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Joanne McCartney: It’s time to give more rail services to London Overground – just ask my constituents

The Mayor is right to keep up the pressure on a reluctant government to devolve further control of London's suburban rail services
Joanne McCartney

This week Sadiq Khan made a call for City Hall to take control of London’s rail infrastructure in order to target investment where it’s most needed and pave the way to tube-level frequencies on a number of neglected but critical National Rail lines across the capital. He was right to do so. For several years now, I have been campaigning for Transport for London (TfL) to take over the suburban rail services which run out of Moorgate along the former Northern City Line and through my constituency of Enfield & Haringey. I have regularly written to the Department for Transport (DfT) and raised this with TfL and with the Mayor at his Question Time sessions.

Such a change would bring these services into the London Overground network, leading to a significantly improved service for commuters and residents. The line, currently run by Great Northern, has something of a chequered history. Despite the rollout of new trains finally getting underway, the service is unreliable. The outgoing trains on which the service will depend for a while yet are the oldest electric multiple unit trains in service anywhere in mainland Britain, causing frustration for many – including myself, as I rely upon them for my daily commute.

An independent report by Chris Gibb for the DfT made for interesting reading. As the non-executive director of Network Rail, he reviewed the Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), which covers Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern. One of his key recommendations was to devolve the Moorgate service and the Southern service from Milton Keynes to Croydon via west London to TfL. This highlights the fact that the GTR franchise is simply too large to handle all its routes. Gibb also stated that these lines should be devolved in 2017 or 2018, so they are already well behind schedule.

I was struck by a recent answer given by TfL Commissioner Mike Brown in response to my question during a London Assembly discussion of this issue. He described getting a proper discussion going with the DfT as being “like pulling teeth“. London has a proven track record for delivering its own transport services and you have to ask yourself what it is that the government is waiting for.

London Overground has been a tremendous success on the railways it controls, with increased service levels, more information and better customer satisfaction. Stations are also staffed at all hours of the day and have been better cleaned and maintained. It’s hardly surprising that in response to these improvements, passenger numbers have consistently increased on devolved lines. Londoners rightly expect this level of service across the capital.

The GTR timetable fiasco last year dented the reputation of rail operators. To me. this only strengthened the case for devolving the lines to TfL. Doing so would help bring more passengers to the line and enhance connectivity by adding it to the London Underground map. Discussions are currently ongoing as to whether the line should be handed over. I will continue to push for devolution so that as many residents as possible can at last enjoy the benefits of a reliable railway.

Joanne McCartney is London Assembly member for the Enfield & Haringey constituency.

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Department for Transport, Enfield & Haringey, London Overground, London Underground, Mike Brown, Sadiq Khan, Transport for London

Hackney: Tension over People’s Vote march illuminates Labour’s Brexit divisions

Some Corbynites in the overwhelmingly pro-Remain borough appear reluctant to campaign for a second referendum
Dave Hill

A public disagreement between a Labour councillor in Hackney and the secretary of her constituency party has illuminated and underlined tensions over Labour’s Brexit strategy that have festered in the capital and nationally ever since long time eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn became the party’s leader.

On Saturday, Heather Mendick, a dedicated Corbynite who was elected to her post in Hackney South & Shoreditch in 2017, wrote on Twitter that she had seen photos of “nearly 20” Hackney councillors and one Hackney MP on Saturday’s People’s Vote march through Central London, but “just four grassroots members”. She observed that this was quite different from the balance at most demonstrations where, “we normally get 20-30 from the grassroots and just a few councillors”.

Screen shot 2019 03 26 at 12.19.34

This drew a Twitter response from Sem Moema, who is a Labour councillor for Hackney Downs ward (in the Hackney North & Stoke Newington constituency) and an adviser to Hackney Mayor Philip Glanville. Addressing Mendick, Moema wrote: “You unilaterally decided not to advertise the event or even *allow* the Hackney South [& Shoreditch CLP] banner, for reasons yet to be explained”. She added that it was “great to meet members who never come to meetings AND members of the public”.

Screen shot 2019 03 26 at 12.33.02

Replying, Mendick denied making any “unilateral decision”. What isn’t in doubt, however, is what that decision was. Minutes of the meeting at which the CLP settled on its attitude to Saturday’s event say: “We agreed not to organise a Hackney Labour meetup for the People’s Vote March as we have previously not organised on matters that are divisive even when the CLP has policy on these”. Sources say that the policy referred was decided very recently, when members voted to support a second referendum against the wishes of Mendick among others.

Screen shot 2019 03 26 at 12.47.56

Mendick later tweeted that she had meant no criticism of local Labour members who went on the march (“I’m glad people did,” she wrote, though it seems self-evident that she was not among them). However, the extract from the minutes plainly state that Brexit is a “divisive” matter in Hackney South CLP circles and that it was decided not to organise CLP representation on the march – hence the absence of the banner. And does a sense of some broader fracture in the ranks emerge from Moema’s Twitter intervention?

Of course, internal disagreement is part and parcel of every political party, at whatever level of organisation. But Brexit is no minor issue and it clearly excites strong and conflicting views in Hackney Labour circles.

The Hackney MP Mendick mentioned, though not by name, who went on the march was her very own Meg Hillier, who has voted against Brexit repeatedly, including not to trigger Article 50 in the first place. However, Hackney North’s Diane Abbott, a loyal member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, was not there. One local Labour member who went claims, seemingly contrary to Mendick, that there were actually “hundreds” of Hackney Labour members present on Saturday.

There are also interesting questions raised by the fact that Hackney as a borough voted 78.5 per cent to Remain in 2016, one of the biggest Remain margins in the capital and in the country. Does a CLP in such a borough have a responsibility to give campaigning expression the views of a huge majority of local voters, especially as it is Labour policy to back a second referendum if it enables a “damaging Tory Brexit” to be stopped?

Jeremy Corbyn himself, the MP for Islington North, mentioned the People’s Vote march in the House of Commons yesterday when criticising Theresa May. Yet he himself was in Morecambe, Lancashire, on Saturday. If there is a second referendum, would he campaign enthusiastically for Remain? After all, he didn’t last time.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Brexit, Diane Abbott, Hackney, Hackney Council, Hackney North & Stoke Newington, Hackney South & Shoreditch, Heather Mendick, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, Meg Hillier, Philip Glanville, Sem Moena

London knife crime linked to youth homelessness and fear of neighbourhood violence

Ongoing research also suggests that longer jail terms have no beneficial effects
Dave Hill

Londoners who start carrying knives at a young age often do so in response to fear of being attacked within the neighbourhoods where they live and because they have witnessed older friends or siblings being attacked in their local area, according to research with over 100 young male offenders in the capital.

Writing at The Conversation, criminology lecturer Erin Sanders-McDonagh adds that most of the young men she has been speaking to “grew up in areas of high deprivation with disproportionately high levels of violent crime compared to other areas of London” and that her study is revealing that “homelessness is also a major issue for young people who become involved in offending”.

Sanders-McDonagh reports one young Londoner telling her that he began carrying a knife at the age of 12 “as he was afraid to walk across his estate to and from school”. She also describes cases in which children “were asked to leave home by parents who didn’t know how else to stop them getting involved with drug dealing, or were worried about keeping younger siblings safe”. Exposure to domestic violence is cited as another reason why youngsters end up homeless: “Tragically, for some of these children, the violence they experience at home makes living on the streets a better option than staying”.

The findings shed light on the influence of family and immediate local factors on boys’ decisions to start carrying knives and other weapons. Much sociological and media focus has been on territorial rivalries between gangs rather than violence and the fear of it experienced by young Londoners within close localities. London Mayor Sadiq Khan is running a campaign urging young Londoners not to carry knives and the Home Office launched a “knife free” advertising campaign one year ago.

In her article, Sanders-Donagh expresses concern over new government data showing a greater likelihood of offenders of all ages across England and Wales receiving custodial sentences and that the average length of these has simultaneously increased. She stressed that “punitive approaches” to young males who are themselves often victims of stabbings or other assaults and may have “lost someone close to them to violence” is not an solution to their offending. She is also critical of the effect of reductions in local authority funding for youth services and failures by councils to help youngsters seen primarily as dangerous criminals.

The full article at The Conversation can be read here.

Categories: News
Tags: crime, Erin Sanders-McDonagh, knife crime, Sadiq Khan

Sadiq Khan awards funds to support EU Londoners’ ‘settled status’ applications

The London Mayor has provided grants to community organisations as part of the ongoing "London is Open" campaign
Dave Hill

Sadiq Khan has provided £30,000 of mayoral funds to six community organisations supporting non-UK European Union citizens who wish to continue living in the capital after Brexit.

Applications for “settled status” or “pre-settled status” by non-UK EU citizens and their families who wish to continue living in the UK after 30 June 2021 must be made under the government’s EU settlement scheme, which will become fully open by 30 March, regardless of the ongoing parliamentary wrangles over Brexit.

Mayor Khan says these “micro grants” of around £5,000 each will help ensure that “good quality advice and support” is available to more EU Londoners, “particularly those who are vulnerable”, including disabled people and rough sleepers. The money follows the Mayor’s allocation last year of £20,000 to nine different groups, which have since staged events, provided information services and arranged legal advice with the aim of helping EU Londoners through the Home Office process.

The six organisations benefit from the latest funding round are:

  • Latin American Women’s Rights Service, which will put on workshops and community events in Islington, Southwark and Haringey and conduct outreach work in Lewisham, Wandsworth and Tower Hamlets.
  • New Europeans, which provides “legal surgery events” for Somali communities, older Italian and Roma communities in nine boroughs across the capital.
  • Work Rights Centre, which runs weekly Q&A sessions for Eastern Europeans throughout London.
  • Migrant Resource Centre, a training organisation for volunteers and staff helping all EU Londoners in various boroughs including Brent, Camden and Waltham Forest.
  • Refugees in Active and Effective Partnership, a body that assists EU refugees, primarily in Hillingdon, Harrow, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow.
  • Bulgarian Centre for Social Integration and Culture, which organises advice sessions and events for Bulgarian and Roma communities in Edmonton and Enfield.

City Hall describes the funding awards as part of the Mayor’s London is Open campaign, which was launched in 2016 after the outcome of the EU referendum to demonstrate his commitment to the capital continuing to be a welcoming, international city. The campaign has also included the creation of an online EU Londoners Hub providing information and advice about post-Brexit rights, which the Mayor says has already been signed up to by 19,000 people.

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Brent, Brexit, Camden, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Lewisham, Sadiq Khan, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth

Dave Hill: London MPs must work with others to block Brexit and build the UK anew

The capital's representatives in parliament should by-pass their inadequate party leaders and join with others to put the UK back together
Dave Hill

I joined the march for a so-called People’s Vote through Central London yesterday as both participating citizen and journalist observer. When it was over, I made my way back home to E5 a little stronger in my growing belief that although a second referendum has its attractions, the ideal solution to the poisonous quagmire Brexit is simply to junk it immediately.

An abuse of democracy? A betrayal of the 17.4 million who voted Leave? Look at it this way. The referendum took place nearly three years ago, and was won by a narrow margin – less than two per cent – with the help of dirty and legally questionable campaigning. Since then, the electorate has changed and public opinion has shifted. The referendum was advisory and the United Kingdom government can cancel it.

Most important of all, the Brexit saga is tearing the UK to bits. That is terrible and frightening, especially as formal withdrawal from the EU would be only the beginning of years of further destructive wrangling. Brexit fatigue is already taking a ruinous toll in parliament and everywhere else. There is a mood in the country for getting this business over with. I sympathise. We should free ourselves right away from a situation created by David Cameron, worsened by Theresa May and exploited by Jeremy Corbyn before it gets any worse. Parliament should revoke Article 50, bin Brexit for good and get on with trying to deal with the national fractures and failings the referendum has so unhappily exposed.

London’s MPs could play a big part in this, starting with next week’s series of votes on, well, whatever they exactly they will be able to vote on. Already, a cross-party group of MPs from various parts of the country is looking into how it can cancel Brexit amid concerns that May will fall in with her party’s “no deal” wing at the eleventh hour if her own deal is rejected yet again. London MPs of every political party and none should do whatever is in their power to thwart such an outcome and to impede Brexit in whatever ways they can. But whether they succeed or fail in those goals, their work on rescuing the UK from isolationism, division and decline will have only just begun.

A part of the Leave vote was a subliminal rejection of various versions of “London” that have attracted increasing dislike and resentment in recent years: the London of a cloth-eared Westminster and Whitehall village; the London of greedy bankers who crashed the economy and got away with it; the London of street crime and terror attacks and “too many” immigrants; the “rich London” that “gets everything” while other regions go short. All of these are populist misconceptions, but they are powerful and they are symptoms of a relationship between the capital and the rest of the UK’s regions and nations that is genuinely problematic and needs to be bravely and generously addressed.

This is as much a job for London MPs as it is for its Mayor, who, to his credit, has made a start on the task of building better relationships with counterpart “metro mayors” and others leaders of other big UK cities. Not every London MP is a Remainer and they vary widely in ideological disposition, including within parties. But maybe there is bigger role to be played by the all party parliamentary group for London in forging productive ties with MPs and groupings representing other parts of the UK.

Common ground, already identified, in recognising that London-bashing is counter productive, that public investment is not a zero sum game, and that London would benefit from other cities and regions thriving, should be firmly occupied and built on. A shared theme of much fuller and far bolder devolution of powers and resources to cities, regions and local authorities should be taken up, forming a cross-party platform which London MPs can enthusiastically occupy alongside fellow parliamentarians from up and down the land and fellow politicians working in different layers of government.

One of the gloomiest and most regressive things about the programmes of the UK’s two largest national parties has been their feeble kow-towing to anti-London feeling and their failure to strongly embrace and champion the de-centralisation of government. Brexit was sold on a promise of taking back control, yet we see every day that the other EU nations already have more control over the UK’s destiny they did before and, meanwhile, the UK government’s capacity to govern the UK is being chronically reduced by the Brexit shambles and will be for a long while to come.

Yes, cancelling Brexit would cause a backlash and some of it could be ugly. But it has already legitimised plenty of ugliness, with the prospect of plenty more to come. This damaging debacle should be stopped as swiftly and decisively as possible and a process of national listening, healing and democratic invigoration begun. By-passing their backward, moribund national leaders, London’s MPs of all parties should join with colleagues across the country and help it to Remain, recover and renew. Go on, do it. Do it now.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit, David Cameron, Devolution, Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 83: The perfidious rogue of Downing Street

The spirit of George Downing is still among us
Victor Keegan

Everyone knows that there is only one Downing Street, the traditional home of British Prime Ministers just off London’s Whitehall. However, New York has two Downing Streets – one in Brooklyn and the other in Greenwich Village. They can be checked out on Google Streetview. And there is a direct connection: it is a man called George Downing (1624-1684), an extraordinary character whom Samuel Pepys once described as a “perfidious rogue”.

Downing was probably born in London in 1624, but joined his mother’s family in America in 1638. He became one of the first nine students to attend Harvard, sponsored by the soldier John Okey and, soon after finishing, became the first tutor there (Harvard’s founding benefactor was another Englishman, John Harvard from Southwark, by the way). A few years later he sailed as a preacher to the West Indies on a slave ship and eventually ended up back in England, where he became chaplain to Okey’s regiment, fighting on Oliver Cromwell’s side in the Civil War.

Downing was one of the people who urged Cromwell to take the crown. But when Cromwell died and Britain’s enthusiasm for republicanism waned, Downing did the only honourable thing a perfidious person could do. When the monarchy was restored, he jumped ship to support Charles II, having already cleared his path at a secret meeting with Charles in Holland while he was still on Cromwell’s payroll. 

Charles dispatched him to the Netherlands, where one of his jobs was to organise a spy ring and hunt down the remaining regicides at large who had killed his father, Charles I. One of those he captured was none other than  Okey, the man who had sponsored his education in America. Okey was executed and buried in the Tower of London, rather than the graveyard of St Margaret’s Westminster where most of the regicides were interred, to minimise popular reaction.

To be fair, Downing did help institute some major financial reforms and was one of the key people supporting the reform of the Treasury and establishment of what became the Bank of England. He was also instrumental in doing a deal with the Dutch, as a result of which Britain acquired ownership of New York in exchange for Surinam. He amassed a huge fortune by fair means and foul. 

A grateful Charles rewarded him with a knighthood and a parcel of land adjoining St James’s Park, including what was renamed Downing Street after he commissioned a row of smart terraced houses there. Judging by the recent double dealing among cabinet members it looks as though the ghost of George Downing still haunts Number 10. 

The previous 82 instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
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Onkar Sahota: Sadiq Khan can give a helping hand to unpaid social carers

He may lack funds and powers, but there are valuable interventions the London Mayor can make
Onkar Sahota

To get serious about fixing social care we must lend a hand to the many Londoners who do it unpaid. The funding announced in the government’s most recent budget provided only a sticking plaster for the burgeoning issues that social care workers and commissioners are facing. My recent report for the London Assembly, Who Cares?, sets out why giving a hand to London’s 610,000 unpaid carers must now be a priority for the London Mayor.

Cuts to social care left have London councils facing a funding gap of £100m by 2019/20. Demand and costs are still rising faster than funding. The Mayor has little funding or mandate with which to bridge this chasm. But, by building on the recommendations in my report, he can make intelligent interventions to support the city’s unpaid carers.

Good social care needs a partnership between the professional and the family – all the more so given aspirations to carry out more care work at home. However, unpaid caregiving has risen faster than the elderly population, suggesting that family carers are stepping up to fill gaps left by cuts to formal social care provision. They must be helped to do that better, so that workers can fulfil the tasks only they are trained for. That isn’t the case at present, and though many social care workers form close, cooperative relationships with the families they work with, their situations can still be stressful, not helped by pressures on resources.

UNISON and the Coram Foundation polled carers and found many feel discriminated against at work, take pay cuts or leave their jobs altogether. Given the demographics of caring, this means that women are driven out of the workplace or on to wages that don’t reflects their skill levels. Carer’s allowance and carer’s credit are inadequate. The sums on offer are paltry and the requirement that people in need of care are given at least thirty-five hours of it a week is unrealistic. Research shows that commitments above ten hours a week are enough to prevent people from working.

As a GP, I see growing numbers of older patients with complex conditions. What I tend not to see is the army of family and friends supporting them. Yet see them I should, because caring takes a toll. Two in five carers devoting more than 50 hours a week to the task suffer from bad health. That’s more than twice the rate for non-carers.

Women pick up the lion’s share of unpaid care, with 100,000 more of them than men providing it in London. Perhaps that is why it is so undervalued. Carers UK estimate that unpaid care in London alone is worth £13.8 billion annually. With this comes financial hardship and poor health, consequences that are set to become more concentrated in already-deprived areas. Tower Hamlets (15.9 per cent), Islington (11.8 per cent), Hackney, and Southwark (both 11.4 per cent) have seen the most significant increases in the value of unpaid care provided since 2011.

That is why I’m calling on the Mayor to work with the NHS to run check-ups for carers when they accompany someone to a health service. Health professionals should also proactively identify whether a patient has a carer – even if they don’t think of them as such – so they can be supported. At the moment, two-thirds of carers aren’t given the support they need by medical professionals and only one in ten is even identified as a carer in the first place.

Support in the community will be a central pillar of this. My report also recommends that the Mayor uses his social prescribing strategy, now being drafted, to ease the journey of carers through social services. Health and social care services in pleasant and welcoming community centres would give carers somewhere they actually want to go, where they can get a bit of respite, information and company.

As the social care system is short of workers, not helped by the effects of Brexit and the government’s insistence on treating staff as unskilled, volunteers can help. They can never replace trained workers, but they can provide some of the background support that a trained worker cannot. Mayoral leadership on cross-generation volunteering would be welcome and improve social integration too. The Mayor could even look to expand co-housing schemes that offer young people reduced rent in return for doing a few regular chores and providing company for someone else.

This is a problem that the Mayor can address. In doing so he would help the limping social care system until the government gets a grip and publishes the green paper that should have appeared last summer. Unpaid carers should be able to look to the government and find a helping hand. My report shows how the Mayor can offer one in the meantime.

Dr Onkar Sahota is the London Assembly Member for Ealing & Hillingdon.

Categories: Comment
Tags: adult social care, London Assembly, Sadiq Khan

Kensington & Chelsea: Labour wins Dalgarno by-election, but with reduced vote share

It was a comfortable win, but ground was lost to rival parties
Lewis Baston

Dalgarno is the place you reach when you reach North Pole and keep going. It is also a safe Labour ward in the Conservative citadel of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. If you can understand what on earth has been happening in British politics lately, these two apparent paradoxes should be easy to resolve. Bear with me as we explore the polar north of Central London.

Dalgarno is a far cry from what one is used to thinking of as Kensington, but it is just as much a part of that neighbourhood as the palaces and expensive boutiques to be found further south. Kensington has always had its own north-south divide, and although the frontier has shifted around a bit over the years in Notting Hill, there is a large community north of it, of which Dalgarno is the northernmost.

The ward lies between the north end of Ladbroke Grove to the east and the London Overground line between Willesden Junction and Shepherds Bush to the west. To the south, there is a jagged line starting at North Pole Road – my sense of symmetry was pleased that there is a Kensington Avenue at North Pole, Alaska. The main through road is Barlby Road. The northern edge of Dalgarno ward runs along Harrow Road, but the area to the north of the Great Western railway line is made up almost entirely of the great necropolis of Kensal Green Cemetery. To the passer-by on a train, it is the area around the squat tower of the St Charles hospital, the Kensal gasholders and the big Sainsbury’s. The Ladbroke Grove train crash happened on this stretch in 1999.

Dalgarno ward is dominated by social housing, the tenure of 65 per cent of its residents. It is not a “council estate” ward as such because North Kensington has always been a laboratory for different models of social housing. The largest single element is the Peabody Trust’s Dalgarno Estate, based around a densely populated group of 1930s slab blocks, but there are parts of the ward that are quite suburban-looking as well. The population is extremely diverse: 41 per cent “white British” in the 2011 Census with a wide range of other ethnicities also represented. Some of the minority population is of recent origin, but the ward is also part of one of London’s oldest black Caribbean communities.

The demographics point towards this being a safe Labour ward and it has indeed produced large Labour majorities since it was created by local boundary changes in 2014. The party’s biggest win there came in 2018, when full borough elections took place in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster. Grenfell is in a different ward to the south of Dalgarno, but it is nearby. Some more excitable Labour supporters persuaded themselves that the party could win control of the borough last year, but this was never realistic. Despite a significant pro-Labour swing, only one seat changed hands – in St Helen’s ward, which borders Dalgarno.

One of the Labour councillors elected in Dalgarno, Robert Thompson, is a vicar who has moved to take over a parish in West Hampstead and therefore stepped down as a councillor. Yesterday’s by-election – Thursday 21 March – was held to fill the resulting vacancy.

Labour’s Kasim Ali won the seat with 719 votes. He is a charity project manager and an energetic fundraiser for the victims of Grenfell, who has run six marathons for that cause. His victory means that Labour, as is often the case, have a solid lock on the representation of North Kensington but remain a localised permanent opposition on a Conservative-controlled council. Tory candidate and long-time party activist Samia Bentayeb achieved a creditable 306 votes in coming second. Liberal Democrat, Green and UKIP candidates also stood. 

Although Labour won, it was not a very encouraging result for the party. Its vote share was down significantly, from 71 per cent last year to 52 per cent, with gains scattered between all the other parties. To some extent this outcome was just a reversion back to the normal state of affairs following the 2018 peak, as the Labour vote share has tended to be in the 50-60 per cent range. But it was at the lower end of that range. Turnout fell from 38 per cent in 2018 to 29 per cent – not great but not terrible either.

The worry for Labour is not that it might lose Dalgarno ward in the future, but the implications for its defence of the parliamentary seat of Kensington, which Dalgarno forms part of. Labour famously won Kensington in 2017 with a 20-vote majority. To hold on to it, Labour really needs to win by big margins in wards like Dalgarno in the north of the constituency to outweigh the Tory votes that will pile up in the south of it.

It isn’t possible to compare numerical margins in multi-member ward elections precisely, but Labour’s lead in Dalgarno shrank from around 800 in 2018 to a little bit over 400 in 2019. A split vote and a low turnout were not what Kensington Labour was looking for, even if they have maintained their level of representation in the council chamber.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Barlby Road, Conservatives, Dalgarno ward, Green Party, Grenfell Tower, Kasim Ali, Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, Labour, Ladbroke Grove, Liberal Democrats, North Pole Road, Notting Hill, Robert Thompson, Samia Bentayeb, Shepherds Bush, Ukip, West Hampstead, Willesden Junction