By-Election Results From Castle Baynard & Cripplegate Underline The Urgent Need For Democratic Reform In The City Of London

Given that the leader of the City of London council Chris Hayward has been personally involved in a drive to register yet more undemocratic business voters in the Castle Baynard ward, the 11.9% turnout for the 23 March 2023 by-election there leaves the policy chair with yet more egg on his face. Hayward is registered as a voter in Castle Baynard but with a firm that doesn’t appear on his register of interests, so presumably he doesn’t work for them – but they still provide him with a business vote enabling him to stand for office from Broad Street ward.

The Castle Baynard by-election was triggered by the resignation of Martha Grekos who’d been bullied into giving up her seat by a group of freemasons – including council leader Chris Hayward – who dominate this anachronistic local authority. The by-election was called at short notice, ensuring – as we have already reported – that only freemasons posing as ‘independents’ would be standing to replace Grekos.

In March 2022, Michael Hudson failed to get elected in Castle Baynard with 177 votes (turnout last year was 27.95%) – but in the 2023 by-election last week with his support nearly cut in half, this mason was ‘elected’ with business votes that failed to go beyond double figures. Hudson’s closest rival, Edward Goodchild got only 47 votes – but perhaps more shocking is the fact that outsider candidate Scott Longman* beat another longtime Guildhall establishment councillor Kevin Everett, who like Hudson lost his seat last year, into fourth place. Longman got 32 votes and Everett 21.

In total less than 200 votes were cast in the Castle Baynard by-election and in part this was because people did not want to vote for any of the candidates since all of them clearly wanted to cozy up to the discredited masonic elements within the Guildhall establishment who had bullied Martha Grekos out of her seat. Indeed, just before the election LibDem councillor for Reading and business voter in Castle Baynard, James Moore. could be seen on Twitter complaining to his party’s Cities of London and Westminster figurehead – Edward Lucas – that he would have to abstain. While Moore makes it clear he can’t support any of those standing, he doesn’t explain the reason for his views.

The City establishment falsely claims to be ‘non-partisan’ with the majority of its vastly over-numbered 125 councillors pretending to be ‘independents’ – although in reality most aren’t. But here is a business voter asking for transparently ‘partisan’ candidates. Currently the council has members who belong to the Labour Party, Temple & Farringdon Together and the Castle Baynard Independents Party (Michael Hudson is one of its officers but for last week’s vote he stood as an ‘independent’).

In the residential ward of Cripplegate the turnout was a rather less scandalous 29.2% on 23 March 2023, although this was down from 45.46% in March 2022. The by-election was held after Sue Pearson was voted into the position of alderwoman (senior councillor) for Cripplegate on 15 September 2022 and thereby vacated her common council seat.

Only in a rotten borough like the City of London would a seat in the ward currently most likely to elect opposition councillors to a nominally ‘non-partisan’ council be left vacant for nearly 5 months longer than its equivalent post in Castle Baynard, where a Guildhall establishment ‘ma(so)n’ was much more likely to be elected if opposition candidates weren’t given time to organise. If the Guildhall establishment can organise an election in a week or two in Castle Baynard, they can do it anywhere, they just prefer not to in a ward where they’re unlikely to see a candidate they favour returned.

All three Cripplegate candidates were independents who campaigned on the basis of standing up for residents whose needs and views are rarely considered by the 80% of councillors elected on business votes and who instead champion the interests of the financial city. The outcome of the election was determined largely by how embedded each of the candidates was in the local community. Dawn Frampton won with 369 votes.

Frampton made it clear in her election material that she’d grown up in the City and lived in it all her life. She’s well known in Cripplegate as a friendly and helpful neighbour but also as someone unafraid to stand up in meetings and demand overdue repairs for council flats or facilities for young people. Frampton put more effort into her campaign than the other two candidates – leafletting more extensively and creating a website, as well as holding a meet and greet event in Cripplegate’s Sir Ralph Perrin Centre.

Lionel Meyringer who has lived in the Barbican for 20 years polled a respectable – considering the small size of the electorate – 214 votes, although beyond the Barbican Estate his leafleting was patchy. Many of those we know on the Golden Lane council estate received no election material from him or his rival Angus Myline – and as far as we can determine, neither of them put up websites. At hustings and the wardmote, Meyringer was very much out-classed as a public speaker by Frampton and Myline. That said, he came across as pleasant and sincere, as well as someone who had put in lots of hard graft for his immediate community as secretary of his Barbican block house group and with the Barbican Association. We thought Meyringer would have made a good councillor but that Frampton will make an even better one.

Angus Myliner moved to the Barbican about 4 years ago and that was reflected in the 46 votes he received. Most Cripplegate voters want councillors who will work hard and stand up for them at the Guildhall. Experience has taught voters in the ward that those they can trust to serve them well are usually those who’ve lived in the ward or neighbouring Aldersgate for at least a decade or two. For a good number of voters, Frances Leach who moved to the Barbican shortly before being elected in Cripplegate on a Labour ticket in 2022 hasn’t been visible enough at the Guildhall supporting residents in committee meetings in the way her two Labour colleagues and the other independents in Cripplegate do. To many of her constituents, Leach appears to have treated becoming a City councillor as a stepping stone to other things.** Whether Myliner would have ended up being perceived in the same way is impossible to say – but once bitten twice shy!

That said, it’s time to do away with the undemocratic political system in the City of London that results in elections where it is often difficult to discern the differences between all the ‘independent’ candidates and the political blocks they fall into. The business vote should have been abolished long ago, it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the UK and it shouldn’t exist in the City of London! To sections of the financial city, the business vote may look like a Smithfield bargain*** at resident’s expense but ultimately it serves to bring disrepute on the square mile, and so the financial city – as well as residents – would be better off without it.

Cripplegate’s new councillor Dawn Frampton.

Notes

*In the near future we intend to post on Scott Longman’s attempts to make money out of the Freedom of the City of London award, something that makes him deeply unpopular in many financial city circles despite his ongoing failed attempts to ingratiate himself with the Guildhall establishment.

As we noted in our previous post on the Castle Baynard by-election, given how Longman is positioned it is possible that protest votes are what took him to the not quite dizzying heights of having 32 marks against his name in the ballot. That said, those who supported Longman as a candidate by nominating him are certainly curious. Longman was proposed by Jason Miles Dibley – seemingly founding director of QCC counter surveillance companies registered in Wells, Somerset (as are his other companies) but based at 1 Hind Court, 149 Fleet Street. Longman was seconded by Eamonn James Mullally, a City of London councillor for Farringdon Within and spouse of Rt Rev. and Rt Hon. the Lord Bishop of London Sarah Mullally.

Longman’s other nominees were Georgina King, Alberto Costa and Md Anamol Hq. Strangely, an Alberto Costa was a nominee for Saif Ahmad Masood in the City’s November 2022 Bridge & Bridge Without by-election – where Longman also stood unsuccessfully. We have yet to determine if the Masood Bridge nominee is the same person as the Alberto Costa who nominated Longman for last week’s election in Castle Baynard; or if one or both of these nominees is the same person as the Alberto Costa who is Conservative MP for South Leicestershire.

** Cripplegate ‘independent’ Paul Singh was elected in 2022 largely because there were eight seats up for grabs and ten candidates, two of whom were clearly tied to the Guildhall establishment and didn’t live in Cripplegate or neighbouring Aldersgate (the ward that – alongside Cripplegate – the Barbican Estate is split between). Singh took a tenancy on a Barbican flat for the purpose of standing as a candidate in Cripplegate where he knew he’d have a better chance of being elected if he appeared to be a resident, but it seems he uses his Breton House pied-à-terre no more than occasionally.

The fact that Singh is obviously commuting in and out of London hasn’t gone down fabulously well with Cripplegate voters but he does appear to work reasonably hard at being a councillor and certainly puts himself about. Singh is a surveyor and seems to have a small business advising on claims. There are persistent rumours that it is family money from small scale property developments that pay for Singh’s Barbican flat – although we’ve not seen any documentation to substantiate these claims.

If Singh stands for re-election in Cripplegate it will be interesting to see how these factors play out with voters – although that will to a large degree depend upon who he is standing against and if he does anything that particularly annoys residents before another vote. For example, if Singh were to be seen working with Ian Luder to get Sushil Saluja elected as Luder’s replacement as alderman (senior councillor) in Castle Baynard, this would go down very badly with a section of Cripplegate voters.

***A Smithfield bargain is a bargain in which the buyer of something is taken advantage of; a rip-off. This now archaic term derives from the Smithfield area in the City of London, where fairs were formerly held and which the City council is currently attempting to transform from a meat market into a cultural quarter – as part of its ‘destination city’ vanity project.