Clive Furness wants to be the mayor of a borough he thinks in some ways is “divided”.
When the former Labour party councillor announced he would stand as Reform UK’s mayoral candidate in Newham last month, he said: “Across the country and in Newham I see people dividing on the basis of ethnicity and religion.”
The claim came in for criticism from local Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) campaigners and the London Labour party.
Miriam Scharf, co-chair of SUTR, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that far from being divided, people in Newham “enjoy each other’s differences” and “learn from each other’s cultures”.
Labour, meanwhile, said Newham’s diversity was “something Newham residents are proud of”.
Shortly afterwards, a study commissioned by Labour-run Newham Council found that most people living in the borough “consider the area to be cohesive, with people from different backgrounds living well together”.
Speaking to the LDRS, Furness admits that’s true “for 99 per cent of the people, 99 per cent of the time”.
He says: “I think there are lots of areas where the differences between people could easily become more motivating than the things they have in common.”
There are, he claims, “gangs based on ethnicity who don’t get on well together” and “clearly problems between Hindus and Muslims”.
“It only takes somebody to light the blue touch paper,” Furness claims, “and that blue touch paper might be who won the cricket match”.
More specifically, Furness also believes that politics is becoming divided based on race and religion.
“If I look around the borough, I talk to absolutely anybody, they’re now talking in terms of ‘the Bangladeshis might vote for Forhad [Hussain, Labour candidate], the Pakistanis are going to vote for [Newham Independents candidate Mehmood] Mirza.
“‘The white middle class in the north are going to vote for the Greens. Labour will pick up in some places the whites in the south. The whites and the eastern Europeans and the Indians are going to vote Reform [UK].”
In particular, Furness accuses Labour of “falling over backwards to ensure that it doesn’t lose the Muslim vote”. That’s a claim he’s made before.
In 2022, Furness even wrote a 44-page article for his Open Newham blog that claimed an “unholy alliance” of the “hard left” and “Islamist extremists” had conspired to replace previous Labour mayor Robin Wales with Rokhsana Fiaz.
He claims Ramadan celebrations at the council’s Dockside headquarters were part of Fiaz’s “pay back” to supporters. London Labour, however, says Wales was “removed by local members following concerns about his record in office”.
Furness is also hostile to government efforts to define Islamophobia – believing these to be a threat to free speech. “Why should me saying, ‘I think your faith is a load of rubbish’ be an offence?” he asks.
In December last a year, a speech by Labour councillor Sabia Kamali indicated Islamophobia goes beyond criticism of religion, speaking of physical attacks on Muslim women.
Cllr Kamali spoke of a Muslim woman whose “hijab was pulled so violently she feared her neck would snap”. She said she herself had been the victim of an attack when a man threw a rock through her car window.
But Furness says such incidents are already covered by law. “The crimes are harrassment and criminal damage,” he says, “they already exist”.
Furness says he wants to stand with a message of “one Newham”. He explains: “If elected, my intention is to work for everyone, regardless of faith and irrespective of whether people have faith, and of ethnicity”.
One of his promises is to put “an end to where council tax is being used as an ATM for politicians to fund their pet projects”.
“We applied for London borough of culture,” he says. “Even after we lost it we carried on funding the London borough of culture office.
“We were paying the deputy director – deputy chief director, I think he was – to do that, close to £200,000 a year, plus an office, plus the staff. I’m not against doing things that bring excitement into the borough. But when you’ve lost it, why don’t you cut bait and move on?”
Furness, however, is cautious to avoid falling into the trap of promising a council tax freeze or cut. “I’m not promising any cuts in council tax,” he says. “What I’m promising is to get the funding under control. When the funding is under control, we can decide how much money we need and how we’re going to spend it.”
Furness also has thoughts on how to deal with the three main challenges to every council’s budget – special educational needs, adult social care, and temporary accommodation for homeless people.
On adult social care, Furness thinks there could be potential for artificial intelligence to help manage social workers’ admin work and caseloads. “I’d like to use AI to see how many lives does spending an extra million save us?
“If you’ve got caseloads, you’ve got case files that are twelve inches thick, which is not impossible, and you’ve got case workers that have more cases than they can adequately deal with. We’re not dealing with the problem correctly. We need to find a way to filter them, and the existing ways of doing it are not working.”
On temporary accommodation – by far the biggest challenge to the council’s finances – Furness says the council could “either buy or build our own temporary accommodation. I mean flats, houses that people can live in, but they won’t have the same status as a permanent lease.”
This would mean more borrowing, adding to the council’s £2billion debt. But Furness says this could be cheaper than renting accommodation from the private sector. And he says the money new housing brings in could pay down the debt in the long run.
“As long as we can get the rents to cover the cost of the lending, then that will be cheaper,” Furness says. “If it’s more expensive to build and let than it is to rent, we wouldn’t build. But at the moment, that seems to be the best way forward.”
There are seven other candidates standing to be Newham’s mayor on Thursday, 7 May.
They are Conservative Terri Bloore, Green party candidate Areeq Choudhury, Labour’s Forhad Hussain, Kamran Malik of the Communities United Party, Mehmood Mirza of Newham Independents, Bharath Swamy of the Christian Peoples Alliance and Liberal Democrat Laura Willoughby. The LDRS is aiming to interview all of them.
Furness says he thinks the contest is a “four-horse race” between him, the Greens, Labour and Newham Independents. But he thinks he stands a chance of winning.
“We’re coming from a zero virtually, so anything’s an improvement,” he admits. But, he adds, “I’m in it to win it”.
