Follo
Martha Grekos got council chamber questions off to a rollicking start at 18.40 on the recording of yesterday’s live stream by querying both the competence and legal validity of the policy & resources committee’s decision not to designate St Brides Tavern as an Asset of Community Value. Hayward looked angry and rattled when replying, and especially upset by the direct critique of him and his crony Shravan Joshi. We covered their wrong-headed decision in our Solstice Round Up (sroll down) and Marianne Fredericks followed up on what Grekos had to say yesterday at 27.30, with Hayward cutting a very sorry figure in his response to these two councillors.
Hayward looked like he was under siege and out of his depth during a discussion of diversity that begins at 32.26, despite Edward Lord offering the council boss a line of support. At 46.25 Greg Lawrence gets up to ask about freemasonry impacting diversity at the council. Given that both Hayward and Joshi are freemasons this was in effect a further attack on the leadership at the council. It shows how support for that leadership has collapsed, as well as support for more peripheral Guildhall establishment figures such as Edward Lord – and Lord’s Temple & Farringdon Together coalition of which Lawrence is nominally a part (scroll down this link for more on that) – since Lord is also a freemason.*
Haywood completely flunked the equality and glass ceiling questions related to freemasonry by stating ‘we are not considering the diversity of masonic lodges’. The issue – as we’ve pointed out before – is that since the founding of the Guildhall Lodge 3116 in 1905, around two-thirds of Lord Mayors (the top council post) have not just been freemasons but members of this specific lodge. This is utterly disproportionate to the numbers of freemasons in English society (less than 1%) and since Guildhall Lodge members – including Hayward – are flabbergastingly over-represented in top posts at the City of London council, the fact that they run their lodge as a men only club makes it a glass ceiling issue at the council. Among other things addressing this matter should include not letting the Guildhall Lodge meet on council premises until it admits a decent number of women members – currently the lodge is allowed to use the council HQ for free.
Moving on to 54.02, Gregory Lawrence stands again to ask Henry Colthurst (finance committee chair) a question about the construction of the City’s Justice Quarter that appears designed to provoke an answer that makes the man giving it look responsible and capable, while showing the leadership of the council – and especially Hayward’s mentor Michael Snyder who pushed through the vanity project – in a poor light. Our Solstice Round Up post provides some background to this. During the course of his question, Lawrence revealed that the engraved Justice Quarter foundations stones – which residents protested against last year – cost £85,000.
In short, now the fact the Guildhall establishment blew the council’s capital budget by pushing forward unaffordable vanity projects is known to all councillors, support for the leadership has shrunk considerably. Hayward’s political credibility has been shredded – over conflict of interest questions, as well as capital spending – so as far as we’re concerned the best course of action he could take is to resign not just as chair of policy, but also as a councillor. Our message to Chris Hayward and his cronies is: “we’d like to see you go!”
Notes
*The debate even saw Tom Sleigh, usually a stalwart supporter of the Guildhall establishment, bringing up the issue of the shameful William Beckford slaver statue in the council chamber. Hayward played a key role in the decision to retain rather than remove the statue, so this was an attack on the council leadership from someone who previously had a solid track record as one of its supporters. Given that Hayward appears to have fallen out of favour with councillors like Tom Sleigh, he’s clearly in deep political trouble.
Source link