The Labour Group has recently been lucky to have met twice. Amidst all of the items up for discussion, the looming financial crisis caused by a massive overspend on temporary accommodation was not mentioned.

Finding an extra £25m was evidently not of sufficient importance.

We have had a response to the inquiry about the publication of the Report for the Standards Advisory Committee. Readers will recall that the mayor and Cllr T Paul had an exchange of words back in December 2022. This resulted in cross-complaints and the local authority spent, we are told, a sum in the tens of thousands of pounds to investigate and make recommendations.

Readers will recall that Cllr Mirza and the Independent Group campaigned for a change of policy regarding the Stratford Village Market. They introduced an amendment to the budget to that effect.

Newham Council have agreed, after much internal dissent, a budget. Central to the budget is the plan to sell £16m worth of capital assets.

On the same day as the council meeting that agreed the budget the BBC disclosed that 19 English councils had been given permission to sell their capital assets in order to subsidise their revenue costs (see list below).

Seven voluntary sector groups have written to the mayor and the chief exec to protest the cuts in youth service funding, (see text below). The mayor has planned to take some £300,000 from the youth service budget over the next two years.

There has got to be just the smallest sense of irony in the fact that Fiaz and Labour are slashing the grant to The Theatre Royal at the same time as they are spending more than that in seeking to become the Borough of Culture.

One of the issues that this website has repeatedly returned, is the mayor’s obsession with pursuing her pet projects, regardless of the costs or the benefit to the residents of Newham. This is an issue that both her internal and external opposition have alluded to.

Amongst the changes at the cabinet meeting in February, the threatened cuts to the commissioned youth work were reversed. My London reported the U-Turn which will restore the money to commissioned youth work budget.

In 1997, Tony Blair took office to the strains of “things, can only get better”.

We see from the Newham cabinet papers that (some of) the results of the annual residents’ survey have been released. For reasons best known to themselves, the authors of the cabinet papers have chosen to show the movement between only two years.

The purpose of this series is not to support or challenge the policies that the mayor has reneged on, it is simply to remind readers that there were significant promises made to the electorate that have been ditched once she got into office.

We will touch on this only briefly because we have covered it at length elsewhere. However, we should note that within the space of 12 months, Mayor Fiaz had suddenly dropped the manifesto commitment to 50% social housing in all new developments.

Promises made three years ago are fast disappearing into the ether. And car drivers in Newham are understandably a little peeved about the number of parking tickets issued.

A special meeting of the cabinet was called on on 2nd April 2024.For some reason, when you click on the video link, it goes to a special meeting of the cabinet in February. Because of this we have had to rely upon the accounts that emanate from those present.

At the weekend, members of the Labour faithful turned out to campaign for Sadiq Khan and the Assembly candidates, Unmesh Desai and James Beckles.

They were supported by some of Newham Labour’s party big-wigs.

In a process that any remaining members of the Labour Party in Newham will be familiar with, the members of the Ilford South Labour Party chose to have an open selection in deciding who would represent them on the ballot for the next general election.

We reported on the hissing directed at a Jewish councillor when he got up to speak at council. The hissing came from the public gallery. It is not unknown for members of the public to express their disapproval of their elected councillors by means of gestures, heckling and rude noises.

We reported some years ago, that a small number of younger Tablighi Jamaat activists, had won favour with Mayor Fiaz for the way in which they had orchestrated the social media campaign in the race to get her selected as the mayoral candidate.

By our count, roughly 80-100 people turned up for the Galloway event. In the end, it seemed a bit of an anti-climax. It was not at the (Afro-Caribbean) Community Centre. Apparently, the booking was suddenly cancelled on the day of the event. He knows who was behind the decision, “the mayor was behind it”.