London mayor Sadiq Khan

• LLOYD Hatton was worried that the Green Party has gone “into coalition with the Conservatives” on the London Assembly, following the May elections, (Vote ‘Green’ but get ‘Blue’, June 4).

The reality is quite different.

As Londoners know, the actual power for running our city rests entirely with the mayor, and last month Labour’s Sadiq Khan was voted back into that role.

The assembly Mr Hatton was writing about is a scrutiny body, elected to hold the mayor to account, though it also has an ability to reject strategies or amend his budget, if a two-thirds majority agrees.

The new assembly consists of 11 Labour members, nine Conservatives, three Greens and two Liberal Democrats.

So a two-thirds majority on anything is unlikely, and its committees overlook areas such as budget and performance, housing, police, transport and so on.

In previous years all the parties worked together to ensure chairs of these committees were shared out fairly, according to the number of seats each group held.

This time Labour decided to walk away from any agreement and refused to chair any committees at all, leaving the other parties to divide the work between themselves.

This was the “unholy alliance” of Conservatives, Greens and Liberal Democrats that Mr Hatton referred to.

It’s far from clear why the Labour members chose to abandon their scrutiny responsibility in this way, though it may well relate to their failed attempt to demand control of the transport committee, which is poised to ask the mayor important questions about his damaging Silvertown tunnel scheme.

Certainly a leaked email has shown that before the election the Labour group blocked questions about this from one of its own members which it felt could have been “deeply embarrassing” to Sadiq Khan’s campaign.

If the Lloyd Hatton who wrote last week’s letter is the same one who wrote a letter in November last year, as a member of Holborn and St Pancras Labour Party, he should perhaps worry more about his own party’s attitudes to scrutiny and responsibility than about criticising other parties for getting on with the job they were elected to do.

ANDREW MYER
Islington Green Party