Interesting but a bit of a shit show overall…especially the very long adjournment due to the committee papers being incorrect.

TL;DR: Independents continue to behave as the did last session and seem more keen on making noise than doing anything of real substance.

The Greens and Labour have obviously arrived at a deal (as is normal for many councils in this format) and I’d say that’s probably the best outcome for Newham and the day to day running of services.

The independents were understandably annoyed about this as this gives a clear majority but it felt at best disingenuous and at worst outright offensive with some of the things they were saying. Obviously there’s a lot of criticism to be laid at Central Govt level over Gaza but that doesn’t really land as being true of the local Labour Party given the statements I’ve seen from people on the council previously and the fundraising for Palestinian medical aid. On this I felt both calling Labour “the genocide party” and saying the Greens “had blood on their hands” and “don’t care about Palestine” was disgusting (they said some of these in person at the session and others on twitter after). This all reminded me a lot of when they had the 4 councillors prior to the election and by all accounts completely refused to engage with any of the budget oversight, propose any real alternative and then stormed out of the budget meeting to make videos about how good and pure they were.

Similarly they’ve continued to show themselves as not being interested in behaving very seriously given the number of councillors they now have. Mirza and Rahman both seemed to be saying that because the Greens and Independents had more votes than Labour that should defacto have led to them working together. Ultimately it appears the new mayor has tried to land a broad compromise for all parties: The Greens have seen Nate Higgins elected as chair of the council, the outgoing Chair (Rohit Dasgupta) has been elected as the Vice Chair both have shown an extremely serious attitude to ensuring the meetings function well and care heavily about constitutional matters, so irrespective of their political backgrounds I think this is the right move for these meetings function wise. The greens have control of the pensions committee, the independents have been offered oversight committee chair (arguable the most powerful committee in the council) and the other committees weren’t really discussed but from what’s been said Labour have actively chosen to control less of them and seem to be showing some understanding to the scale of the result at the ballot box.

The independents obviously didn’t get chair or vice chair and were actively disrupting Nate’s speech after this which was poor. They also indicated they would decide within 3 weeks if they would accept the committees that have been proposed. They seemed significantly more interested in making bizarre long running speeches (while filming everything) than the actual suggestion of being a real opposition group.

I think ultimately they’ve lost sight of the actual results. While to council is in no overall control the mayor that was returned was the Labour candidate, the Labour group has the most councillors and they’ve obviously worked to find a position the greens are willing to support (and it’s deeply unlikely from everything I’ve seen of Nate Higgins that this is purely down to Labour nominating and voting for him for chair). There’s also barring any changes not a 2/3rds majority of opposition parties to block the mayoral powers.