Opposition groups stage Council AGM walkout over ‘assault on democracy’

Hackney Council AGM, Wednesday 14 May 2025

Two of Hackney’s opposition groups walked out of a Town Hall meeting last night as they attacked the council over rulebook changes and a “record of failure”.

Yesterday (14 May) Labour councillors voted through a raft of constitutional amendments at the council’s annual general meeting, prompting Green party and Independent Socialist members to exit the chamber in protest after blasting the council for an “assault on democracy”.

The changes in question include reducing the length of politicians’ speeches made in the chamber, extending the necessary lead time for the public to submit questions to the Town Hall, and limiting the number of motions for debate at full council meetings to just one.

They also place restrictions on matters of discussion by “providing clarity”, namely by prohibiting opposition leaders from making “political statements in their own right” when responding to speeches from Hackney’s mayor.

Petitions are also now required to relate to things which are only within the council’s power to change, as opposed to “another public body”.

Independent Socialist councillor Claudia Turbet-Delof said this was “the way Labour responds to justified worries about its competence”.

“It continues in the tradition of endless, self-congratulatory speeches and filibustering at the expense of taxpayers’ money”, she said.

The Greens’ co-leader, Alastair Binnie-Lubbock, said it felt like “battening down the hatches one year out from an election”.

In a later statement, he added: “Our Town Hall is now a stifled and controlled environment.”

Under new rules, the mayor’s opening speech at full council meetings is also set to be cut from ten minutes to eight, while opposition parties’ response would be cut from five to three minutes.

The Conservative group’s acting leader, Ian Sharer, said the reforms meant opposition groups only had “fifteen minutes a year” to discuss political changes in Hackney.

“But still, we’ve got two and a half hours for planted questions by the Labour group to the Labour cabinet members, which is blatantly ridiculous,” he said.

“Minor politicians are still politicians, and we are talking politics here. You can’t now tell us we’ve only got fifteen minutes a year to speak and what we can speak about, which is basically nothing at all.

“This is not democracy working properly.”

Before the walkout, cabinet members defended the changes they said would help create a “robust, transparent, strong culture”.

Cllr Margaret Gordon (Labour), vice chair of the borough’s constitution committee, argued that the reforms followed the Local Government Association’s review of authorities across England, and had been the subject of “careful deliberation”.

She pointed to the mayor’s speaking time also being curtailed, and urged her colleagues to vote for the plans “so we can get our business done”.

Deputy mayor, Cllr Anntoinette Bramble (Labour), said the amendments would “ensure we get that balance of hearing our residents in the chamber and getting through the business of why were are here. That is truly important.”

She also stressed that she had decided to make the changes subject to the constitution committee she chaired, meaning there was still a “cross-party, public forum” for the opposition to raise concerns about reforms.

“That is the constitution, that is democracy, and that is how we best serve our residents,” she said.

As they left, the Green party and Independent councillors stood up before the chamber brandishing signs highlighting their concerns over the “harmful” constitutional changes, alongside “systemic housing failures”, service cuts and “ignoring genocide”.

The latter sign referred to the council’s resisting calls to divest its pension fund from firms linked to producing weapons for Israel.

Hackney Council has insisted that neither it or its fund manager has the power to control these “indirect” investments, which work by contributing to the pooled, “passive” local government pension scheme.

Described by the opposition groups as a “municipal showcase”, the meeting also saw the election of Cllr Sharon Patrick (Labour) as the council’s new civic mayor and Town Hall speaker, replacing Cllr Sheila Suso-Runge (Labour).

Cllr Grace Adebayo (Labour) was elected deputy Speaker.