Cllr McAuley’s “absolute barefaced lie” intervention was dramatic. My wife Sally, who had been present at the unveiling of the road plans to the school governors and was present in the public gallery during the Council meeting, added to the theatre of the moment; she was so incensed that for the first time ever she broke Council chamber protocol and shouted out what had happened.

The mayor joined in the drama. Claiming that “Cllr Craig has been very clear about what he said. This is our opportunity to find out”, he ordered an investigation. Note that he did NOT say, “Cllr McAuley has been very clear about what he said. This is our opportunity to find out.” Cllr McAuley is of course leader of the Labour group and a colleague of the mayor; I, on the other hand, am from an opposition party. So it is my statements that are being ‘investigated’.

It is instructive that Newham is one of only eleven local councils in the UK that has an elected executive mayor. The model was imported from France and the US by Tony Blair in order to improve local authority decision-making and effectiveness. When it was introduced in 2002 I was in favour. After 6 years experience in Newham, I am against.

The problem is that huge powers are concentrated in the executive mayor. Within the town hall council officers are accountable to him and the majority of Labour councillors have been put on his payroll (his Special Responsibility Allowance gravy train). Even his cabinet has only an advisory role. Yet town hall tentacles reach into all corners of the borough and hugely impact the lives of many.
But this all-powerful mayor is subject to very few democratic checks and balances. The system of scrutiny commissions was established to provide some accountability but it has become supine and ineffective. Commissions are dominated by Labour councillors who because of party loyalty, self-interest and fear of the mayor, cannot offer objective and serious scrutiny of his performance.

The result is an authoritarian and managerialist culture that brooks no opposition. Fear stalks Newham’s corridors of power. The Labour party, and in particular the Labour mayor, knows best; the rest of us had better fall in line. A good illustration of the brutal arrogance of this culture can be seen in the Radical Activist Newham blog of 3 April, “Newham Mayor Buys Himself A Group Of Charities” at http://www.radicalactivistnewham.org.uk/ .

So what about the mayor’s ill-conceived and illegitimate ‘investigation’? Of course I didn’t lie so I don’t have to be afraid of the truth. But how can a politically-inspired investigation operating within the authoritarian and fear-driven culture of Newham town hall ever find the truth? It will be a miracle if it comes to any conclusion other than one which suits the Labour mayor.

Full meetings of Newham Council are fairly tedious. They are often dominated by the mayor, Sir Robin Wales, informing us all how wonderful/successful/impressive the borough has become since he’s been in charge. His venal payroll-vote nod, clap and cheer at another master-class in self-praise. And we all go home.

Mind you, since the 2006 elections when the Christian Peoples Alliance took over Canning Town South ward in bed-rock Labour territory (Labour since 1912 according to the town hall records), the fury of that party has known no bounds. It has led to ferocious and fascinating inter-party rows in Council.

At full Council on 7 April, during Questions To The Mayor, a Labour member planted one about representations received from local councillors over the closure of Oasis Nursery School. As all the local councillors are from the Christian Peoples Alliance, this was clearly intended to be party political knockabout.

As you will expect from the previous post (Part 1, below), the mayor spun the line that it was River Christian Centre’s (the landlord’s) fault the school was closing. On a Point of Order I countered that the reason why the school was closing was because a road was going through it. Then the balloon went up. The mayor’s executive adviser for regeneration and leader of the Labour group on council, Cllr McAuley, erupted with a show-stopper: Cllr Craig, he shouted, was telling an “absolute barefaced lie”.

At root the eruption was about power and control. In the Aldous Huxlian Republic of Newham there is only one way of seeing the world – the Labour Party way. Labour paradise-engineering requires us all to toe the line and receive the wisdom propagated by the mayoral cadre of party jobsworths and their bloated communications department (spin doctors to you and me), as that way lies universal – synthetic - happiness.

Anyone out of line is out of their control and, like UNISON’s Michael Gavan (see my post of 24th January), is ruthlessly disposed of. Labour Newham is Mugabe without the bullets.

Therefore Cllr McAuley was unable simply to say I had a different and democratically-valid viewpoint about the closure… Nor even that I was profoundly mistaken… Nor possibly that in his view I promoted a malicious misrepresentation of the facts. No, he was so affronted that someone had another way of seeing the world and the school closure that he had to go the whole hog. So I was telling an “absolute barefaced lie”.

It’s a tribute to our Judeo-Christian and liberal democratic heritage that such an expression would be ruled out of order in the mother of parliaments at Westminster. A Christian understanding is that there is only one unchanging root Truth in the universe and that everything else can be up for discussion and dispute; this leads to a liberal and enlightened respect for diverse viewpoints. Freedom of speech, thought and conscience flow directly from this.

Accusations of “lying” on the other hand tend to be fascistic, antidemocratic and intended to close down debate. They aren’t of course ruled out of order at Newham Council.

Cllr McAuley’s claim leads to a logical conundrum. He said ‘advisedly’ (that is, with due consideration) that I told a lie or “uttered a falsehood with an intention to deceive” (Chambers Dictionary). If he’s right, I am a dishonourable liar. However if he’s wrong and I didn’t lie, then the boot must be on the other foot.

I don’t and didn’t lie.

Want to know what happens when a local political party, obsessed by power and control, is unrestrained by normal democratic checks-and-balances?

Here’s a small but illustrative story from the Labour one-party state of Newham in London’s East End which, when I was first elected a councillor in 2002, had – apart from myself – no-one but Labour politicians representing it at all levels; Newham Council, the GLA, Westminster and Europe. No political opposition anywhere - a situation that must be unique in the UK. And for the Labour Party as a whole it’s a showcase borough providing a convenient photo-op location for ministers to visit and promote their latest government initiative.

Since 2001 the Labour executive mayor Sir Robin Wales has planned and personally driven through a massive housing regeneration project in my ward of Canning Town South. Residents are currently being moved out, council flats demolished and new posh private apartment blocks are rising out of the rubble. Parts of the neighbourhood are more moonscape than local community. And at the heart of this neighbourhood is the gem of an educational establishment, Oasis Nursery School (see my post of 13 March).

Last May the head of the regeneration project (a council officer) attended the school governors meeting and slapped a regeneration map on the table that indicated a new east-west road was to be built exactly where the school stands. How do I know? My wife, Sally was a governor and present at the meeting. She asked incredulously, “How exactly are we to explain this to the parents?” A thumping great road was replacing the school! The governors were then promised a placatory consultation “to minimise any impact”. It was surreal and bizarre. It was as relevant as consultation with a condemned man about his method of execution.

Mind you, there was already concern about falling pupil numbers. So many families were being moved out of the area due to the regeneration that Oasis was failing in its struggle to maintain the school roll.

The school’s landlord is a church and community centre, the River Christian Centre (RCC), with which the school shares a large site in the centre of the regeneration area. In due course it became apparent that RCC wanted to follow the council’s lead, get on the regeneration bandwagon and redevelop the whole of its site too.

So there are three possible reasons why the school should close (the east-west road, the falling pupil numbers and the landlord’s development plans), all of which flow from the Mayor’s original decision to regenerate the area.

Oasis is very popular amongst local parents, so guess which the Labour-dominated council is promoting as the reason for the closure? Yes, you’re right. It’s RCC that is causing the school to shut and, by implication, it’s RCC that should be blamed by the local people. “Not our fault. It was them. Er… so don’t vote against us at the next election.”

RCC’s reputation is now being trashed amongst local people by Labour councillors and it dare not defend itself. Why? RCC needs to get its own redevelopment plans through the council’s planning committee, and guess who dominates the planning committee – like every other committee, board, body, agency, authority and working group at the council and in the borough? Ah yes, Newham Labour Party.

So, we are told triumphantly by our Labour masters, it’s RCC that has Oasis blood on its hands. Labour of course is blameless.

Welcome to the Alice-in-Wonderland management-by-mirrors world of Newham.

But the story doesn’t end there…

Last week’s edition of the current affairs weekly New Statesman (14 April) returned to the topic of religion (see my post of 3rd February), with three articles collectively entitled ‘Belief is back’.

Two observations on these:
First, there is a major article about the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. Unlike his recent and very liberal predecessor at Durham, David Jenkins, who was famously (but inaccurately) quoted as referring to the resurrection as a “conjuring trick with bones”, Bishop Tom is decidedly and delightfully orthodox. He believes that the resurrection is literally true, that we will be physically raised at the Second Coming of Christ and Day of Judgement – “no metaphors… no decoding… no poetics.”

As the article says, “Wright’s line… is to be taken entirely at face value. If this man is a hero to millions of conservative Christians, then belief is certainly back.”

And so it is. But the interesting thing is that not just ‘religion’ or ‘church-going’ is back, but that it is the theological content of belief (in this case, the resurrection) which indicates the return of faith in the UK, at least according to the New Statesman. If sensible balanced intelligent people (like Tom Wright) can state publicly that the dead will rise again without being sectioned into a mental institution, then belief itself is well and truly back and able to impact the public agenda.

Second, there is no mention of Islam in the articles. The New Statesman seems to think the return of faith is entirely related to Christianity.

This seems unfair and untrue. Islam more than Christianity has put religion back into UK political discourse and Islamic belief has recently dominated the public agenda. See for instance the furore over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Sharia law lecture or tomorrow’s BBC radio programme about the difficulties for UK Muslims who convert to Christianity and the role of apostasy in Islam.

But whatever the limitation of the articles, the New Statesman is certainly abreast of a key development in our national political debate. Belief is definitely back.

Last night I was shocked.

For some time I’ve been tracking the rise of religion in our political debate and - perhaps unfairly - laughed at the antics of religiously illiterate politicians and secular commentators as they try to get to grips with - especially - Christian and Islamic concepts.

Last night I encountered the dark side of the phenomenon.

As The Christian Choice Mayoral candidate I attended election hustings at Kensington Temple (KT) in Notting Hill Gate. It’s an amazing multi-ethnic church stuffed full of young people that holds five services on Sundays and lots of mid-week services including youth worship on Saturday night, and that has spawned daughter churches all over London.

KT is the only organisation in the whole of London so far that has invited all 10 mayoral candidates to hustings. KT does not buy into the cosy BBC-style exclusivity of inviting only the ‘big three’ or four. Our democracy grew out of our fertile Judeo-Christian heritage and it takes a church to maintain open level-playing-field democracy in London.

But that meant the BNP came too.

The shock was how far and how much the BNP clothe their narrow nationalist and racist dogma in ‘Christian’ garments. They claim to be Christian despite the views of their founder John Tyndall (“What passes for Christianity in this country today can only be described as superstitious sociology: a bland doctrine of welfare-mongering with guilt, humility and self-abasement…”) and current legal officer Lee Barnes (“The teachings of the Biblical Jesus and the Biblical Christ are a mixture of truth and deliberate falsehoods…”).

But as I listened to the BNP spokesman last night I realised that theirs is a counterfeit Christianity, a pseudo-Christianity or at best a sub-Christian ideology that tells nothing about a living relationship with the living Christ. There is no grace, no warmth, no compassion – their ‘Christianity’ is all harsh ethics, loveless discipline and dubious morals, and no spirituality.

There is a wide gap between their ‘Christianity’ and my Jesus Christ. When I spoke I said that they themselves needed to come to Christ; if they did so they would leave the BNP.

The other shock was the positive response the BNP received from some Christians of ethnic minority background. Asians and Africans applauded when the BNP spokesman started speaking about the Bible, the Ten Commandments and Christianity in schools. I was embarrassed – not about promoting faith in schools but that Christians can be naively taken in by BNP ‘Christian’ rhetoric. The journalist from the Evening Standard was puzzled too.

It is widely predicted that the BNP will get at least one seat on the London Assembly on 1 May. I’m praying that we, The Christian Choice, do too – now if for no other reason than that true Christianity should be represented rather than just the BNP counterfeit.

The liberal establishment is in a right tizzy.

Following some pungent comments by senior Catholic figures (thank God for the Catholics’ insistence on their right to speak out clearly on moral issues) and ahead of next month’s vote on the Human Fertilization and Embryology (HFE) Bill, Gordon Brown has done a U-turn and decided to allow a free vote on the more contentious parts of the Bill. It’s took him his usual long period of dithering and indecision before he finally conceded to normal parliamentary practice on this matter of individual conscience.

The secular liberal elite (and one or two senior Catholics including Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of the Medical Research Council) are aghast. Gosh, the peasants, the people and the prejudiced are revolting. Don’t the great unwashed understand who knows best on these moral issues? A free vote in Parliament of all places! Whatever happened to our cherished all-controlling secular nanny state?

So, the hand-baggers have been hand-bagged and – inevitably - the fight-back begins. It starts on the front page of today’s house-magazine for the liberal elite, The Independent on Sunday (IoS), with banner headlines (ironically under a full-colour tabloid-style advertisement to “Train Your Brian” - yes, really, you couldn’t make it up) informing the world of their outstanding news scoop: “Exclusive: Right Wing Christian Group Pays For Commons Researchers.”

This world-shattering earth-moving piece of news (clearly more important than the renewed murderous fighting in Basra, this weekend’s vital elections in Zimbabwe or the key UN climate-change convention in Bangkok) is all about 12 innocuous wide-eyed young Interns who personally scrimp and save for the supposedly glamorous privilege of working for a year as an assistant to an MP. It’s a decade-old political education programme for young people who are attached to MPs of all parties, but the work is often tedious and unglamorous and their status is sometimes little above that of the tea lady.

But they are CHRISTIANS and they are sponsored by a CHRISTIAN organisation! Oooh! And the sponsoring organisation, CARE, is strongly against aspects of the HFE Bill. Oooooh! CARE has (unspecified) “links to the powerful Christian right in America”. Oooooooh! The IoS has smelt a Christian conspiracy against the HFE Bill…

Actually, I’d like to smell an effective IoS conspiracy against Christians in the article, but the story is so weak and so unworthy of any front page that I’ve nothing to get my teeth into.

And the best bit is a quote from that fount of all non-believer wisdom, celeb Professor Richard Dawkins (I love the man, we so badly need him to continue with his high-profile and entertaining proselytism on behalf atheist fundamentalism and shrill bigotry). “If only these restless busybodies (CARE) would keep their prejudices to themselves, nobody would object,” he opined, “but they can’t resist inflicting their ignorant opinions on others.”

Ah yes. Such a helpful contribution from such a wise, erudite, open-minded, liberal Oxford academic.

If you want to see an intelligent but completely closed mind that’s been shut tight with lock and bolt, you’ll do no better than to read Prof Dawkins. Even good academic atheists are embarrassed by him. Or as the director of the Human Genome Project said, “Dawkins has abandoned his much cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism.”

When the IoS has to buttress their article with quotes from Richard Dawkins you know that their story is weak, very weak.

Come on IoS, you can do better than this.

Seven years ago Newham Council announced that it intended to regenerate the predominantly council housing stock in my electoral ward in Canning Town. Nothing wrong with that: many of the homes were in urgent need of rebuilding or renovation.

But it became a classic New Labour project, typical of their many projects up and down the country that are more concerned with ends than means, of achieving targets rather than helping people. Despite buckets of warm empty words about “consultation” and “involving residents in decision- making”, the scheme was ruthlessly driven top-down from the executive mayor’s office.

The working-class people of Canning Town became irrelevant in the town hall’s blind obsession with yuppifying the neighbourhood. Locals were moved about like pawns on a chess board. The regeneration was done to and at the local people, nor for and with them - a superb opportunity for community regeneration replaced by an ugly example of community destruction.

This scenario was well illustrated at a meeting I had this week with the parents of children at Oasis Nursery School on Burke Street.

Oasis is an excellent nursery school, one of four in our neighbourhood but the only stand-alone one. It has received outstanding Ofsted assessments and is a popular and happy place with a superb head and committed staff. It is streets ahead of the other nursery schools. It’s a diamond and a unique asset in deprived under-serviced Canning Town.

All the local schools, like Oasis, are suffering from a fall in pupil numbers as families are moved out of the area as a result of the housing project. In addition, planners tell us that the Oasis building itself is to be bulldozed to make way for a new road and development of the surrounding land.

So DOH! Our imaginative town hall came up with an intelligent creative plan. They’re going to close the best nursery school in the borough and spread the pupils and staff around into much lower-performing schools nearby. That’s it. End of. The committee met, the slide-rules and calculators came out and the decision to terminate one of Newham’s few outstanding schools was taken, top down. Educational excellence is replaced by mediocrity. The parents I met are distraught.

Is it beyond the wit of man and Newham town hall to be a little more resourceful and inventive – even if this entails more financial risk? The developers are set to make £millions from the housing regeneration project. How about they are compelled build a new and larger nursery school for the community? (It’s called Section 106.) Oasis staff and pupils could then move in and the children from other underperforming local nurseries should be offered places too – which may of course lead to their closure. But at least educational mediocrity would be replaced by excellence. And I’m confident from my meeting that it would be supported by parents and local community.

Oasis is destined to be shut in August. Is it too late for Newham Council to see sense?

Newham in east London is an extraordinary place. One of the most deprived boroughs in the country and dominated by a superficial, self-promoting and authoritarian New Labour-controlled town hall, it is nonetheless a colourful, vital and ethnically-diverse place – “the most diverse place on the planet”.

Crime and fear of crime stalk the streets, Islamists plot atrocities (according to New Scotland Yard, Newham is one of the anti-terror squad’s top national ‘hot spots’), dirt and rubbish plague public places, and many live in awful grinding poverty by western standards. Even so there is a general cheerfulness and tolerance between the different communities that enables life to go on and flourish despite all the handicaps. I have lived here for 26 years and have no plans to leave. It’s a stimulating place to bring up a young family.

Given the recent rapid rise of religion in public life (see previous posts), Newham is at the cutting edge of this new era. While the town hall Kanute-like stays avowedly secular, the burgeoning faith communities are increasing their social impact. Churches, gurdwaras, mosques and temples are all active centres of their communities. Not without reason Newham has been branded “the unsecular city”.

It’s in this favourable context that my party, the Christian Peoples Alliance, is leading the charge to put religion back into Newham politics and public life. For instance, as a direct response to CPA’s success within the borough, councillors within Newham Labour Party last year formed a local branch of the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM) in order to counter the inroads CPA is making into the thriving Christian community. I have no problem with that: part of CPA’s mission is to prod and provoke the sleepy Christians within the major parties into taking Christian action within their own parties – being “salt and light” as Christ termed it.

Newham CSM has some odd policies but it holds church services and tries to grapple with real issues. The fact that it has even come into existence however is a trophy in CPA’s cupboard.

Another trophy is the increasing inclination of Labour members to quote the Bible in the council chamber:
Ever since I was elected for the Christian Peoples Alliance in 2002 as the sole opposition councillor representing the previously bedrock-Labour working-class area of Canning Town South (Labour since 1912, according to town hall records), the Labour Party has been fuming against our party. The anger and insults regularly thrown at us during council meetings, especially from the borough’s elected executive mayor Sir Robin Wales, have been extraordinary. His latest offering at a council meeting was to loudly swear (not much of a role model for the youth of the borough there) and to repeatedly bawl that we are “half-baked idiots”!

But some months ago Labour also started to quote the Bible against us to try to prove we aren’t Christian in our approach to politics. More recently they have started even to quote the Bible in order to support their own policies.

From my perspective there is an interesting parallel here with St Paul’s comment to the Philippians, that “some preach Christ out of envy or rivalry… (or) out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me… But why does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”
For the record, at last Monday’s council meeting two members of the Labour Group – one was the mayor - quoted the following passages from the New Testament:
“I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me.” (Matthew 25: 35, 36)
“By their fruit you shall know them.” (Matthew 7: 16)
A third justified his argument about a particular issue by pointing to Jesus’ apparent silence about it in all four Gospels
That’s not a bad input at one single council meeting of an officially secular council that is claimed to be the national Labour Party’s leading showcase borough.
Let’s hope the Word of God now begins to impact their actions as well as their speeches, in Newham and across London.

The London Development Agency is in deep manure. It has been investigated by Big Four accountants Deloittes, castigated for lack of accountability and transparency, accused of breathtaking incompetence, given large sums of money to firms that do not file accounts or keep records of how the funds were spent, and had six of its projects investigated by police over allegations of fraud.

Then last Friday Lee Jasper, the London Mayor’s chief race adviser, was suspended while the allegations of financial irregularities at the LDA are investigated by the police.

Not bad for the institution better known by the ironic cuddly sobriquet, ‘Ken’s piggy bank’.

But there’s an ominous side of LDA activity that has so far stayed below the radar screen. That is its role in the eviction and fracturing of Europe’s largest church, Kingsway International Christian Centre - or KICC for short.

Last year the LDA enticed KICC out of their property at Waterden Road, Hackney, because the land was needed for the 2012 Olympic Park. Assurances by the LDA that an alternative site would be provided for the 12,000 weekly worshippers persuaded the church to quietly leave its building in the autumn and work towards constructing a new building on the LDA-owned land at Beam Reach, Havering, Essex.

This was farcical. Did the LDA really think that a huge lively predominantly black inner-city church would fit in to that quiet semi-rural corner of Essex?

No. The LDA wasn’t at all concerned with the welfare of the church or the aptness of the move. They were simply concerned to get KICC out of its Hackney premises as quickly and quietly as possible, and therefore gave whatever assurances were necessary to achieve that end - including the offer of an entirely inappropriate site.

Surprise, surprise, ten days ago Havering Council and the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation both rejected KICC’s planning application. The church didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades.

The LDA of course cried crocodile tears of surprise and regret, and offered to work with KICC to work up an appeal. But meanwhile the church is left swinging in the wind with no permanent home. It is now forced into the last-ditch option of appealing to the minister of Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears, to overturn the Havering/LTGDC decision.

LDA should have been a helpful handmaiden to KICC in its move. Instead they were a Machiavellian manipulator.

The result is unfair and unjust, and LDA’s involvement stinks.