Rumours, Reality and the Politics of Who Gets to Stand

Labour Mayoral Candidate - Forhad Hussain

It has been bubbling away for some time now. Persistent rumours have been emanating from certain sections of political Newham, whispered in corridors and shared in private conversations.

There seems to be a concerted effort to bring to light a housing scandal involving one of the 2026 Mayoral Candidates, Forhad Hussain.

Back to the Beginning

Many years ago Hussain was a councillor in Plaistow at the same time he was also a Husband, Father and working class east Londoner.

The council started a scheme called New Share. New share was the brain child of Sir Robin Wales he had identified an issue for many in Newham, they couldn’t raise the required deposits to be able to buy a home for their families within the borough?

Sir Robin introduced one of the first, what we now call “shared ownership” programmes by a Council.

Back to Hussain…

He like many Newham residents applied to the scheme and was successful, there was criteria that had to be met in order to access the scheme. The requirements were the same for all applicants.

The scheme enabled Hussain to purchase a share in a property.

The Allegations

It now seems that some inside of the Labour Party, predominantly those who are aggrieved by Hussain’s stance on the environment and parking matters are trying to throw mud.

Now regular readers will know that Open Newham could never be accused of being pro-labour or anybody else for that matter, we like to think that we call it as we see it.

We have enquired extensively about this rumour of irregularities regarding Hussain’s housing situation and have to say that we have found no evidence of any issues or irregularities. We have spoken to current and ex-council officers who are familiar with the allegations and even one who was tasked with investigating any wrong doing.

One officer who we shall not name said:

“there is absolutely no truth in the allegations of irregularities”

Readers will remember that we broke the story of Mayor Fiaz suing her own council, at the time Labour councillors were calling us liars as not even they knew.

We broke the massive pay off of Abi Gbago and once again we were called liars as once again councillors didn’t even know what we knew.

Unfortunately for our reader numbers there was nothing there when we looked into the Hussain allegations, as had there have been, it would have been one of the biggest scandals in Newham political history….. Alas

So Who Benefits?

We then had to ask ourselves who would want to stop a working class, Labour ethnic minority candidate from standing for office.

Everywhere we enquired the same answer came back, the overwhelmingly white middle classed eco warriors within the Labour Party in Newham.

So aggrieved are they that they can see the end of their Green revolution project irrespective of who becomes Mayor in May, Mirza or Hussain they are content to blow up their own ship to achieve their ideological aims.

Whilst we can not say that race plays a factor in their bias, it is clear that there are no ethnic minorities joining them on this crusade. In a borough like Newham where the overwhelming majority of residents are people of colour the lack of colour amongst their ranks speaks volumes.

A Wider Reflection

Thinking about the current situation that Newham finds itself in, one can draw parallels to the early 1900’s when only independently wealthy people could stand for public office.

It was only in 1911 that MP’s started to receive a salary. The 1918 Representation of the peoples act abolished all property qualifications for voting and opened up democracy for the masses.

It would seem that some in Newham would like to go back to these days, where working class candidates who may need to avail themselves of council services don’t stand for office for fear of being called corrupt or having undue influence.

This would make our borough all the more poorer if we were to lose authentic working class voices from the council chamber.

We would however have a preponderance of landlords, business people and those who no doubt have property wealth which is in no way representative of the people of Newham.