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Dave Hill: Keith Prince has seen the writing on the Conservatives’ wall

The defection of the London Assembly member and Havering councillor to Reform points to a further crumbling of the London Tories
Dave Hill

He was arguably not the most Farageist of the group, but Keith Prince always looked one of the more likely of the London Assembly Conservatives to throw in their lot with Reform UK.

He was clearly on the right wing of the party: early last year, for example, he thought it a good idea to book celebrity lout Lee Anderson as star guest at a “gala dinner” on a date that turned out to be inconveniently adjacent to Anderson’s gutter lie that Islamists had “got control” of Sir Sadiq Khan. Anderson defected to Reform soon after. Now, Prince can again be an Anderson fan without having to hide it.

His local political landscape will have influenced his calculations. As well as representing Havering & Redbridge on the assembly, Prince is a councillor in Havering, which has a unique electoral microclimate.

In the May 2022 borough elections, the Conservatives finished second best to a large group of Residents’ Association candidates, one of whom has since then been the council’s leader. Some of those who backed these hyperlocal non-politicians, who have long been a part of the Havering scene, might well like the look of Reform. Maybe some of their representatives do too.

Faragesim has made more inroads in Havering in the past than in any other London borough: in the 2014 borough contests, his UK Independence Party won seven seats. After Bexley, it is perhaps the borough most likely to be won by Reform next year. And last year, a local MP, Julia Lopez, only just held off a Reform challenge. Another, Romford’s flag-waving Andrew Rosindell, survived a 30 per cent vote share drop, as Reform’s candidate took 22 per cent.

In January, Prince stepped down as Havering Tory group leader, reportedly citing “changes in his personal and professional circumstances” for his decision. It seems he thinks he’s seen the writing on the Tory wall – a siren scrawl that says “the future of the Right is Reform”.

Which London Conservatives might follow Prince? It isn’t hard to imagine fellow Havering – and maybe fellow Redbridge – Tories doing so. As for the London Assembly group, it contains two conspicuous Trump Tories in its leader, the perma-catastrophist Susan Hall, and her ally Alessandro Georgiou, who also leads the Conservatives on Labour-run Enfield Council.

In her social media output, as charmless as it is copious, Hall routinely allies herself with figures even further to the Right than Farage, such as “remigration” advocate Rupert Lowe MP and an ethnonationalist, self-styled “free speech” martyr who lately described the far-Right so-called Tommy Robinson, a man with a considerable criminal record, as a “national treasure”.

Hall is, though, seen as a diehard party loyalist. It would be quite a leap for her to forsake Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who she succeeded on the assembly in 2017 after Badenoch became an MP, and has described as a mentor.

As for Georgiou, any urge he might have to follow Prince by jumping on the Reform bandwagon – which he’d fit into just as well as Prince or Hall – might be tempered by his own local ambitions. In 2022, against the London trend, the Tories closed the gap on Labour in Enfield, and in a recent exchange of unpleasantries on X/Twitter with current leader Ergin Erbil, Georgiou underlined his appetite for displacing him.

Giorgiou, like Prince, seems to have identified a danger to his prospects from Reform: following last month’s United The Kingdom march, led by Robinson, he recorded a video address in which he declared himself deeply moved by the sight of so many “Brits” processing through central London, attempting, somewhat ambitiously, to portray an almost wholly white gathering as multicultural; after the government’s New Towns taskforce confirmed that it had recommended Green Belt land in Enfield as a site for 21,000 homes, he went Full Winston in his indignation.

But such performances seem designed to dissuade Enfield voters who’ve previously backed local Tories from peeling off to Reform – thereby splitting the Right vote and potentially thwarting  Georgiou’s quest – rather than a sign that Georgiou thinks his chances would be improved by changing sides. After all, Enfield doesn’t have the same history of Farage-friendliness as Havering.

All this switching and Rule, Britannia positioning is taking place as the Conservatives gather in Manchester for their annual conference. Few are in an upbeat mood. In a despairing LinkedIn post, Kevin Davies, who led Kingston Council from 2014 to 2018, has likened attending to travelling to a funeral. “This is the first time I have gone to a conference not understanding what the point is,” he writes.

Davies has intimate experienced of the Tory decline in London. At the end of his four years in charge there, during which the EU referendum took place, his party was routed in Kingston by the Liberal Democrats, losing 19 seats to be reduced to an opposition group of nine. In 2022, it fell further still, winning just three seats.

Do the Tories in London – or anywhere else – have any sort of realistic plan for reversing their decline? Perhaps they will emerge from next May’s highly unpredictable borough contests better off than they are now, given Labour’s national unpopularity.

But their response to Reform so far, even in the cosmopolitan capital, has been to imitate rather than challenge it. And all the while, Reform has continued to take their voters and recruit their politicians. Maybe they shouldn’t set their hopes too high.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo from Keith Prince X/Twitter feed.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Alessandro Georgiou, Conservatives, Keith Prince, Susan Hall

John Vane: Farringdon chuggers

Their flattery was energetic but it failed
John Vane

I had almost made it over Cowcross Street before being chased and hailed.

“Good morning, young man, you’re looking great today, I know you’re rushing off to a meeting with Bill Gates, but…”

A bit of what he said was true. I was, indeed, in a rush. I mentioned this over my shoulder as I completed my scuttle from the brand new Elizabeth line Farringdon station into the one opposite. It is old. Even older than me.

Addressing gentlemen in their sixties as “young man” is an interesting ploy. What is the thinking behind it? That we’ll be flattered? Amused? Charmed? How often, I wonder, does it work?

It didn’t work with me. I hastened to the barrier, Freedom Pass in hand, hoping I had conveyed some sense of good humour and well-wishing to my artful pursuer, whose line of work, after all, isn’t one I need to consider.

Guys like him, young, usually black, buzzing with ersatz affability, pouncing evangelically on passers-by, have become a regular feature of this pedestrianised link in a rail chain now used by up to 150,000 people daily.

You’ve seen them there. You’ve seen them elsewhere. You’ve seen the exposes. The complaints. Maybe you’ve made one. If so, it didn’t work.

There’s no escaping them. Your only option is to observe them while rebuffing them and wonder how they come up with their lines. Why Bill Gates? Why me?

An old favourite is “Could I be cheeky…?” Well, you can try. But I’ve got what I wanted from the encounter: a scan of your wares (a magazine full of nothing); a look into your eyes (less empty, more hopeful and more hopeless at the same time). You, on the other hand, have not.

This high-pressure chugging for an opaquely social mission is a modern London thing, but it is also an adjunct to a Farringdon tradition.

For centuries, long before the influx of creatives and tech, this mosaic tile of London, a subset of Clerkenwell and a spit from Smithfield, was a labyrinth of hustlers and hoods.

During the reign of the first Elizabeth, Turnmill Street, which leads off Cowcross, was notorious for crime and vulgarity, which is why playwrights of the era loved it.

The neighbourhood’s narrow streets were nicknamed Jack Ketch’s Warren, because so many who lived round there ended up being dispatched by Charle II’s executioner.

Under Victoria, Charles Dickens fashioned the Oliver Twist pickpocketing scene on Clerkenwell Green, which is a two-minute walk from the station.

The Farringdon chuggers aren’t robbers or thieves, but their methods can make you feel cornered and wary of being fleeced. Presumably, it works – at least well enough for enough of them to keep on trying, picking their targets, zooming in, referring to old blokes as “young man”.

And you have to feel for them. But Betsey Trotwood would not have approved, and even were I Bill Gates himself I doubt I would give them a bean.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Farringdon

Julie Hamill: Return of Arthur the parrot – a story of modern London

Scared by a cat, a much-loved pet took flight - but the good people of Willesden got him back home
Julie Hamill

Posters of a striking, emerald-green, missing parrot with beautiful round eyes began appearing on my feed. His name was Arthur, and something about him seemed to radiate personality. I am always sad when I see a pet is lost, and immediately felt for Arthur’s owners, who I was sure must have been frantic.

I was transported to the time when our family dog, Sandy, went missing in Bellshill, Scotland, during my early childhood. Sandy had soft white curly fur (probably part poodle), pointy pink ears and a sandy-coloured stripe down his back. Our street neighbours joined in the search, calling his name, checking gardens, knocking on doors. In the end, it was my sister, Louise, who trusted her instinct, knocked on the right door and found our beloved pet (he’d been stolen).

Arthur the parrot’s story unfolded decades later in London. He wasn’t stolen, he was startled. One afternoon, a cat jumped on top of his outdoor cage, bending the netting just enough to open a small gap. Terrified, the four-year-old parrot launched himself skyward over the top of the cat and vanished beyond the rooftops.

Christy Zetta King, his owner, was at home at the time. “I was working on my laptop when Arthur was in his outer cage, getting his vitamin D,” she says, when I visit. “It was all over so fast. Before I could react or yell, it was too late. Arthur flew off. I knew he’d be disoriented. Parrots don’t have a homing instinct, like pigeons. He wouldn’t know how to get back. Immediately we went into rescue mode, calling for him loudly, even with a megaphone, as the first thing we taught him was to come to us when called.”

Christy and her partner, Michael Zmahar, like her a successful author from Slovenia, moved to London only two years ago with Arthur and Lexi, their incredibly elderly and wonderfully sprightly 19-year-old “golden something” rescue dog. What happened next surprised them.

“London is nothing like Slovenia,” Christy explains. “There, if you lose a pet it’s just: good luck! But here, everyone helped. People put out seeds and water, texted us, called his name in the streets. Kids rode off on bikes to look for him. We were shocked, in the best way.”

Michael agrees: “Our neighbours on this street are Ukrainian, French, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian — everyone came out. First, they thought, who’s yelling with a megaphone? But then they joined in.”

While the couple scoured the streets and posted online, neighbours spread the word on WhatsApp and Nextdoor. Christy notified parrot-alert groups, and posted flyers on trees. “We received about 100 calls that day,” says Christy. “Arthur was spotted up a tree in the park, then over on Willesden Lane, a mile away.”

Unnamed 15

After nearly 48 hours, salvation came from a young Brazilian couple, Liz and Rafa, who lived in a flat five storeys up beside a towering tree. They heard squawking at their window and saw a vivid green bird with red feathers perched about a foot away. They offered him a banana, which he ate. The ever-sociable Arthur eventually climbed on to an arm and was brought inside.

“Rafa and Liz don’t speak a lot of English, so didn’t even know he was missing,” Christy adds. “Arthur is an Eclectus parrot from the Solomon Islands, a special bird, not something you usually see in Willesden! He’s vulnerable to cats, foxes and other birds. Liz had done so much research on parrots, what to feed them, how to behave around them. She contacted the parrot society that I had previously notified. They told her to identify the ring around his leg and ask me for the ID number. Once she knew we were the owners,  she sent a video of him eating the banana. We were so happy our boy was with good people.”

Arthur was soon returned. “He got lost on Saturday afternoon, he was at their flat by 8pm that night, and we were reunited Monday,” Christy says. Meeting Arthur in person, I understand the attachment. He’s great with me, very playful, just as Christy and Michael trained him to be – familiar and friendly with people.

At one point he tries to nibble my earrings before giving me a kiss and sticking his tongue out. He even poses for photos by bending his head from side to side. As well as an ear-splitting loud squawk, he boasts a wide vocabulary in both Slovenian and English, and happily shouts phrases like “Good bird!”, “What’s up?”, “How are you?” and of course, his own name. “He’s such a goof,” Christy laughs.

Michael points out that although people meet him, love him and then want to own a parrot as a pet, they don’t realise the commitment required. “It’s like caring for a five-year-old who could live for 40 years. They’re super smart, demanding and full of personality. People don’t realise the level of work, expense and responsibility.”

I am touched to hear that the search for Arthur also involved one very special neighbour, who was the first to hear him after his escape. “A woman four doors down, who is blind, spends her days listening to birdsong in her garden,” Michael says. “She heard a strange-voiced bird and contacted us. ‘Does your bird call his own name?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ we replied, ‘that’s him, that’s King Arthur!’”

The ordeal left Christy and Michael with more than relief. “It was stressful, of course,” says Christy, “but also uplifting. We’ve never felt this kind of support anywhere we’ve lived before. London gave us kindness, good energy, protection, and we got Arthur back.”

After another parrot kiss goodbye, I head home. I think of the day Louise brought Sandy home in her arms. I visualised him jogging up our hallway to greet me, his tail wagging, my fingers in his furry curls.

Foll0w Julie Hamill on Instagram. Enjoy Christy and Michael rejoicing in Arthur’s return here. It’s just as well that Arthur wasn’t stolen: very few pets reported stolen in the capital are recovered.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Willesden

Christabel Cooper: If fewer ‘White British’ means a nation in decline, why is London so successful?

Using the capital to paint apocalyptic visions conveniently ignores its contentment with diversity and its economic vitality
Christabel Cooper

In the last few weeks, several high-profile commentators have expressed apocalyptic concerns about the fall in the percentage of “White British” people in the UK. In the Daily Telegraph, Professor Matt Goodwin claimed “the white British will become a minority group in the UK by the year 2063”. Conservative MP Neil O’Brien wrote (also in the Telegraph) that “Britain is heading for utter oblivion”, in part because of high migration and consequent rapid demographic change.

They are fond of citing startling statistics from London to back up their dystopian claims. O’Brien, for example, notes that in Greater London, only a third of private renters are White British. In the Standard, David Goodhart stated that “just over one in five school children are white British”.

What is curious about this is that if you are going to argue that a lack of “White British” people is destroying Britain, pointing to London, the region of the UK which is both the richest and the most tolerant part of the country, is a pretty odd choice.

Take productivity. London remains the most economically productive region in the UK. In 2023, output per hour in the capital was 28.5 per cent higher than the UK average and significantly above every other part of the country. Were ethnic diversity a drag on economic output, this situation would be difficult to explain.

In fact, many of the city’s key sectors – from finance, to tech, to hospitality – are powered by migrant labour. A 2017 PwC report estimated that each migrant worker contributes an additional £46,000 in Gross Value Added to London’s economy per year. With about 1.8 million non-UK-born workers, this translates into around £83 billion annually – around 22 per cent of the city’s economic output.

Education tells a similar story. Inner London schools, notorious for low achievement and disorder in the 1980s, are now among the best-performing in the country. This turnaround occurred as the city’s schools became increasingly ethnically diverse. Today, school students in London, many of them from low-income or immigrant backgrounds, routinely outperform their peers elsewhere.

Researchers point to targeted investment (such as the London Challenge) and high-quality leadership, but also the ambitions of immigrant families, which place a strong emphasis on education. Rather than pulling down standards, demographic change appears to have helped raise them.

Although the city has large ethnic minority populations that could form concentrated enclaves, London is less racially segregated than any major US city and not especially segregated by UK standards either, according to analysis by John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times. Surveys show that Londoners – crucially including white Londoners – are more positive about immigration and multiculturalism than residents of less diverse areas. This aligns with social science research showing that proximity to diversity leads to familiarity and tolerance. A 2014 Demos study found that White British people who live in diverse areas are less opposed to immigration and less supportive of far-right parties.

Of course, none of this is to say that London is without problems. High levels of migration have contributed to London’s rising population and therefore become a factor in its housing supply problems and pressures on public services, with many poorer migrant families having high levels of need. However, perceptions that migrants are routinely prioritised over longer-established residents for social housing are mistaken, with borough allocations based on need within a legal framework that encourages a requirement for recipients having been residents for at least two years.

London has not been immune from racially divisive politics: in 2006, the British National Party won 12 council seats in Barking & Dagenham and although they were ousted four years later, some parts of Outer London could be fertile ground for Reform UK in next year’s borough elections. The politics of Tower Hamlets provide another cautionary tale. Lutfur Rahman was re-elected as the borough’s Mayor in 2022 due largely to the continuing support of fellow local Bangladeshi Londoners, despite having served a five-year ban on seeking office after an election court found him to have previously benefited from “corrupt and illegal practices”.

Still, the idea that the rest of the country is about to follow London’s demographic trajectory – and plunge into dramatic social decline as a result – does not hold up. London is a clear outlier: in 2023 around 41 per cent of its residents were born outside the UK, compared to just 13 per cent across England. Goodwin’s claim that the “White British” are on the verge of becoming a minority relies on a particularly narrow and contentious definition – one that excludes anyone with one foreign-born parent. By that logic, both King Charles and Winston Churchill would not count as “White British.”

The more sober reality is that the UK is a patchwork of cities with large migrant populations and varied ethnic backgrounds, which will continue to exist alongside less diverse areas. Meanwhile, the insistence that London is a kind of multicultural hellscape is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality. In his Standard piece, Goodhart claimed: “I heard nobody saying ‘rapid demographic change is nothing to worry about, just look at London’.” But maybe more people should be looking at London. The capital has shown that diversity and change does not have to mean decline. Instead, it can  mean adaptation, ambition and success.

Christabel Cooper is Director of Research at Labour Together. Follow her on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE. Photo: Londoners enjoying Granary Square, King’s Cross,

Categories: Comment
Tags: demographics, economy, education

Dave Hill: Labour cannot afford to feed anti-London grievance

Endorsing regional resentment of the capital will lose the party vital votes and hamper growth
Dave Hill

The Greens have popped by again, dropping another leaflet through my letterbox. It features three young women informing Hackney voters that Labour, whose candidates the borough habitually prefers, does not deserve their support any more. The local Labour council, the trio of Greens stress, is preparing to make big budget cuts, forced on it by a Labour government that is “continuing the Conservative legacy”. There are, they assert, “credible alternatives” to this.

Of course, they don’t go into detail. But the broad message is clear. So is a ward-level activist focus on community safety, litter-picking and “listening”. The Greens have a gap to close if they are to unseat Labour from my Hackney ward next May: in 2022, their best-placed candidate finished fourth with 881 votes, around half the total of the lowest-placed of the three Labour winners. They face comparable challenges in several other wards in Hackney and in other London boroughs. You can tell, though, that they fancy their chances.

Why wouldn’t they? Labour’s national unpopularity, which continues to inspire astonishment and glee, has been reflected in London by-election results. Polls say the party is still the capital’s most popular. Yet, even, so it has been losing votes to an array of challengers, varying from borough to borough, seat to seat. The next local elections are still seven months away, but if Labour retains control of the 21 boroughs out of 32 it won in 2022, it will be a surprise. The party could sustain heavy losses. Have its national leaders spotted that? If so, do they care?

London voters could not be blamed for thinking Camden’s own Sir Keir Starmer has forsaken the capital, or at least concluded that it suits him to look as if he has. His party conference speech, though accomplished and refreshing in several ways, reprised his Chancellor’s spending review endorsement of tendentious complaints that London has long had preferential treatment.

With “one clear voice”, the PM declared in Liverpool, Labour must say “we should invest more outside of London and the South East”. Thanks for nothing, London’s million-and-a-half Labour voters might respond, that 43 per cent who provided Starmer with a third of his general election majority. In an address that upbraided the politics of grievance, Labour’s leader saw fit to indulge one of the most destructive.

Depressingly, this won him a big cheer – depressingly, yet unsurprisingly. The populist myth that Londoners live the high life at (in particular) honest northern folk’s expense is deeply entrenched and fiercely clung to when challenged.

Yet the reality is that of the £218.4 billion raised in tax revenue in London in 2022/23 (the most recent year for which figures are available), £43.6 billion were spent elsewhere. London and Londoners subside almost all the rest of the UK, and have done so for years. It is a bedrock truth of national life – a truth the national government dares not speak.

The electoral calculation appears clear: most of the Labour parliamentary seats under the greatest threat are outside London, and the biggest threat in most of them comes from Reform UK, whose admirers detest everything London stands for and lots of things they (wrongly) think it does. Therefore, pointedly agreeing that London should come bottom of the spending pecking order might seem a bright idea.

There are, though, two big reasons why Starmer needs to realise that it isn’t.

One is about self-preservation. At some point, Labour needs to stop bleeding support at an alarming rate and at least consolidate at a level of local election losses that is normal for a party in national power. If it doesn’t, Starmer’s leadership will be loudly questioned again and a sense of crisis about his administration may become impossible to shift. Imagine the reaction if even London, so often called “a Labour city”, goes off the party in a spectacular way.

The other reason concerns the economy. Do I have to repeat again that London provides almost a quarter of all UK economic output and remains by far the biggest engine of UK economic power? Do I have to point out once more that London is the goose that lays the country’s golden eggs, and that starving the goose means fewer eggs for all? And then we have the local government Fair Funding Review, with its alarming lack of fairness to most boroughs. The perils that poses for Labour are not lost on Hackney’s Greens. They won’t be lost on Londoners, either.

Feeding anti-London feelings might seem like canny politics. But in the end, neither Labour nor the country can afford it.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Borough elections 2026, Green Party, Labour

Rob Blackie: Panorama showed that the Met needs a London re-set

The far-reaching reforms called for in the Casey review cannot be implemented unless the service is focused solely on serving the capital
Rob Blackie

The Metropolitan Police needs to be changed urgently. This week’s Panorama programme, showing officers’ racism and hatred of women at Charing Cross police station, is just the latest exposure of its failings.

Over two years ago, Sir Sadiq Khan said he had “already acted to put the Met on a path of far-reaching systematic and cultural reform”. Yet we keep seeing unacceptable behaviour. And on everything from recruiting more woman officers to screening new recruits better, the Met is failing to improve fast enough.

Baroness Louise Casey suggested in her 2023 report into the Met that it would need to be restructured if it couldn’t make progress within two years. That time is up.

If we’re going to get the Met that London deserves, we need it to focus exclusively on London’s priorities. That means relieving the service of its various national responsibilities, leaving its leaders free to concentrate on bringing about the major reforms of culture and attitudes Casey called for.

At present, senior Met officers have an almost impossible job, juggling different roles. They have high-risk national tasks. They protect the royal family and diplomats. They also work to stop terrorism across the country. At the same time is fulfilling these specialist duties, they are expected to tackle crime of every type in the capital.

No other major country has this structure. The US has the FBI for national crimes. Its secret service protects diplomats and the President. State and local police handle everything else. But in London, our police chiefs are forced to split their attention between terrorists and phone snatchers.

Here’s a simple solution: reset the Met by focusing it entirely on policing London, investigating and solving crime in communities across the city.  As the Met’s national functions are moved to national bodies, greater powers over crime and policing should be devolved to London’s mayoralty.

This could be done quickly, with only simple legislative measures needed to cement the following changes:

  1. Transfer national and international police duties from the Met to the National Crime Agency.
  2. Allow the National Crime Agency to fulfil new duties and give it arresting powers. This could be as simple as a statement saying that the NCA would have the same powers in the areas it was to assume responsibility for as the Met has at present.
  3. Move management responsibility for the Metropolitan Commissioner from the Home Secretary to the Mayor of London, replacing the current system where the Commissioner has two bosses.
  4. Move Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection and Royal and Special Protection out of the Met into independent groups reporting to the Home Secretary.

These types of change already have wide support, including from the Police Foundation, my Liberal Democrat colleague and former police officer, Wendy Chamberlain MP, and serving police officers I talked to while running for Mayor last year.

Inevitably, people would argue against this for the sorts of reasons often given for not implementing change.

We would hear that it would be costly. It won’t be, though, because only existing duties would need to be funded. Instead, there would be more focused management by people who would know what their job was.

We would hear that the Met would lose funding, a claim made by people who either cynically misunderstand the plan or are unable to add up.

We would hear that such changes would be a distraction from reform. But we’ve seen the Mayor’s current reforms of the Met fail.

Finally, we would hear that the proposal were too radical and need more consideration. Yet we already know that our system is failing, and that if we don’t reform it the people of London will continue to suffer.

Another benefit of bringing the Met back to its core London functions might be inspiring the next generation of police officers. The reforms I’m proposing could again make good, old-fashioned community policing a job young people dream of having, and help fix the Met’s recruitment crisis.

We owe it to the people of London to have an effective police service. We owe it to the many hard working police officers who are trying to protect Londoners every day. It’s time to get going and reset the Met.

Rob Blackie was the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London in 2024. Follow him on Bluesky. Image from the Panorama investigation, which can be watched in full here.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: crime, Metropolitan Police, policing

Richard Derecki: London must act to reduce youth unemployment

The advent of AI is destroying entry level jobs for even well-qualified young people in the capital
Richard Derecki

The labour market situation for young people in London today is among the toughest since the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.

There are just over 900,000 16-24 year-olds in London. Many are in education, some on apprenticeships, some working part or full-time. But increasing numbers are struggling to establish themselves in the labour market, piling financial pressure on them and their families and undermining their sense of self-worth.

Long-standing difficulties with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) labour force survey have affected analysts’ attempts to get a clear picture of what is going on in the labour market. However, various data sources make it apparent that conditions for young people trying to find work have worsened.

Nationally, the unemployment rate has risen from 10.7 per cent in 2022 to 14.0 per cent in 2024. There has been a slight easing of this in the past couple of quarters, but the 2024 annual youth unemployment rate was the highest for ten years. And in London it is significantly higher.

Unhelpfully, there is a paucity of granular London data. However, Trust for London quotes a youth unemployment figure of 14.6 per cent at the end of 2023 and the NOMIS dataset from the ONS has a figure from pooled date for April 2024-March 2025 of 17 per cent.

These unemployment figures are worrying, and a further labour market indicator, that of inactivity rates, compounds the concern. ONS data show that, nationally, the economic inactivity rate for young people (that is, those not able to work or not seeking it ) is running at over 30 per cent and has been on a rising trend for many years.

Economic inactivity reflects certain choices – for example, if a young person chooses to stay in education. But since 2023, this measure has been rising for young people out of full-time education. The current number is around the highest level recored since the current series began in 1992.

A recent House of Commons briefing paper on youth unemployment notes how, since the start of the pandemic, there has been an increase in the number of 16-to-24-year-olds who are economically inactive due to long-term illness. This has been driven largely by an increase in the number of young people with a mental health condition.

There is a well-worn narrative that seeks to explain London’s high youth unemployment rate: employers are looking for ever higher skill levels; there’s a misalignment between the school curriculum and labour market needs; there’s insufficient investment in further education and a paucity of apprenticeship schemes.

A post-2022 twist comes from the rapid and speculative adoption of AI tools by many firms. This is cutting entry-level jobs in administration, customer services and even software development, and wiping out swathes of graduate entry jobs.

The recruitment site Adzuna reports that entry-level jobs now only account for 25 per cent of the market in the UK — down from 28.9 per cent three years ago – and that the number of job vacancies has declined by 32 per cent since 2022. It also reported Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI company Anthropic, warning that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level jobs in the next five years.

This is in line with research about the US. A recent paper from Stanford University shows how employment has declined for young workers in AI-exposed occupations (they highlight software engineers and customer service agents). Growth in employment as a whole continues, but for young people it has stagnated.

Those with no toehold in the labour market of any kind are caught in a terrible bind, as entry-level jobs both for those with GCSEs and those with A levels and degrees vanish. These qualification pathways were traditional routes into well-paid and stable careers. But it is not like that anymore.

Chatting to a Sainsbury delivery driver, who is self-funding a coding degree because everyone assured him coding was a gateway skill to a well-paid software developer job, I wondered what he should do. Crack on, double-down and try for a Masters? Take on more debt in the vague hope of landing, eventually, a high paid role or grind out the hours in his current role on a just above minimum wage?

The rapid adoption of AI is changing our labour market in ways we still don’t really understand – and far more quickly than policy can respond. There will be winners as well as losers, but if we do not want to further entrench employment inequalities we need to be braver about finding a way to recycle some of the staggering profits the tech firms are making into specific support for those whose labours they are making redundant.

The recent UK-US tech agreement goes big on new data centres, but these do not, of themselves, generate many jobs beyond the construction phase. They are capital-intensive, not labour-intensive. A temporary one-percent windfall tax on AI-excess profits earned in the UK could provide a ring-fenced fund to support thousands of paid apprenticeships in not just AI and digital sectors, but also those where there are long standing shortages, such as nursing or childcare. In this way, the AI transition can be made more inclusive.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the government’s policy response is to establish a Youth Guarantee so that every young person aged 18 to 21 has access to further learning and help with getting a job or an apprenticeship. Youth guarantee trailblazers have been launched in eight mayoral authorities in England, and London has been awarded £30 million for 2025-26 to invest in locally-led employment support programmes.

London government – the Mayor and London Councils – has long highlighted how youth unemployment disproportionately affects black Londoners, disabled youth, and those with mental health challenges. Its response has tended to focus on tackling the fragmented nature of employment services provision.

As the most recent London Councils report, Breaking Barriers, argued, “there are many bodies operating at the national, London, sub-regional, and borough levels which offer employment and skills services to young Londoners, but the lack of integration and collaboration among them hinders effective support.”

As part of the London response, the Mayor set-up the No Wrong Door programme, which seeks to ensure that whichever route a Londoner chooses, they get directed to the appropriate guidance or training to help them gain employment and boost their skills. This objective is delivered through four sub-regional partnerships, which are the recipients of the trailblazer funding.

One of those partnerships, the Local London integration hub, focuses specifically on adults (19+) with special educational needs or disabilities and on young people with few qualifications, especially those without Level 2 English or maths.

Local London covers nine outer-London boroughs across the eastern side of London. It focuses on support for schools through their career hubs, which provide self-development and career management skills for students and meaningful exchanges with employers.

It also looks to support young people by capturing their voices through youth summits, so that interventions are more closely aligned to young people’s concerns. The team is helping to develop a core offer that all young people in London should be able to access through interactions with their own dedicated youth frontline advisor, though future funding for this resource-heavy initiative is not yet secured.

Through its engagement with local businesses, Local London found that many SMEs can be overwhelmed with applications when they advertise a vacant role. Without the resources to efficiently manage the process, they can come to rely on word of mouth and people they know when choosing who to take on. This compounds the problems of those with low levels of social capital.

Caroline Kandaya, who leads on the integration hub at Local London, would like to see more direct intervention to support firms with taking initial steps to create and recruit young people for new roles.

Kickstart, the Covid-era employment support scheme for young people, was widely criticised for being overly bureaucratic and inflexible, but Caroline argues that the level of financial support – paying 100 per cent of the age-relevant National Minimum Wage, National Insurance and pension contributions for a 25-hour week for six months – was crucial in mitigating the costs of employing someone in a situation where margins are tight across the firm.

The integration hubs have the potential to address long-standing failings in the functioning of London’s labour market. But they need much bolder levels of investment and less prescription. London government has long argued for greater flexibility over the use of the apprenticeship levy and for some control over the underspends, so that resources can be brought together.

Moves to provide London with an integrated funding settlement, which will include adult skills and employment support and be multi-year, should be the catalyst for amplifying the work of the hubs.

There is momentum behind them. But to really push on, they need the finances to develop their tech infrastructure, to employ well-resourced youth advisors and –  wouldn’t this be something? – to have the ability to pilot a Kickstart-like programme of financial support for local small and medium enterprises. to take on a youngster who needs a helping hand into the labour market.

All the ingredients are there to allow the hubs to make decisive interventions. It is time to bring them all together.

Follow Richard Derecki on Bluesky. Photo from Local London.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: employment, further education, skills

Government confirms Crews Hill in Enfield and Thamesmead riverside picked as New Town locations

The choices were expected, but the official announcement has also provided details about the size of the potential schemes
Dave Hill

Two locations in London have been officially recommended for the building of New Towns, with the potential to provide more than 35,000 new homes between them. The newly-released findings of the government’s New Towns Taskforce confirm that the Crews Hill area in Enfield and riverside land at Thamesmead in Greenwich are among 12 sites thought suitable for New Towns across England, as first reported by On London earlier this month.

The taskforce report says the Crews Hill site has the potential to provide around 21,000 new homes, bearing out suggestions in recent days that it was being earmarked for significantly more the the government’s goal of at least 10,000 for each New Town. The Thamesmead site too, has been judged able to substantially exceed the minimum target, with the report saying 15,000 homes could be built there.

The report’s definition of the Crews Hill location also encompasses the adjacent area collectively dubbed Chase Park in what it calls a “green” and “expanded development” with “an ambition for 50% of those homes to be affordable, helping to address London’s acute housing need”. This effectively combines the two Green Belt sites Enfield Council has long had ambitions to build on and has included in its new Local Plan proposals, which have been undergoing their statutory examination in public.

As Enfield Dispatch editor James Cracknell has documented for On London, Enfield envisaged only 5,500 homes for the Crews Hill area itself (top picture) and 3,700 for Chase Park, a total of only 9,200. The taskforce report say it would bring together and expand the two sites and that “without new town designation it is unlikely that development will be brought forward at such a scale” or with the speed the government seeks.

The much smaller, 100 hectare (247 acre) Thamesmead Waterfront location (pictured below) is described in the report as “an opportunity which has gone unrealised for decades” to renew the original promise of the mid-1960s Thamesmead development, which is undergoing a long term regeneration. It notes a “long-standing desire to connect the Waterfront site to the London transport network” and says New Town status “could be an opportunity to finally realise this historic vision”.

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It identifies as a “key challenge” Transport for London securing “confirmed government support” for its proposed extension of the Docklands Light Railway to the south side of the Thames through Beckton to its north. Sir Sadiq Khan made known his disappointment with the exclusion of commitment government funding for the project from Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spending review in June. However, transport secretary Heidi Alexander later noted that “substantial work” had been done on the plans and would continue to work with TfL and City Hall to finalise a business case by the autumn.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. 

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: Enfield Council, housing, Thamesmead

Sadiq Khan deputy hints at major policy shift to increase homebuilding

Deputy Mayor for Planning, Jules Pipe, has told a high-level conference to expect "immediate measures"
Charles Wright

As London’s housing crisis deepens, pressure is mounting on Sir Sadiq Khan to reduce his 35 per cent affordable housing requirement for new private developments to help revive home building in the capital, now at a record low.

Could a dramatic City Hall announcement be imminent? That was certainly the expectation among development professionals at the Shaping London’s Future conference held by leading planning chambers Landmark last week “Everyone is waiting for the GLA (Greater London Authority) announcement,” said one attendee as the session began.

That made Jules Pipe, Sir Sadiq’s deputy for planning and overseer of the London Plan, the Mayor’s long-term blueprint for development in the capital, something of a star attraction. And while participants may have been disappointed not to hear specific pledges from him, Pipe suggested there isn’t long to wait. There was an “increasing sense of urgency” as development ground to a halt, he said, with City Hall working with government on “immediate measures”.

Speakers set out the now familiar cocktail of challenges which, according to Tom Dobson of planning consultancy Quod, meant that in the coming period “most developers aren’t going to be building very much”. Soaring costs, high inflation and interest rates and falling sales, coupled with the pressures of new building safety rules and the demand to provide high levels of affordable housing, new infrastructure and other public provision, were all making schemes increasingly unviable.

Two recent schemes were highlighted, the 1,000 home Stag Brewery development in Mortlake and the 52-storey, 434 home Cuba Street scheme at Canary Wharf, where developers had successfully argued for large reductions in an initial 30 per cent affordable home provision, to enable works to proceed. Meanwhile, as Pipe himself pointed out, no work has begun on thousands of potential homes in the capital for which there is planning permission because of similar viability concerns.

With homelessness increasing, the situation is all the more acute because affordable housing built by private developers under “Section 106” agreements with boroughs, in return for planning permission, makes up more than half of the total affordable supply in the city.

More homes in London were also critical for UK economic growth, said Landmark KC Rupert Warren, while his colleague Zack Simons KC pointed out that with the capital allocated almost one in four of new homes in government plans, there would be “no hope” of reaching that target “unless London does its bit”. The Mayor’s London Plan, added fellow KC Russell Harris, must “become a delivery machine…because if it doesn’t, no-one else will”.

“I’m very alive to the reality of development in the current climate,” said Pipe. “We recognise the viability challenge, and the Mayor is serious about kick-starting development in London.” Short-term measures that might initially focus on helping unlock stalled sites and “make those permissions a reality” were in train, he said.

Pipe added that viability challenges were not all due to City Hall and borough planning rules and other regulations. Wider economic pressures were in play, and more investment in transport – particularly City Hall’s top three proposals, for the Bakerloo line and Docklands Light Railway extensions and the new West London orbital line – was vital for meeting the city’s 10-year 880,000 home target.

But he also accepted that for potential new development what had been a flagship, and initially successful, Khan policy, offering a “fast track” through the planning process in return for 35 per cent affordable housing, was no longer delivering. And changes brought in by City Hall at the end of last year, designed to speed up delivery by allowing more flexibility on the type of affordable housing provided, had “not been enough”.

The Mayor would now be “increasingly active” in exercising his power to “call in” major planning applications and take over decision-making from the borough in order to push schemes through, Pipe promised. But beyond that, what could the emergency City Hall guidance, which is now clearly expected – perhaps in the next few days, according to some observers – look like?

Pushing that 35 per cent threshold down is the main demand, with viability expert James Brierley, from the Newmark consultancy putting his money on a reduction to 20 per cent. “Developers want to build, and schemes should provide what they can and maximise the amount of affordable housing, recognising that affordable delivery is the government focus,” he said. “But we need a bit of pragmatism and realism.”

Simons highlighted what he said was the “biggest constraint” on housebuilding in London, its extensive Green Belt, covering 22 per cent of the city’s land area. The government’s changes to planning rules allowing some release of Green Belt land, alongside strict affordable quotas, was a “once in a generation” opportunity to get building, he said, and urged developers to “strike while the iron is hot”.

Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Photo: New homes at Brent Cross Town.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: housing, Jules Pipe, planning

Arise, Sir Keir of Camden

Some words the Prime Minister might like to consider including in his speech to the Labour Party conference
Dave Hill

If Sir Keir’s aides have a moment, they are invited to run their eyes over the below.

Why do our most extreme opponents – Britain’s enemies within, often funded from abroad, who pose as patriots but peddle lies, incite violence and stir up hate  – so often denigrate their own capital city?

Our capital city – London.

Why do they falsely claim that it is “fallen” or “lost” when, in so many ways, and despite Brexit, the pandemic and the sidelining it suffered under the Conservatives, it is still growing and thriving?

They do it because they cannot bear to recognise that London, with its energy, creativity and vast human variety, represents one of things – one of the very many, very different things – our country can be proud of.

London, let us remember, is the mighty engine room of our country’s economy. Almost a quarter of all UK economic output comes from it. Every year, tens of billions of pounds in taxes raised in London are spent in other parts of the country – north and south, east and west – on public services and on funding infrastructure.

I would like to see less of that dependency on London. I want all of our other great cities to become more successful, more independent, more attractive to business, more able to provide great opportunities for their people and draw others from around the country and the world.

But we cannot achieve that if London is made weaker – precisely because the stronger London and its economy is, the better able the government – this Labour government – is to fund the skills training and new transport and revived industrial power that Birmingham and Leeds and Cardiff and Manchester and Bristol and Glasgow and Liverpool and many other cities need.

My friend Sadiq Khan is right when he insists that when London does well, the whole country does well. And just because Boris Johnson used to say the same thing, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

To help London grow stronger – and grow better – and to help our other cities and regions at the same time, we are now finalising plans, worked out with Sadiq, to give away more powers to London’s City Hall so that London can take care of its own affairs better – and, as a result, do more for the rest of the country too.

We will build further on the historic devolution of power to the capital made by the last Labour government at the start of this century to put London and Londoners more in charge of their own destiny, and become even more of an asset to our country than they already are.

Those powers will include more freedom for London government to raise more taxes at London level and spend those taxes the way its Mayor and its local councils, rather than Whitehall and the Treasury, thinks best.

That won’t mean the rest of the country gets less. Quite the opposite – by giving London more freedom and control over taxes raised in London, London will generate more for us all.

Conference, we must not fall into the trap of blaming one part of our country for the problems of others. It is true that some parts of Britain have, for many decades – indeed, for centuries – been wealthier than others.

But even the wealthiest have also contained stubbornly high rates of poverty and disadvantage. My job as Prime Minister and leader of a Labour government is to recognise that truth and to work relentlessly with every part of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, to create opportunity, spread wealth and bring those rates of poverty down.

We will never do that by pretending that favouring some parts of the UK at the expense of others will end inequality. In the Britain I want to build, no one would be left behind, whether they live in Aberdeen or Anglesey, Blackpool or Birmingham, Carlisle or Camden, where my constituency is.

The dead end, regional politics of the so-called “north-south divide” are not progressive, not patriotic and not prepared to deal with reality. They are though, as their name suggests, divisive.

The different regions and nations of our United Kingdom have long had precious and profitable relationships with each other. We need to strengthen those good relationships, so that all concerned get more out of them, not encourage destructive resentments and rivalries.

We need all of our cities to grow stronger economically, and build stronger relationships – with other cites, including cities overseas, and, of course, with the towns and villages that surround them, so that as prosperity increases, it is also shared.

Conference, our country does not need any more voices of grievance and division, seeking to blame honest, hard-working migrants or supposed “metropolitan elites” – who include, I am told, north London lawyers – for difficulties whose true roots and causes could not be more different.

Instead, the regions and nations – the cities and towns and villages – of the United Kingdom need unity – unity in their dazzling diversity – to work together for national renewal.

All reasonable suggestions for re-writes considered, but don’t push your luck. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Camden, Keir Starmer, Labour

Lewis Baston: Trouble grows for Newham Labour with landslide by-election loss

The latest victory for the Newham Independents follows a succession of governance crises and internal strife for the ruling party locally
Lewis Baston

The Newham Independents, a local political party, made a landslide gain in a by-election held last Thursday in the ward of Plaistow South. The Plaistow area has fallen within Labour-run councils’ domains since 1919, initially as part of the County Borough of West Ham and since 1965 as part of the London Borough of Newham*. Could this change in the borough elections of 2026?

Labour’s defeat in Plaistow South was just the latest bit of damage inflicted on its Newham fortress. The party won every seat on the council in three successive elections between 2010 and 2018 and has provided the borough’s directly elected mayor since the post’s creation in 2002.

But the 2022 elections were preceded by internal Labour strife in the council chamber, leading to the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) administering the re-selection of mayoral incumbent Rokhsana Fiaz, who had won for a first time in 2018. The election results showed some slippage from the 2018 high point. Although Labour won another massive majority, winning 64 seats, the Greens took two, both of them in the new Stratford Olympic Park ward, and support for Fiaz fell from 53,214 votes (73.4 per cent) in 2018 to 35,696 (56.2 per cent).

Since then, a sense of crisis has gripped the borough, with a financial difficulties leading to an above-normal nine per cent rise in Council Tax, emergency funding from central government and looming “tough decisions” about spending in the light of a £40.6 million overspend, largely the result of demand for temporary housing.

Newham’s housing services received a damning C4 rating from the Regulator of Social Housing indicating “very serious failings” requiring “fundamental change”. There have been frequent changes of chief executive, with three permanent and three interim appointments in post since 2018. The borough has fallen a long way since it was held up as a role model by a sympathetic central government when it was led by the its first Mayor, Sir Robin Wales.

In May 2025 the government issued a “best value” notice to Newham expressing concern about its governance and culture. Paul Martin, the latest chief executive, who was appointed in July, warned councillors that the government imposing commissioners to take charge of Newham over the head of the local executive was a “plausible outcome”.

A row rumbled about the terms of departure of Martin’s predecessor, Abi Gbago, who left with a £230,000 payoff and a non-disclosure agreement. In July 2025, Mayor Fiaz announced that she would be standing down. The Labour NEC panel selected her successor as Labour candidate. Newham may not have a tradition of organised political opposition to Labour, but it has a lively and critical local media including Newham Voices and Open Newham, which receive a steady stream of Town Hall news and gossip.

Labour’s response to the Israeli attack on Gaza after October 2023 added to the party’s problems in Newham. The borough’s population is 35 per cent Muslim and many of the rest are young and have left-wing and pro-Palestine values. In the general election, the Newham Independents polled a significant 20 per cent in West Ham & Beckton and a Gaza Independent polled 18 per cent in East Ham, as Labour’s vote fell by 26 percentage points compared with 2019.

But Newham Labour started losing by-elections even before Gaza became the major issue in UK domestic politics it is now. A Boleyn ward seat was lost to Mehmood Mirza, now leader of the Newham Independents, in July 2023. The independents won again the following November, in Plaistow North. And now comes Plaistow South. In addition, Labour has lost four Newham councillors through defections or suspensions. There are now nine Newham councillors not taking the Labour whip, which the largest since the council term of 1974-78.

The Plaistow South by-election was caused by the death of Labour councillor Neil Wilson, who had represented this ward and its predecessor, Hudsons, since 1994. Wilson’s long service made him “father of the council”. He played a mentoring role for successive intakes of new councillors, which will be much-missed. He was cabinet member for health and adult social care under Mayor Fiaz, and for equalities under her predecessor, Mayor Wales. His Cabinet colleague Sarah Ruiz paid tribute to him:

“Neil was a very dear friend and colleague. His beliefs shaped him and his values, and his life of public service – as a teacher, and as a councillor.  Neil was loved and respected by Member colleagues across the chamber, and by all the Council officers he worked with, for his experience, dedication and commitment to the borough and people he loved – and his sense of joy and fun.”

Plaistow South is more or less in the geographical centre of the borough of Newham. The ward is well-defined on the map. Its boundary to the south is the A13 Newham Way. The line follows New Barn Street and Barking Road to the west and north, and then Boundary Road to the west. Boundary Road defines the border between the former boroughs of West Ham and East Ham.

It is divided by the elevated Greenway, which follows the course of Joseph Bazalgette’s Northern Outfall Sewer, one of London’s great Victorian public works. The ward includes Newham Hospital. It contains no stations, but a very high 25 per cent of its working population travels to work on the Underground, mostly from Upton Park or via a bus connection to Canning Town.

Like most of Newham, Plaistow South is a multi-ethnic, predominantly working-class area, but its demographics are a bit distinctive. For an inner London ward, a high proportion of people (76 per cent) live in houses rather than flats, and 41 per cent (above the 33 per cent Newham average) own, rather than rent, their homes.

Fewer people are educated to degree level (35 per cent) than is usual for Newham (40 per cent) or for London (47 per cent). It has a larger white population (35 per cent) than Newham as a whole (31 per cent) and not as many people of Asian heritage (35 per cent rather than 42 per cent). It has a smaller proportion of Muslims (32 per cent) than either of the other two wards previously gained by the Newham Independents (Boleyn has 46 per cent, Plaistow North 43 per cent).

Plaistow South was won by Labour by a large majority over the Conservatives in the 2022 elections, but it was clear from the outset that, although six candidates came forward the by-election, the contest was between Labour’s Asheem Singh and Md Nazrul Islam** for the Newham Independents, both of whom ran proper campaigns with leafleting and canvassing while the other parties were less active.

Islam (pictured) gained the seat with 913 votes (44.7 per cent) – more than twice as many as Singh’s 436 votes (21.3 per cent). Labour’s vote share was down 34 percentage points, its worst London result since the general election except for Redbridge Mayfield in March.

In third place was Lazar Monu for Reform UK, whose 16.1 per cent (329 votes) was a creditable showing. The other three contenders – Nic Motte for the Greens (152 votes), Rois Miah for the Conservatives (123) and Sheree Miller for the Liberal Democrats (90) – all lost vote share. It was the fourth-worst Conservative by-election performance in London since the general election by this measure. Turnout was poor, at 23.1 per cent.

The by-election issues, according to Islam speaking to Newham Voices directly after his win, were housing plus the Council Tax rise, emission-related charges for parking permits (the “parking tax”, as he dubbed it) and charges for bulky waste. In the background were Gaza, the national government and the general state of Newham governance, but most of Islam’s priorities could have come from a pro-motorist, low-tax Conservative.

The perception that groups like the Newham Independents are left-wing relies heavily on their stand on Palestine. Look more closely, and a more complex picture emerges. The local party is a catch-all. It has not had to make the sort of choices that being in government involves.

Labour’s candidate for Mayor of Newham next May is Forhad Hussain, who was a councillor for Plaistow North in 2010-18 and served in Wales’s cabinet. He will face determined competition from the Newham Independents, surely in the form of party leader Mehmood Mirza. The Plaistow South by-election is a sign that Labour’s mighty fortress is perilously besieged from without, and at risk of collapse from within.

Newham is one to watch in the May 2026 elections. Despite its century-long history of Labour municipal control, it is one of the party’s more likely losses.

*Labour won only 30 seats out of 60 in the 1968 elections, but retained an overall majority thanks to indirectly elected Aldermen.

**Md or MD is a common abbreviation among Bangladeshi Muslims for Mohammed when used as a personal name.

Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky and read all his writing for On London here. Photo from Newham Independents x/Twitter feed.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Support link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Council Tax, Labour, Newham Council, Rokhsana Fiaz