Labour in London, not so good

Labour in London, not so good

Even now, on Saturday morning, it’s probably too early to say what the local elections mean politically. I feel I made a mistake commenting too early last year.

Over the last two days, the story has been that Labour did well in London; there are two punctures in that balloon, Harrow and Tower Hamlets. I believe these losses are caused by a sickness in both the Labour Party and possibly in society itself. In the Labour Party left-right factionalism allied to ultra-communalism/ethno-nationalism has broken both the Party and its connection with its electorate. When one stirs in two spoons of careerism this becomes deadly to the Party and to democratic politics.

I thought Harrow was vulnerable from looking at the Mayor & GLA results last year, as the early declaration of the Harrow & Brent seat results in the GLA elections (last year) had given us all a squeaky bum moment. Given that both councils were Labour, it was expected that there would be a strong vote for Sadiq; there wasn’t. Closer examination of the results suggested that Labour would  Harrow council; I thought that the polling predicted swing to Labour across London would be enough to save it. I was wrong.

The Tower Hamlets result is the culmination of 11 years of bad politics in both the Labour Party and Tower Hamlets; the community is now split on ethnic grounds. Some say it was the poor policies of Mayor Biggs, particularly on liveable streets/low traffic networks which was seen by many as serving the interests of a middle class party against the interests of brown (& white) working class who needed the mobility. In addition, the cuts, in public nurseries, and the notorious ‘fire and re-hire’ programme of the Mayor were unpopular with the Party and the community. This loss is made worse, for Labour, by last year’s referendum in TH to retain the Mayoral system in which Bigg’s Labour campaigned to retain it. My feelings on Mayors is well publicised but it’s possible that Aspire would not have been able to do so well if there wasn’t a ‘whole boro’ mandate being sought.

In Harrow, Labour lost to the Tories, and TH to Aspire. Harrow is over 52% ethnic minority and over 26% Indian, Tower Hamlets has over 55% ethnic minority and over 32% Bangladeshi.

While it is easy to name names in those two borough Labour Parties the true sickness is in Labour’s governance. London Labour has colluded with the leaderships of these two borough parties, specifically the MPs, and in the case of Tower Hamlets for over a decade. This is reinforced by McNicol’s attempts to use senior regional staff as weapon in the factional war, and then Evans’ redundancy programme. I believe that there are only two field/campaign staff left employed by London Labour.

Big governance decisions are not being taken with a view to building a democratic campaigning party or even a democratic parliamentary party. Wrong things have happened and are still happening.

There are plenty of people arguing that by prioritising a ‘blue labour’ policy vector, that Starmer’s Labour is telling the new members of Labour’s coalition that it has nothing to offer them and in doing so jeopardises the support of the young, workers, renters and ethnic minority voters. The relatively good results for the Lib Dems and Greens (& Aspire) shows that people do have somewhere else to go, and some have found out.  …