Thursday 10 September saw further sequels to July’s general election, with by-elections held in three borough wards where councillors had become MPs. Contests held for the same reason have previously taken place in Camden and Westminster. This time, it was Ealing’s turn.
The Hanger Hill race was unusual in that the councillor who ran successfully for parliament was a Conservative. Greg Stafford was elected for the new constituency of Farnham & Bordon, which straddles the border of Surrey and Hampshire, with a narrow majority of 1,349 over the Liberal Democrats. For the Stafford family it was a case of one door opening and another closing, as Stafford’s brother Alexander Stafford – another former Ealing councillor – was defeated in Rother Valley by Labour by 998 votes.
It is a sign of how much electoral change there has been over the past ten years that both Farnham & Bordon and Rother Valley can be considered marginal seats. Hanger Hill’s marginal status is also of recent vintage: it had previously been one of the safest Conservative areas in Ealing, but in the 2022 borough elections Lib Dem candidate Athena Zissimos topped the poll with Tories taking the other two seats, Stafford finishing third, and Labour missing out but not far behind.
Hanger Hill is the northern part of a block of mainly middle-class suburbia in the vicinity of Ealing Broadway. It consists of avenues either side of the busy Hanger Lane, which does duty as part of the North Circular Road, and includes the once infamous Hanger Lane Gyratory and a small salient of Ealing poking northwards into Brent.
One small but distinguished part of the ward is the Hanger Hill estate, an interwar Tudorbethan extravaganza served by two Tube stations, North Ealing and West Acton, which has been a conservation area since 1969. The population of the ward is majority white with a significant Asian presence, and majority owner-occupied – factors which enabled the Tories to remain in contention.
Having finished first two years ago, the Lib Dems fought hard. As well as being supported by his party’s local machine, their candidate Jonathan Oxley (below), formerly interim chief executive at media regulator Ofcom, was helped by activists from across London. The campaign centred on car crime – a problem locally given the major road junction in the ward – the need for harder-working local representatives, and opposition to high-rise development in this temptingly low-density but well-connected suburban district.
The Conservatives were still on the back foot, having already ceased to be the main opposition to Ealing’s Labour-run administration. Their candidate, charity worker Sean Callaghan, stressed many of the same issues as Oxley – car crime, fly-tipping, loss of facilities and the prospect of development. However, the Lib Dems are masters of the art of running this sort of local campaign, and there is no sign of the Tories regaining their appeal to the educated professionals who live in wards like Hanger Hill, even though they had some decent results in Surrey on the same day.
The result was a comprehensive Lib Dem triumph. Oxley gained the seat with 1,655 votes, only two fewer than Zissimos secured in 2022 with a considerably higher turnout – 42 per cent compared with Thursday’s 28 per cent. The Lib Dem share, at 52 per cent, was up 19 points since 2022 principally at the expense of Labour, who were squeezed down from an almost-competitive 23 per cent in 2022 to only 10 per cent this week. Candidates from the Greens and Reform UK failed to make an impact.
The other two Ealing vacancies resulted from Labour victories in July. Northolt Mandeville ward councillor Deirdre Costigan became the MP for Ealing Southall, while Callum Anderson travelled further for a Parliamentary berth – from South Acton ward to the new Bletchley & Buckingham seat, which he won on a substantial swing from the Tories. Anderson became the first Labour MP representing the town of Buckingham since Robert Maxwell did it from 1964 until 1970.
Northolt Mandeville is the north side of Northolt, around the station. Its southern boundary is formed by the A40 main road a few miles further out from the Hanger Lane junction and it contains the large Northolt Park council-built estate. Built on the site of a racecourse, Northolt Park is a low-density estate not too dissimilar from the surrounding owner-occupied suburbia. It is a later manifestation of the same growth of Metro-land that created the Hanger Hill estate.
Mandeville has a history of being a marginal ward. The Conservatives won three out of three in the elections of 2002 and 2006, but Labour won two seats there in 2010, the third in 2014 and held them with ease in 2018 and 2022.
The campaign issues were very similar to those in Hanger Hill – crime, traffic, fly-tipping, the local environment and the alleged threat from overdevelopment and tall buildings. Conservative candidate Andrew Bailey, who fought nearby Perivale in 2022, was the principal vehicle for any criticism of Labour’s running of Ealing among the local electorate, while Dominic Moffitt defended. Four other candidates – Lib Dem, Green, Reform UK and Workers Party – contested the election.
Given the ward’s history and Labour’s bad performances in council by-elections since July, the Northolt Mandeville result, a win for Moffitt (top, centre left), was highly creditable for the party. Labour’s vote share dropped by 10 points and the Conservatives were up by two, making a swing to the Tories of six per cent – not negligible, but not impressive either, given how poor their result had been in 2022. None of the other parties made much impact.
South Acton ward shows another of the many faces of Ealing. It is a thoroughly urban ward covering the centre of Acton and the area to the south, including Acton Town station. It has a large, high density council estate where a considerable share of its population lives. The streets around Bollo Bridge Road have been redeveloped in the last couple of decades, but remain dominated by large social housing blocks.
South Acton is 30 per cent social rented with another 33 per cent private rented in contrast to the owner-occupied composition of the other two wards which went to the polls. It is much more deprived, and fewer than half the households have access to a car. Given its social composition and inner city diversity, it should not be surprising that South Acton’s politics is different as well. It has been a Labour stronghold where the Greens came second in 2022.
Despite the tendency in the general election and since for Labour’s vote to sag in diverse inner urban areas, South Acton saw the party’s candidate Katie Douglas (top, centre right) returned without a fuss, albeit on a low turnout of 17 per cent. The Conservatives crept into second place as the Green vote fell, but there was virtually no swing since 2022.
Labour’s results in Ealing were considerably better than those in Camden or Westminster and also better than in the rest of the country on a big by-election day which saw 20 council vacancies filled and the party lose seats in places like Southampton and North East Derbyshire. This poor performance is unsurprising, given that local elections have always been difficult for Labour when the party is in power nationally, the low share of the vote with which the party came to office in July, and the apparent lack of grip and direction it has displayed since then.
However, other than the collapse in Hanger Hill due to tactical voting, the party has defended strongly in Ealing, a borough which was lost in mid-term in 2006 but which looks safe now. That is despite Labour being in control since 2010 and might be thought at risk from the unpopularity that long-term national government can bring. Morgan McSweeney could do worse than ask Labour colleagues at Ealing Town Hall how they did it.
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