Labour successfully defended Hounslow Council’s Cranford ward in a by-election on Thursday, but looking beyond the headline there is little for the party to celebrate – it was one of the Conservatives’ best results in London since the general election.
The by-election was caused by the death in June of Labour councillor Sukhbir Singh Dhaliwal. He served as a councillor for the Cranford or Heston West wards in two periods, from 1994 to 2010 and then again from 2016 until his death. Dhaliwal worked on the buses, first as a conductor and then as a driver, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s bus network, which his friends would test him on. Transport was one of his top political interests. He was a proud trade unionist. The leaders of both of the main Hounslow Council parties praised Dhaliwal’s dedication and personal warmth, and commented on the respect in which he was held in the Cranford community and the borough more widely.
Cranford’s name indicates that the old village was a ford over the River Crane, which flows from Yeading into the Thames near Twickenham. The Crane is a boundary river, demarcating the line between Hounslow and Hillingdon and, further downstream, between Hounslow and Richmond-upon-Thames. It also separates Feltham from Heston. Cranford Park and the parish church of St Dunstan’s are in Hillingdon, but the centre of the village and modern residential development are in Hounslow. The ward lies between Hounslow West and Hatton Cross on the Heathrow branch of the Piccadilly line, and contains the triangle of roads at the meeting point of the A4, A30 and A312.
Heathrow’s proximity is impossible to escape in Cranford. Planes fly low overhead on their way in, and many local residents work at the airport or in jobs that supply it or the airlines that use it. Like much of the Heathrow hinterland, Cranford has a large Asian population (57 per cent of residents according to the 2021 Census). It is a working-class community, with few professionals or managers resident in the area, and very religious – only eight per cent claimed no religious affiliation in 2021 (37 per cent did so in England as a whole). The plurality religion is Christian (38 per cent), with significant Muslim (20 per cent), Sikh (18 per cent) and Hindu (10 per cent) presences too. The Sikh community seems particularly prominent in local politics.
Cranford’s housing is a mix of owner occupied (37 per cent), privately rented (35 per cent) and socially rented (28 per cent). Much of it consists of family houses built in the inter-war period, though one will see the occasional older house left over from when this was market gardening country. The major roads physically divide the community, and the residential areas are slightly bleak, with treeless avenues and front gardens converted into parking.
The ward is host to some of London’s quirkiest street names, thanks to the presence of the council-built estate known variously as Beaver, Beavers or Beaver Farm – the official renaming to “Meadows” in the 2000s never caught on. The main loop through the estate is called Chinchilla Drive and the other roads are also named after rodents and small mammals – Raccoon Way, Opossum Way, Marmot Road and so on. The estate has had a troubled history, with problems arising from the system building techniques used in the late 1960s and, in the 1990s, from antisocial behaviour. It remains a rather insular community.
Candidates for the by-election came forward from the five main parties. Labour’s Hira Dhillon (pictured) was in the tradition of Sukhbir Dhaliwal in being a long-standing local resident and a transport worker – in his case on the London Underground and railways rather than the buses. There have been ructions within Hounslow Labour, and currently Labour candidates within the borough are being selected by a panel of the National Executive Committee. The Conservatives contrasted this with their own more local methods, and selected young activist Gurpreet Singh Siddhu. Businessman Khushwant Singh stood for Reform UK and Miruna Leitoiu stood for the Liberal Democrats. Neither party fought the seat in 2022.
The Green Party nominated Gurpal Virdi, who has an important place in the history of London policing. He was the first recruit to the Met from the Hounslow Asian community when he joined in 1982, and became a high-flying detective sergeant in the 1990s. Then, in 1998, he and other ethnic minority officers received racist messages. Instead of conducting a proper investigation, the Met falsely alleged that Virdi himself had sent the notes, and in 2000 he was dismissed.
The Virdi affair was the subject of an official inquiry. This reported in 2002, when Virdi was reinstated, and again in 2004. After retiring in 2012, Virdi aspired to a political career and in 2014 was selected as a Labour candidate for Cranford ward, only to suffer further injustice. He was accused of a historic sexual offence during the campaign, suspended from Labour, elected anyway and eventually acquitted of all charges in 2015. The Labour whip was then granted, but Virdi left the party in 2017 and stood down from the council in 2018. He ran for election in Cranford as an Independent in 2022, polling a respectable 489 votes but still coming last, just behind the Green.
Cranford has long been a safe Labour ward. The Labour slate won well over half the vote in 2022 (the usual method of calculation of percentages rather understates how dominant Labour was) and the party has won consistently large majorities for decades, lapsing only in the Tory annus mirabilis of 1968. One of the Cranford Labour winners in 1982 was Harbans Kanwal, one of the first two Asian councillors in Hounslow.
The issues of the by-election were familiar ones to the observer of local politics – standards of street cleaning, fly tipping, antisocial behaviour and the feeling of neglect which sometimes takes hold in communities such as Cranford due to their lying at the outer edges of their boroughs. The August polling day made for a torpid campaign and a low turnout, which at 21.6 per cent was well down on the itself unimpressive 30.6 per cent participation in Cranford in the 2022 full borough elections.
Hira Dhillon retained the seat for Labour, with 951 votes (40.7 per cent). This was by past comparison a very poor result in Cranford – the Labour vote share was down 12.6 points on where it was in 2022 on the standard basis of calculation, and this arguably understates how big the fall in support really was. Calculated on an alternative basis, the Labour share collapsed by 25 points.
The Conservatives finished a good second, with 679 votes (29.1 per cent). That was up by 10 percentage points on 2022, making the Cranford result their third-best in London since the general election on that metric. The meaty 11.3 per cent swing from Labour to Conservative was the highest since Fulham’s Lillie ward in February.
The Tories achieved this despite the arrival of competition on the right from Reform UK, whose 405 votes (17.3 per cent) was not a bad showing for a ward with Cranford’s demographics. The Greens (156 votes) and Lib Dems (145 votes) were far behind. Overall, there was a large swing from Left to Right.
One should not read too much into a low-turnout summer local by-election, but some conclusions can be drawn from Cranford. One is that there is a bit of a malaise about Hounslow Labour. This is indicated not only by the NEC involvement in selections but also internal rumblings becoming public and poor by-election results earlier in the year, in Brentford.
The swing in Cranford would, if replicated across the borough next May, be enough to switch perhaps 10 or more seats to the Conservatives, though the tide would have to rise higher to threaten Labour’s control of Hounslow, as its majority in 2022 was an enormous 52 seats to the Tories’ ten.
Cranford is another piece of evidence that the Conservatives are picking up support among Hindu and Sikh voters, on top of the 2022 elections in Harrow and Brent and several results in the 2024 general election, including Harrow East and the isolated Conservative gain in Leicester East. If this is indeed a general trend, the Conservatives could make significant gains in Hounslow, Ealing and Brent and perhaps on rather high swings, even if they struggle elsewhere.
Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.