On The City Of London Council’s Toxic Culture, Bullying & The Maladministration Of Its Code Of Conduct

On 7 February, at the meeting of the Civic Affairs Sub-Committee of the City of London Corporation, its chair, Edward Lord – who is both a mason and a self-styled diversity champion – spoke to Ann Holmes (the chief commoner elect) in a bullying manner: see from 35:00 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2vCM99AZzk. In doing so, Lord displayed the same need for anger management as Christopher Hayward (another mason) when he addressed Martha Grekos a month earlier at 26:02 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ6skeAkgQA.

The word “bullying” is being bandied around the Court of Common Council a lot at the moment, generally by members of the ruling clique (mostly masons) by way of projection against those who criticise their actions and seek accountability.

If Ann Holmes makes a complaint about Lord’s bullying to the panel of “independent persons”, which replaced the discredited “standards” committee, it’s very likely that her complaint will be dismissed at the first stage of the process. It’s been revealed that the “independent persons” were expressly recruited to “have empathy with the roles and objectives of the City of London Corporation”, which are in practice determined by the ruling clique of elected members. The performance of the “independent persons” in their first ten months of operation shows how empathetic they’ve been, dismissing every complaint made against a member or supporter of the ruling clique, and upholding every complaint made against the clique’s critics. They’ve become notorious within the Corporation for failing to follow elementary due process.

The new Civic Affairs Sub-Committee that has oversight of the “independent persons” is chaired by … Edward Lord, in spite of Lord leading the vigilantism of the former “standards” committee which caused such scandal that it had to be abolished (scroll down to second part of this link for an outline of what led to this).

The obvious solution to this problem is to replace these “independent persons” with a retired senior judge, as suggested a few years ago, but the ruling clique oppose this, as they don’t want a truly independent person performing a significant role within the Corporation.

Until the “standards” regime is changed again, though, an already toxic Corporation is likely to become even more so.

On 8 February, Martha Grekos resigned as an elected member. As a BID advocate, she’s no democrat, and so not someone we would want to see hold office in the City, but in recent months she’s been vigorously holding the ruling clique to account, especially through questions put to the Chair of Policy, Christopher Hayward, in public session at Court meetings.

She hasn’t given a reason for her resignation, but it’s reasonable to suppose that it’s at least partly connected with the hostility she’s faced from the clique for criticising their actions. In the meeting of the governing Policy and Resources Committee on 19/1/23 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ3DH74cMPE], she wasn’t mentioned by name, but every member present or watching knew that she was the object of pointed comments by Ian Luder (a mason) at 4:03, Michael Snyder (a mason) at 4:17 and Simon Duckworth (a mason) at 6:15.

Duckworth, who officiates as Chief Commoner when he isn’t officiating in the lodge, added that “we have a practice and a principle of not criticising members in public. It is not the sort of behaviour that should be seen in a public body, and that is a point which should be made quite forcibly to the individual concerned” [Grekos].

This is pure masonry, and a classic example of that cult’s principles of unity, hierarchy and secrecy, as explained here. The City Corporation is a public body whose members are supposed to be (but are mostly not) democratically elected to engage in democratic politics, and that entails criticism of the actions of other members. Imagine the public derision that a member of parliament would incur by saying that “we have a principle and a practice in this House of not criticising members in public …”.