Newcastle Council leader and right-wing NEC member to depart political scene
Newcastle Council leader Nick forbes has announced that he will quit politics when his term as a councillor ends in May.
Forbes was deselected earlier this month in a ‘landslide’ vote by members in his ward to replace him with a new candidate and his hopes of being selected to stand in a different ward have apparently evaporated.
In May last year, Forbes survived a challenge to his leadership but his deputy lost. Newcastle will need a new council leader after May’s elections – and Starmer a new ally on the NEC.
In 2018, Forbes pleaded with council leaders around the country to sign letter supporting fellow right-winger Clare Kober when the party intervened in Kober’s ‘HDV’ gentrification project that was widely hated among Haringey locals. Yet the motion against which the letter protested was Forbes’s own motion, which he had pushed through as a watered-down version of a much stronger one originally tabled by the then-Corbyn-friendly NEC.
In 2016, the Forbes-led council tabled a pay-cut of up to almost £4,000 a year from the incomes of ‘middle managers and blue-collar workers’.
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