Antony Manchester, John Edwards, Greenwashing & BlackRock’s Influence Over City Council Policy On London Wall West, Planning & China

Both the City chair of policy (=’leader’ of the council) Chris Hayward and lord mayor Michael Mainelli are members for Broad Street, where BlackRock are a major employer and dominant player in ward politics due to the anachronistic and undemocratic business vote system. For those who wonder where the City council’s office building and China appeasement policies come from, the answer should be at least in part they are handed down by the American mega-fund manager BlackRock, a company the local authority ‘leaders’ Hayward and Mainelli need to please if they are to continue enjoying their council gowns and dinners – not to mention the prospect of ‘honours’ when they step down from their current roles as political puppets.

Kawsar Zaman & Other City of London Councillors Including McGuinness, Hayward, Mainelli & Edhem, Lend Respectability To Repressive Regimes in Turkey, China & Elsewhere

The City of London council has for years given respectability to thuggish regimes in China, Turkey and other countries. Most of its members don’t have anything to do with this aspect of its activities. All 125 of them, however, share responsibility for what it does, and are tainted with the shame of appeasement unless they speak out. Very few do, not because they’re comfortable with what is being done in their name, but because those who step out of line with the leaders are politically undermined, socially ostracised and personally smeared. Members who aren’t indifferent to the suffering of others should find strength in numbers to stop the the leaders and some of their followers from appeasing thuggish regimes. But they probably won’t, which means that the abolition of this council which facilitates international evil is the only solution.

City Corporation Sounds Like A Stuck Record As It Appeases The Chinese Ruling Class

I had suggested that the Lord Mayor and Chair of Policy forward their reply to Free Tibet to all members, who are collectively responsible for the Corporation’s policy on China. I now attach their reply, which (for the third time) they haven’t forwarded to members. obvious why they want to keep members in the dark. The Corporation’s PR department hasn’t been able to invent any new justifications for the appeasement policy. So the Lord Mayor and Chair of Policy have just repeated old ones that were demolished in previous letters from the World Uyghur Congress and Hong Kong Watch, and again in the letter from Free Tibet. In short, the Corporation has run out of spin on this issue – and that’s a problem, because the issue isn’t going away.

Open Letter To The City of London Corporation From Free Tibet

Free Tibet is concerned that the City Corporation’s policy of accommodating China by turning a blind eye to its actions and threats will ultimately be harmful to everyone except those who undemocratically hold and abuse power in Beijing. We call on the Corporation to change course. Decency demands that life and liberty in Tibet and China should take priority over helping some of the Corporation’s commercial “stakeholders” to make profits from facilitating Chinese expansion, including in the City of London itself.

Hitler, Xi Jinping & The City Corporation

Head of the City of London council Catherine McGuinness apparently thinks that the best thing the Corporation can do for “all the Chinese people”, presumably including those in ‘re-education’ camps because of their ethnicity or in jail because of their political or religious beliefs, is to talk to their oppressors about climate change. Xi’s rhetoric yesterday to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China echoed Hitler’s Nuremberg speeches and just as worrying is the deployment of Nazi jurisprudence – specifically the work of Carl Schmitt – to provide legal justification for the national security law in Hong Kong.

When Xi Jinping Tells The City To Jump, Catherine McGuinness Asks How High?

Leaving aside the question of whether the Corporation as a public authority should be representing private commercial interests and using quasi-public money to do so, it does not follow that if the Corporation ended its policy of appeasement with China, that would end its ability to “stand up for the business City”. The UK trades with many countries that do not abuse human rights – in fact most of its major trading partners don’t. China is the big exception. It is troubling to think that the Chair of Policy’s statement, which equates ending the Corporation’s appeasement of China with its being unable generally to represent the business City as it has previously done, only makes sense if the Chinese Communist Party already influences the business City and the Corporation’s leadership to such an extent that the Corporation has become the party’s puppet.

David Alton’s Hong Kong Message To The City Of London Council

I have become increasingly aware how much the issue of trade has become a dominant part of UK foreign policy. It is not tenable for the Corporation to promote deepening trade with China with no regard to the ongoing crackdown in Hong Kong. That is, in itself, a foreign policy stance.

RECLAIM EC1

No To Business Votes, Yes To Democracy!

Hong Kong Watch