We are told Jacqueline Chan, part of the now disgraced former leadership at the Guild of Young Freemen, would comb LinkedIn looking for gossip about GYF members. Chan seems to have seen a LinkedIn post from a GYF member that detailed a visit to Auschwitz. Chan added a snippet about this to a GYF WhatsApp chat and Peck replied by asking if this GYF member was going to stay at the death camp. This…
You wouldn’t guess that Michael Cassidy’s career was at best patchy from reading his City Architecture Forum published pamphlet Something In The City: Reflections on a career in the City of London. This very short account of Cassidy’s life – 42 small pages with a fair amount of white space – is largely fact free and tells the reader very little but does make it obvious that Cassidy has an ego that…
On 19 June 2026 City councillor Nighat Qureishi used LinkedIn to announce the Billingsgate Network Group she heads had scored a City of London council grant. By checking the council website we quickly confirmed this was true. Information about the Billingsgate Network Group is rather harder to come by - when we looked it was not registered with Companies House or the Charities Commission. This is…
This post provides a round up of the most newsworthy discussions at the final full City council meeting before the summer break. The reluctant removal of the Freedom of the City of London from disgraced ex-royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor moves forward at a snail's pace - after the council leadership was forced to take action by a successful campaign led by Alder Martha Grekos. Attempts to…
As we previously reported, the leadership of the City of London Corporation in 2024 commissioned a report from Professor William Pettigrew on “Assessing the Connections between the Transatlantic Traffic in Enslaved African People and the City of London Corporation”. They did this as a reputation washing initiative that seemed like a good idea at the time. When the report was recently produced,…
Here we reproduce an email that Caroline Haines sent to all 125 City of London councillors on Friday, 10 July 2026. It shows that our local authority is panicking over the imminent publication of William Pettigrew's report 'Assessing the Connections between the Transatlantic Traffic in Enslaved African People and the City of London Corporation’. The City council clearly views the paper – which it…
The lack of joined up thinking and poor use of available resources for fitness and wellness in the City of London was made particularly evident by the blasé discussion of the Stronger Communities Fund shortly after the vote to retain the Golden Lane Leisure Centre sports hall at the 30 June 2026 Community & Children’s Services Committee meeting.
After massive push back to the closure of the Aldgate School early learning provision, the City council decided to extend funding for a couple of years. Subsequent to that a proposal emerged to cut the funding from £174,000 to £60,000. So earlier this week the relevant committee should have voted on whether to cut funding to £60,000 or completely defund this early learning service. In the end the…
The conclusion of a high profile trial that ended with two Chinese spies being jailed last week - they had a local boss who was close to the City of London council leadership & one spy was also a City of London Police special constable - apparently wasn’t reason enough for councillors Chris Hayward and James Thomson to refrain from posting on social media about their recent jaunt to China.
Since it was created 9 years ago, this blog has been reporting on the way the City of London council leadership weaponises standards. For the entire time we’ve been covering our local authority’s standards regime establishment supporters have been free to flout the rules, and those who oppose that establishment have been persecuted for alleged […]