillor’s ward.

If they are suspended, then they will join another former Labour councillor, Belgica Guana who was unwise enough to share her antisemitism publicly. This will bring the number of ex-Labour councillors up to four.

And then there is Cllr Lewis Godfrey. Our prediction is that Godfrey will shortly lose the Labour Whip, effectively suspending him from the Group.

This will make the ex-Labour group the largest on the council! The likelihood of this group forming a single block must be remote, but the idea that suspended Labour councillors might be a larger group than any of the opposition parties is a source of wry amusement.

We would imagine that they’ll keep their noses clean, so to speak, for six months and quietly be readmitted sometime in 2025. However, it is not impossible that their suspension might trigger further defections to one of the opposition parties.

The Greens can only manage three councillors. Cllrs Higgins and Keeling were both elected to the new ward of Stratford Olympic Park. They, of course, were joined later by Cllr Areeq Chowdhury who defected from Labour, ostensibly over Palestine. He is not the first religiously Green to join the political Greens.

And Newham Independents got off to a good start, winning two byelections and gaining one by way of defection. They suffered a setback in July when Labour took all of the seats in the by-elections.

So here is our prediction, (and all Fiaz and Islam have to do to prove us wrong, is not suspend Kamali, Chadha and Masters). 

By the end of the year Labour will have suspended or expelled five councillors.

Two Labour councillors will have defected to another party.

Six have resigned.

That will constitute a turnover of 20% in one term of office, and there’s still over 18 months to go.