It has been an open secret that the person behind this website is erstwhile councillor, Clive Furness. Over the past 24 months, he has been collaborating with the former mayor, Robin Wales on a separate project.

The fruits of their labours is the book, Left, Right, Wrong.

Talk is Cheap.

We must give a hat-tip towards Newham65 for this item.

They have discovered that the mayor’s commitment towards building new council homes is a bit fragile.

Labour now knows what opposition it faces in the two byelections, (full details below).

Boleyn clearly looks to be the more interesting race. Alongside Labour, the Conservatives, Lib-Dems and Greens are putting up candidates.

Readers will recall that Mayor Fiaz and her former Cabinet Member for Finance, Cllr Terry Paul have both lodged complaints with the Standards Advisory Committee.

Readers will be familiar with Mehmood Mirza. This former member of the Labour Party, and former constituency officer and former supporter of Mayor Fiaz, has been conducting a virtually single-handed campaign to clean up the borough.

We learn from the Newham website, that Mayor Fiaz is none too keen on housing asylum seekers in the Royal Docks. She echoes the statement from London Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

In the final minutes of the game, Jarrod Bowen secured the win for West Ham in the Europa Conference League.

The Guardian reported that Jamie Driscoll, a Tyneside Corbynista has been barred from the long-list of candidates for the prospective candidate for Mayor of the North East. An interesting decision given that Discoll is the current mayor for the North of Tyne area. It seems slowly the party machine is grinding its way through the remaining Corbynistas.

Haringey Council and former Newham councillor, Joe Ejiofor, has run into a bit of bother with the ombudsman. And the courts. And the police.

A reader suggested that we compile an index to assist readers interested in the career of Newham Mayor, Rokhsana Fiaz. We have put together a short index that will take readers to some of the highlights.

The Guardian reported that Jamie Driscoll, a Tyneside Corbynista has been barred from the long-list of candidates for the prospective candidate for Mayor of the North East.

A variety of political parties will be vying for the two seats, up for grabs in the forthcoming by elections. We thought that we’d like to take a look at how the various political parties advertise themselves.

We reported a year ago, on the increasingly nepotistic appearance of the Newham Labour Group, in the remarkable number of close relations on the council. Well, it seems that Labour has done it again.

Gone are the days when simple councillor, Fiaz could side with any protest group and lament the awful goings on under Mayor Wales. All that was needed was a change of mayor and all would be well. Councillor R Fiaz was clearly an ally of protesters and the Focus E15 Campaign in particular.

It may or may not be known to readers, but the ruling Labour Group collects subs from its members. These are not insignificant sums and are drawn down as a percentage of the councillors’ incomes from their work on the council.

Luke Charters and Cecelia Welsh are standing down, having served a full one year on the council.

After receiving over 200 applications from party members to stand for council, the Labour Party managed to interview almost a third of them and selected sixty plus, outstanding candidates to fight the seats for Labour in 2022.

Our thanks to all of those members of the Labour Group (and others) who kindly sent in the information that appears below. This was more than we have had for any topic. We’d like to thank you all personally, but of course, we won’t.

Now that the dust has settled from the local elections, we thought that we’d take a look at any lessons for Newham.

Nationally, the Tories have done their level best to make themselves unelectable and Labour has been the main beneficiary, picking up over 500 of the 1000 plus seats the Tories lost. As commentators have noted, this puts Labour on track to become the largest party in a hung parliament.

The above picture comes from an article in August 2022. We have noted the failure of Newham Council to address the issue of street homelessness on several occasions.

Mayor Fiaz (pronouns: she. her) and the Green Coalition?

In an approach which seems to have the active support of the two Green councillors and the Mayor, (but precious few Labour councillors), Newham has announced its change of policy for the control of prostitution; to a policy of not controlling prostitution.