After years of campaigning by grassroots activists, the sitting Mayor of Newham Council in London will now be forced to stand in an open primary election. The deselection of Sir Robin Wales is an example of the kind of democratic accountability we need throughout the Labour Party.
Sir Robin Wales, the Mayor of Newham Council, is facing a selection battle to be the Labour Party candidate in the election in May.
Sir Robin (knighted in 2000 for “services to local government”) has been running Newham Council in East London with an iron fist for over 20 years, first as Leader of the Council and then, from 2002, as Britain’s first directly elected Mayor.
One of many careerists who first made their name in the student movement, Sir Robin has a long history of witch-hunting genuine socialists and Marxists.
He was Chair of Scottish Labour Students in 1976, where he helped organise the “Ice Pick Express”. This was a coach full of Stalinist and reformist student activists, going from Scotland to the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS) Conference in Lancaster University. The coach was so-called because it was covered with pictures of ice picks.
Sir Robin’s and others’ aim was to defeat the then Militant-run NOLS. This they did by blatantly rigging the Conference with the connivance of the Labour Party bureaucracy.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Sir Robin went on to help organise the expulsion of Militant supporters from the Labour Party in Newham.
Rough sleeping on the rise
During Sir Robin’s tenure as Mayor, Newham has been the site of grandiose projects that have had little positive impact on the lives of working class residents.
In 2012, the London Olympics were largely held in Newham, with billions of pounds spent to build the Olympic Stadium, the Olympic Park and other facilities. A massive glitzy shopping centre and thousands of flats for sale and rent have also been built – almost entirely at prices outside the pocket of most workers.
Despite such vanity projects, Newham is considered the 25th most deprived area in England. One in 25 people (13,607 people in total) in Newham are homeless – proportionally the highest in Britain. From 2016 to 2017, the number of people homeless in Newham increased by 1,361.
Trigger ballot
Under the existing undemocratic rules of the Labour Party, members have no right to select their candidates for elections to public office where there is an incumbent. There first has to be a “trigger ballot” to determine whether members wish for there to be a selection. This vote is often posed in terms of a vote of “loyalty” to the Mayor or MP.
Sir Robin faced a trigger ballot in the autumn of 2016. In this vote, 11 of the 20 local Labour Party ward branches in Newham voted for an open selection, representing the majority of Labour Party members in Newham.
11 of the 17 affiliated organisations (mainly trade union branches) voted against an open selection, however. That meant a majority of 20 out of 37 came out against an open selection. Sir Robin was deemed to have been selected.
Questions were asked by activists about how some of these affiliated organisations had decided their vote. For example, the Newham Fabian Society had voted to automatically select Sir Robin, but later the national Fabian Society discovered that that vote had been decided in breach of the Fabian Society’s own rules.
Many of the union branches cast their vote without consulting their members, with votes decided by officials. Some unions took the view that every affiliated branch of that union was entitled to a vote, hence the GMB cast four votes, equivalent to a quarter of Newham’s membership.
Given these anomalies, activists launched a campaign involving legal action to overturn the original trigger ballot and hold another. This campaign was eventually successful. The second trigger ballot was completed in February 2018 and there was an overwhelming vote in favour of an open selection which will take place on 1-16 March.
Wider ramifications
While the holding of an open selection is a victory for democracy in the Labour Party, there remain problems with the selection.
Newham has seen a huge increase in Labour Party membership since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, from just 900 to more than 3,000 today. But in the rerun of the selection, many of these newer members will not be allowed to vote. Only members who joined before 1st July 2016 – the ‘freeze’ date for the previous trigger ballot contest – are allowed to vote in the open selection, thereby excluding many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.
Rokhsana Fiaz OBE, who is challenging Sir Robin, is backed by Newham Momentum. Rokhsana is a Newham councillor and has a background of anti-racist campaigning. But she is not particularly left-wing. For example, in a lengthy interview about her programme on the On London website, she does not mention socialism once. If elected she has promised to review whether Newham should continue to have a directly elected executive Mayor. She has also promised to deliver more affordable housing, but does not explain how she intends to do this.
Socialists in Newham Labour Party have no alternative but to vote for Rokhsana in the open selection. Other (possibly more left-wing) candidates have stood aside from the contest in order to unite around one candidate and defeat Sir Robin.
The deselection of Sir Robin could have an effect far beyond the East End of London, however. It will show the right wing that Labour Party members have had enough and want leaders that genuinely represent them.
This is only the start of the battle for a genuinely socialist Council in Newham and for Labour Party leaders who will fight for working class interests.
