The ten-minute walk from Harrow town centre to Wealdstone is rewarding for its parade of Asian shops, its opportunities for long looks down inter-war housing avenues, cars parked on hard standing spaces at the front, and for the sudden shock of seeing the monumental 1970s Harrow Civic Centre building hemmed in by builders’ hoardings, its entrance signage fading, peeling and mildewed.
This spectacle prompts questions. Why has the titanic structure been abandoned? Where does Harrow Council go about its business? Is the local government scene in this outer London borough as stable and serene as it may seem?
Some answers are easy to find. The Civic Centre pile, designed by architect Eric G. Broughton, was earmarked for destruction way back in October 2014 by a newly re-elected Labour administration as part of its regeneration strategy.
Things did not move fast. Five years later and one set of borough elections later, the council, still Labour-controlled, said its plans for a new, replacement home would not be realised soon. Broughton’s grand creation wasn’t closed for business until 2023 by what by then was a Conservative administration. And for the past few years, Harrow’s municipal business has been variously conducted at a council service hub, an arts centre in Pinner and, most recently, a former Plymouth Brethren church hall.
This may feel hapless, untidy, even a bit cheap, though the Conservatives, led by Councillor Paul Osborn, have received praise from neutral quarters. A Local Government Association “peer challenge” report in 2023 judged the council to have found “fresh impetus and energy” and to have worked well with local police and the care system as well as making progress with a “customer first” approach to residents.
That said, Labour objects that Harrow was served with a government “improvement notice” last year after Ofsted reported that its children’s social care services were “inadequate”, and that in 2024 the Care Quality Commission said its adult care “requires improvement” – an important issue for a borough where more than 15 per cent of people are over 65 years old. As election day draws near, Labour is promising to freeze Council Tax next year and retain a Tory policy of providing an hour of free parking in a borough where three-quarters of households have at least one car.
Even so, in a borough elections year that is exceptional for its unpredictability, Harrow looks like one of those least likely to see power change hands: Labour is in the doldrums nationally and although the Conservatives are hardly flying high either, their support in Harrow – unlike in some other outer boroughs – does not seem obviously susceptible to incursions by Reform UK. Only Kensington & Chelsea looks safer. But even if the Harrow outcome could be fairly nailed-on, the borough’s politics do not lack interest. Neither do they want for turbulence, controversy or reasons for disquiet.
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First, let us consider some of the Conservative candidates. At Byline Times, Adam Bienkov has unearthed unpleasant items from the social media back catalogues of two of them.
Exhibit one is William Jackson, selected by the Tories to stand in the extremely marginal Tory-held ward of North Harrow. In recent months, Jackson has taken to his X/Twitter feed to, for example, tell Shadwell-born Poplar & Limehouse MP Apsana Begum to “go back to Bangladesh” and Birmingham-born Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana to “go back to Pakistan”. Even the MP Rupert Lowe, with his “re-migration” dream, might stop short of using language such as that.
Exhibit two is Nathan Smith, standing for the Tories in the Labour-held West Harrow ward. Last summer, a photograph emerged on X/Twitter of far-Right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – the man who calls himself “Tommy Robinson” – standing close to a man lying injured on a platform at St Pancras station. After being arrested in connection with the matter, Yaxley-Lennon faced no charge. However, Smith’s X/Twitter response to the photo was: “Good on Tommy. No doubt this wanker deserved it.” He added an emoji of a flag of St George.
Jackson has been suspended by his party, but he is already listed on ballot papers as a Conservative candidate for North Harrow. If elected to the council, he will sit as an Independent. I understand that the Tories have yet to say if they will take action against Smith, who on his X/Twitter feed has also called former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson a “traitor” and a “scumbag” for his pandemic safety measures and immigration policies when at Number 10.
It cannot be asserted on the strength of these two examples that the Conservatives in Harrow are rotten to the core with members who make Nigel Farage look like a Liberal Democrat. However, they do have a bit of form in this regard. The best-known Harrow Tory is, of course, Susan Hall, the party’s candidate for Mayor of London in 2024, leader of the Conservative group on the London Assembly, a Harrow councillor of long standing and, indeed, for a short period from September 2013, the leader of Harrow Council after the previously ascendant Labour group split.
Hall, who is defending her seat in Hatch End ward, attracted much criticism during her mayoral campaign for her own activities on X/Twitter, which had already included expressing sympathy for Enoch Powell and egging on the far-Right provocateur Katie Hopkins in her abusive attacks on Sadiq Khan. Undeterred, Hall has carried on in much the same way to this day, sticking up for Lowe in his row with Farage and endorsing the views of other extreme right-wingers on the Elon Musk-owned platform.
The extraordinary indulgence of Hall by Conservatives in London and at national level is the number one reason I think the capital’s Tories have lost their minds. The selections of Small and Jackson as council candidates hardly contradict that view, particularly given that Jackson had previously been put up as a London Assembly candidate for the 2024 elections.
I’m told that Small and Jackson are friends as well as party colleagues and that their social circle also includes Matthew Goodwin-Freeman, Hall’s fellow Hatch End ward councillor. Goodwin-Freeman, who, like Hall, is defending his seat, is an energetic self-publicist and guest on the Right-populist Talk TV. His X/Twitter output has included mocking Sir Sadiq Khan’s needing to travel in an armoured police vehicle as a result to the frequent death threats he receives.
In the last full borough elections the Tories won only 404 seats out of 1,817, their lowest total ever. They will be lucky to cross the 400 threshold this time. If they don’t, will they at long last do something to save themselves from yet further disrepute and decline?
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Another diverting dimension of campaigning in Harrow is provided by the involvement of Arise Harrow, a local group whose leading light is former Labour Harrow councillor Pamela Fitzpatrick. She was also Labour’s defeated candidate for the Harrow East parliamentary constituency in the 2019 general election.
The founder of a local law centre, Fitzpatrick is a loyal and close supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. As On London reported at the time, her Harrow East campaign was marked by what critics saw as the noxiousness of Corbynism, including its attitudes to Jews. (Harrow has a long-established Jewish community, notably in Stanmore).
Fitzpatrick was expelled by Labour after Corbyn’s replacement as party leader. According to her, this happened because she gave an interview to the (now defunct) Socialist Appeal newspaper, organ of the International Marxist Tendency, which was formed by erstwhile members of the Militant Tendency, an entryist group Labour fought a long battle to expel in the 1980s. Fitzpatrick claimed that Labour members like her had been subjected to years of “abuse and harassment” by the party. Locally, some Labour members described Fitzpatrick and her supporters in not dissimilar terms. According to one, her departure has not been missed and party meetings have become a lot more pleasant.
Fitzpatrick is now one of Corbyn’s co-directors of the Peace and Justice Project he set up. In the 2024 general election she ran as an Independent in Harrow West, hoping to unseat Labour’s Gareth Thomas. Publicly backed by Corbyn, she finished third with nine per cent of the vote. Fitzpatrick registered Arise as a political party last summer, apparently taking the name from one of Corbyn’s favourite poems. It was launched in Harrow in December with Corbyn’s support. Now, Arise is fielding 11 candidates, most of them in wards in and around Wealdstone and Harrow town centre, where seven of them are contesting every seat in three wards won by Labour in 2022.
Arises’s focus on these wards is unsurprising. They have substantial Hindu populations, but these are smaller than in other parts of Harrow, and in two of the wards – Marlborough and Wealdstone North – the Muslim populations are larger. Fitzpatrick’s X/Twitter feed contains frequent “pro-Palestine” references – including defences of the Palestine Action group, which the government has proscribed as a terrorist organisation – and attacks on Labour, except for its surviving Corbynites in the House of Commons, who are praised.
Labour’s margins of victory in these three wards in 2022 were in two cases not enormous. Arise’s presence on the ballot papers increases the chances of the Left vote getting split to the Tories’ benefit. That seems unlikely to perturb Arise, given that damaging Labour is a more prominent priority for them than opposing the Tories. Fitzpatrick herself is standing in Marlborough ward, where Harrow’s Labour opposition group leader David Perry is defending his seat.
Arise is one of a number of local parties Corbyn has thrown his weight behind in London. Collectively, they might be seen as, in effect, proxies for Your Party, the outfit Corbyn formed with Zarah Sultana that quickly crumbled into rancour and division. Arise’s hopes in the borough elections depend heavily on attracting Harrow Muslims’ votes.
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One of the reasons Reform probably won’t be a big problem for Harrow’s Tories – at least, not as big as the Greens and, in certain wards, Arise, might be for Labour – may be that its large proportion of Hindu residents, more than 25 per cent according to the 2021 Census, have become increasingly loyal to them. That’s part of a nationwide phenomenon that’s been around for a few years (preceding, by the way, Rishi Sunak’s time as Prime Minister).
The success of Harrow East MP Bob Blackman’s in making his constituency a Tory fortress is seen locally as being largely down to his nurturing of Hindu voters. This has sometimes been in ways that have angered political opponents and others. Critics have accused him of contributing to or tolerating anti-Muslim attitudes and of being sympathetic to Hindu nationalism in India, which is seen as inherently threatening to Muslims.
It has been noticeable that Harrow voters as a whole have been less keen to support Labour mayoral candidate Khan than Labour London Assembly candidates, for whom they vote on the same day. The 2016 Tory mayoral campaign notoriously sought to stir fears about the Muslim Khan among Hindu Londoners.
All of this is part of a Harrow political mix that belies any impression of uniform stability. One of the smaller novelties of this year’s unusually unpredictable London local elections is that boroughs whose democratic outcomes have been hard to call in the past are among the minority where power seems unlikely to change hands. Harrow is one of them. But could the borough, once again, confound expectations?
Four years ago, its return to a Conservative majority after three Labour wins in a row was not widely foreseen. Along with capturing the Croydon mayoralty, this gave the Tories in London some consolation for losing the star prizes of Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet to Labour. In 2010, the surprise was the other way round as Labour gained Harrow from the Tories on the same day as it lost power nationally.
Labour is realistic about its chances this time round, concentrating on cost of living, quality of life and bread-and-butter service delivery issues – keeping it local, as elsewhere. Along with those vows about Council Tax and free parking, Labour’s pledges include doubling the frequency of residential street cleaning, “tougher action” on fly-tipping, the introduction of “a private alleyway clearance scheme” and a crackdown on rogue landlords, all of these listed on a leaflet with a corner splash of Union Jack.
In Harrow town centre, the pedestrianised St Ann’s Road contains a string of purple retail kiosks that have gone unused since their arrival last November. Public realm works around them are ongoing. This, too, is a matter Labour is seizing on as it concentrates its efforts on its more promising wards, which tend to be in Gareth Thomas’s constituency. Tory candidate Jackson’s suspension might have helped their candidates’ chances of winning North Harrow ward against the likely trend. Harrow looks pretty safe for the Tories. But in 2026, who can be entirely sure?
Update, 26 April, 2026: Now, meet a Reform UK candidate in Harrow.
To understand in depth and hyper-local detail how the story of the 2026 borough elections might unfold, see London Decides, the definite guide compiled by On London editor Dave Hill and elections expert Lewis Baston in collaboration with Lowick Hedry.
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