Referendum Campaign Staggers into Action
So, the referendum is happening. Residents have begun to receive propaganda from both sides of the campaign. That is from those who want to keep the mayor and those who want a Leader and Committee model.
And which side of the fence does the mayor stand? Well, that is less clear. When interviewed by Huff Post in 2018 they reported, “Fiaz is making one of her key pledges a promise to set up a democracy commission that she hopes will include a referendum in her third year, asking residents if they want to junk the directly-elected mayoralty and go back to a council leader and Cabinet.”
As we know, Fiaz was forced, ‘kicking and screaming’ by her Labour Group into the referendum, many of whom saw her getting too comfortable in her new role. But by this time, she had ditched the Leader and Cabinet model in favour of the Leader and Committee model, backed largely by the non-South Asian factions of Momentum. She and de facto Chief Whip Jane Lofthouse ensured that the members of the Labour Group were denied a free vote on the matter at council and were whipped to vote for the mayor’s new favoured option.
We are aware that there are those who believe that Fiaz is privately supporting and even financing the campaign to retain the mayoralty. But we find that difficult to believe because it would suggest a staggering degree of cynicism and hypocrisy. In the same Huff Post article, Fiaz is quoted as saying “the system of governance that we have presently in Newham, the directly elected mayor model, in the context of a one-party state, I don’t think is particularly healthy”.
At the time of writing Newham remains a council where Labour holds 61 of the available 61 seats, so nothing has changed there. If it was unhealthy in 2018 it is unhealthy in 2021.
We can only surmise that should the referendum vote go contrary to the direction supported by the ruling Labour Group, then Mayor Fiaz will choose to become ex-Mayor Fiaz, because she surely would not want to be seen as a grasping hypocrite; we must surmise that secretly, she intends to leave the stage because she would not want to take £80k pa to fulfil a role that is, in her mind flawed and undemocratic.
We could be wrong in this I suppose…