London’s first election of 2025 took place in Barnet’s Burnt Oak ward on Thursday. Burnt Oak lies just south of Edgware on the western border of a borough that Labour gained from the Conservatives in May 2022. But although Barnet is new to Labour control, Burnt Oak is one of the party’s traditional strongholds there.
Burnt Oak as a residential area is just over a century old. The name comes, apparently, from a gaunt local oak tree that suffered a lightning strike some time before the 1750s. There was not much there before 1924, but that year saw the opening of the Burnt Oak Northern Line station and the London County Council’s decision to build a large residential estate in the area.
Today, that estate, the Watling Estate, dominates the Burnt Oak ward. It was constructed to high design standards, a public sector version of the privately developed Metroland suburbs: largely red-brick, low rise family houses, interspersed with green space. The Watling was designated a Conservation Area in 1998.
The ward contains a few other areas around the edge of the estate, including a stretch of the A5 (Watling Street, as was) and also Edgware Community Hospital, but its social and political composition is dominated by the Watling. It is not renowned as a retail or social centre, but it has two historic firsts: Tesco opened its first store in 1931 in Watling Avenue, and the old cinema on Burnt Oak Broadway became London’s first bingo hall in 1961.
Like many working-class areas of London, Burnt Oak is diverse. It is 43 per cent white, including a substantial number of people from European Union member states, particularly Bulgaria and Romania. Twenty-six per cent of its population are of Asian origin and 17 per cent are black. Forty-seven per cent are Christian, 20 per cent are Muslim and seven per cent Hindu.
Although most of the housing was built by the public sector, the Right to Buy has had a major impact in this attractive suburb. Around half the estate had been sold off by 1991. As of 2021, it is 38 per cent owner occupied, 34 per cent social rented and 28 per cent private rented.
Burnt Oak has been a Labour stronghold ever since tenants first moved into the Watling Estate from inner city Islington and St Pancras. Back in the 1930s, the estate was sometimes dubbed “Little Moscow” by its middle-class neighbours. It was the only ward in Barnet that stayed Labour in the 1968 Conservative landslide, when Labour was reduced to 350 borough councillors in Greater London as a whole. Unlike some other outer London council-built communities, such as New Addington and Hainault, Burnt Oak stayed loyal for Sadiq Khan in the mayoral election of 2021.
The by-election was triggered by the downfall of previous Labour councillor (since 2014) Ammar Naqvi. Naqvi had obtained a senior position in the council’s Labour group and was made cabinet member for finance, but the Barnet Post discovered that he had inaccurately claimed to have been employed as an Associate Professor at University College London medical school. Naqvi was removed from his cabinet position and deprived of the whip as soon as the story appeared. He resigned from the council three days later, on 9 January.
Six candidates contested the by-election. They represented the five main parties plus Charles Honderick, who stood for Rejoin EU. Labour’s defence was in the hands of Charlotte Daus (pictured), a regional officer of the Royal College of Nursing. The Conservatives fielded Kevin Ghateh, chair of Barnet Young Conservatives while Gabrielle Bailey and Altan Akbiyik flew the flags of the Greens and Liberal Democrats respectively.
Reform UK’s candidate Sury Khatri has an interesting history. He had represented Barnet’s Mill Hill ward as a Conservative councillor from 2010 to 2018, but fell out with his colleagues and endorsed Labour’s council candidates (and the Lib Dems in Mill Hill) in the 2018 elections. His political journey has evidently taken a new direction since then.
Burnt Oak was not going to slip away from Labour easily, even in a low-turnout by-election with an embarrassing cause at a time when Labour’s electoral coalition was under pressure. Daus was therefore predictably returned as the new councillor for Burnt Oak with 1,064 votes (45 per cent), more than double the total of her nearest competitor, but down from 63.2 per cent of the vote in 2022. The Conservatives retained second place with 501 votes (21.2 per cent), and their share was down a couple of points.
The principal gainer was Reform, whose candidate polled 434 votes (18.4 per cent) to achieve his party’s most creditable result so far in a borough by-election, overtaking the 16.9 per cent vote share Reform won in Bexley, Belvedere, back in October. Reform is already represented on Barnet Council thanks to the defection of Mark Shooter of Hendon ward, who had been elected as a Tory.
The other parties did not make much of an impact, with the Greens on 202 votes, the Lib Dems on 93 and Rejoin EU on 68. Turnout was 17.3 per cent. The low participation was typical of recent by-elections, and Burnt Oak’s turnout in the full borough elections of 2022 was only 27.4 per cent.
To have lost Burnt Oak would have been a “ravens leaving the Tower” moment for Labour, but the result was not exactly good for the party – a drop of 18.2 per cent is hardly cause for celebration. It was the division of the opposition vote between the Tories and Reform that gave Labour its comfortable majority.
That said, the result was a further illustration of how much better Labour is doing in London than it is elsewhere in the country. On the same day, the party lost a council seat in Torfaen in South Wales on a massive swing to Reform, and another in Warwick to the Greens.
There is a limit, though, to how much one can extrapolate from Thursday’s outcome when looking ahead to the next full council elections in May 2026, because Burnt Oak’s is an atypical community within the borough. We can, though, expect it to be close.
Support OnLondon.co.uk and its freelancers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money that other people don’t. Details HERE. Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. Photo of Charlotte Daus from Barnet Labour X/Twitter feed.