Greens booted out of council cabinet
By Hugh Sullivan
The coalition of Labour and Green party councillors, which has shared control of Hastings Borough Council since the local election in May, has fallen apart. The two Green councillors, Cllrs Julia Hilton and Glenn Haffenden, who were serving along with six Labour members on the council’s cabinet, have been ejected from it by council leader Paul Barnett.
Labour will now attempt to go it alone as a minority party, having 15 out of 32 councillors. The Conservatives hold 12 seats; Greens the other five.
Cabinet May 2022
It appears from separate statements made by Cllrs Hilton and Barnett at the end of last week that there has been no falling out between the parties at borough level. Labour and Green councillors had just voted together (against Conservative opposition) to endorse the recent cabinet decision to take grounds maintenance back in-house, a programme led by Cllr Hilton as portfolio holder for Climate Change and the Natural Environment.
National Executive intervention
Rather, the ejection of the Greens from cabinet has been demanded by the Labour party’s national executive. According to an open letter from Cllr Hilton, the national party threatened Cllr Barnett with expulsion if he failed to take this course.
In announcing the ejection, Cllr Barnett issued a statement giving personal thanks for “the professional response and relationship I have enjoyed with Cllr Julia Hilton the leader of the Green Party group … and the hard work Cllr Glenn Haffenden and herself have put in to their roles within the cabinet”. He went on to state that he would be “looking to find a way to continue that constructive dialogue as we move forward. We are all passionate about our town, the climate change challenge and the huge need to protect our residents from the Conservatives’ destructive policies.” However, he also admitted that any new arrangement would have to be “in agreement with Labour’s national executive committee”.
In the meantime Cllr Hilton issued an open letter expressing her “huge regret” that Cllr Barnett had “bowed to pressure” which will force him to run “what will be an unstable and inefficient minority administration” in place of an “arrangement which was working well [with] growing openness and transparency.
“That national Labour Party officials should wade in and pull the strings of the local Labour group with no thought for the best interests of the people of Hastings and St Leonards shows a complete disregard for local democracy”, she wrote. “Clearly the national Labour Party cares more about its own internal rules than the lives of people in our town and places little value in parties working together.”
“High-handed”
She called upon local Labour councillors and members “to protest in the strongest terms against this sort of high-handed behaviour on the part of their leadership, and to defy national Labour diktats that go against the interests of local communities”.
At the time of going to press there was no indication amongst Labour councillors in Hastings that any defiance is in the offing. However, a number of local Labour party supporters have been vocal on social media in criticism of the intervention by the National Executive.
Less than four months ago, the same executive barred another councillor in cabinet Maya Evans, from seeking nomination as prospective Labour candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Hastings & Rye. There were similar expressions of outrage vented then on social media at the manner in which Helena Dollimore, seen as the national executive’s preferred candidate, was selected. A formal letter of protest signed by a number of prominent councillors and ex-councillors, including current cabinet members Judy Rogers, Andy Batsford and Simon Willis, was submitted to the executive. But no response has ever been publicly aired.
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