Labour Hub on Brent Councillor cull

Republished with permission from Labour Hub. This adds additional context to articles published on Wembley Matters

 

Labour’s factional cull of councillors continues – eight dumped in Brent

Earlier this year, Labour Hub reported that the London Borough of Brent’s Labour Party was the latest to be subjected to a ‘Campaign Improvement Board’. “Instead of allowing the Party’s local branches to select their council candidates ahead of the 2026 borough elections, selections will be made by external ‘assessors’ recruited by the Party’s London Region.”

That process has now ended and Labour’s National Executive Committee has announced its results, against which there is no appeal. No ordinary rank and file members of the Party have been consulted: the NEC has imposed a full set of candidates on the borough’s wards by fiat.

Eight sitting councillors have been excluded. All of them had signed a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2023.

All eight sitting councillors are from minoritised communities, while white councillors who have also held similar positions, such as signing the Gaza ceasefire statement, have not been removed.

The NEC panel was chaired by Keir Starmer ally Abdi Duale, who also carried out most of the interviews that led to the councillors being deselected.

London Party Regional Executive Committee member Cllr Shama Tatler does not appear to be re-standing for Brent Council. But she was a vocal supporter of this CIB and is rumoured to have been actively involved in steering the decision-making. This follows on from her involvement in the Leicester CIB in 2023, which deselected 19 Muslim and Hindu Councillors. In subsequent local elections in the city, Labour lost 22 seats.

At last year’s general election, Leicester East saw the only Tory gain of  the night – and Leicester South went to Independent Shockat Adam.  Cllr Shama Tatler was also parachuted in to run against Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP in Chingford and Woodford Green last year, after the Labour Party apparatus removed Faiza Shaheen as its candidate at the last minute. She lost.

The rationale for the Campaign Improvement Board’s intervention in Brent was never fully revealed. Rumours circulated that it was because of concerns about irregularities in the process leading up to the previous round of candidate selections – which is nonsensical as all steps in this process were fully coordinated with and signed off by regional Party officials.

Another supposed concern was the need to counter the rising Tory-supporting Hindu nationalist vote evident in neighbouring Harrow. Deselecting candidates from a global majority background is unlikely to address such a concern.

It’s evident that factional politics has played a major role in the whole process. Would-be candidates were quizzed about their support for Gaza and, as elsewhere, whatever the original purpose, the result has been to remove a number of excellent local councillors. Poorly performing right wingers, however, who were democratically deselected ahead of council elections in 2022, have been reinstated – sometimes in safe seats.

That’s if any seat in the borough can now be considered safe. Local members, from left to right, are fuming that their councillors have been rejected, without any democratic input from grassroots activists. It’s hard to think of anything more demotivating at a time when members will have work overtime to retain seats, given the poor position of Labour in the polls resulting from Keir Starmer’s failings in government.

Brent Labour Is just the latest victim in the right wing’s campaign of centralising ‘selections’ when it can’t guarantee the result it wants locally. As Richard Price pointed out earlier this year, “The right to choose local government candidates from an adequately-sized panel isn’t a left issue as such, but one shared by many members in other wings of the party and in affiliated unions. The hour is already late, but what we need is a genuinely broad-based campaign to restore local Labour democracy.”

The witch-hunt in Brent comes four days after a Labour defeat in the West Hampstead ward by-election in neighbouring Camden Council on a 23-point swing. A similar swing in Brent in 2026 would see councillors being lost in almost every single Labour-held ward. This upheaval in Brent Labour will undoubtedly increase this likelihood, leading to Labour losing control of the administration.