London’s latest electoral contest, held on Thursday, was in Barnet, where Labour – surprisingly successfully, despite unpromising circumstances – defended a seat in the marginal ward of Whetstone, an area where the party had never won before 2022.
Whetstone is a compact ward stretching between the Barnet branch of the Northern line at Totteridge and Whetstone station and the main line northwards out of King’s Cross at Oakleigh Park. Its centre is a stretch of the old Great North Road between North Finchley and Chipping Barnet. My 1876 Hand Book of the Environs of London by James Thorne is not complimentary: “The village straggles for a considerable distance in disconnected rows and groups of houses…mostly small, some old-fashioned, many poor…the place itself is quite devoid of interest.”
Modern Whetstone is a typical outer London suburb, the houses that attracted Thorne’s condescension filled out with successive generations of suburban dwellings. Oakleigh Park was starting to be developed in the 1870s and it is now the most desirable end of the ward, with large homes on gently curving avenues. The latest area to be developed is a new estate at Sweets Way, which is built to a fairly high density on former Ministry of Defence land.
Whetstone’s demographics are what one might expect from an outer London commuter area. It is 66 per cent owner-occupied. Forty-seven per cent of its inhabitants are in the professions or management (compared to 33 per cent in England) and 53 per cent have degree-level qualifications (34 per cent in England). It is majority white (62 per cent) but with a diverse range of minority ethnicities, the largest being Asian British (19 per cent). Nine per cent are Jewish by faith.
Whetstone was a new ward name creating due to boundary changes in 2022, but it is a successor to the previous Oakleigh ward, which covered a larger area and had three councillors rather than Whetstone’s two. Oakleigh had always been a safe but not monolithically Tory ward, voting Conservative 51 per cent and Labour 32 per cent in the 2018 borough elections.
Labour swept to a surprisingly emphatic victory in Whetstone’s inaugural contest in 2022 – 51 per cent to 36 per cent for the Conservatives. The boundary changes probably did not help Labour much – the party won seats as well in Barnet Vale, which took in the northern part of the old Oakleigh. The win came as a result of targeting and working in a ward that had not previously been seriously contested.
Thursday’s by-election arose suddenly from the resignation of one of the two councillors elected in such triumph in 2022. Liron Velleman, who had recently begun chairing Barnet’s pension fund committee, resigned from the Labour group on 1 April and from the council on 2 April. He had been head of politics at the trade union Community, but abruptly ceased to be employed by the union at the same time as he was leaving the council.
Barnet Conservatives commented that Velleman had been “forced to resign under a cloud of darkness” and compared the situation to that earlier this year in Burnt Oak, brought about by the Cabinet member for finance being exposed as having misrepresented his employment.
Eight candidates contested the by-election. The big five parties were joined by perennial candidate Richard Hewison for Rejoin EU, an independent socialist and another independent. Labour’s new candidate was Ezra Cohen (pictured, centre) who has worked as a volunteer for good causes in the borough.
The principal challenger to Labour was the Conservative Tom Smith, who had represented Oakleigh ward from 2018 until he was defeated in the contest for Whetstone in 2022. Smith, a Tory moderate with parliamentary ambitions, had been an effective councillor and was a strong choice. Adrian Kitching, a business consultant, came forward for Reform UK.
The circumstances of the by-election and the cost to the public purse featured in the campaign, with the Conservatives demanding further explanation from the Labour administration. Reform used national themes, but also proclaimed that “Barnet is Broken” – a phrase previously more associated with a long-running left of centre local blog during the 2002-22 Conservative administration. Labour campaigned for step-free access to Totteridge and Whetstone tube station, aiming to attract votes from older residents in particular.
Cohen held the seat, polling 965 votes (33.5 per cent). Smith was runner up with 818 votes (28.4 per cent) and Kitching came in third with 592 (20.5 per cent). Best of the rest was Charli Thompson for the Greens, with 208 votes (7.2 per cent) followed by Liberal Democrat Luigi Bille (176 votes, 6.1 per cent). Turnout, 34.3 per cent, was the highest in a London by-election so far this year.
The result was a relief for Labour and a contrast with the severe beating the party experienced in the local elections outside London on 1 May and indeed, also on Thursday, its loss to Reform on a 40-point swing in a by-election in Stoke-on-Trent. Even so, the Labour showing is not to be mistaken for a triumph, as the vote share was down 18 percentage points since 2022, which is similar to the loss in Burnt Oak in February.
The outcome was disappointing for the Barnet Conservatives, who could have expected a combination of Velleman’s resignation, anti-incumbent feeling locally and nationally and a decent candidate to have added up to more.
Coming on top of the Finchley Church End by-election in March, where there was virtually no swing, Barnet Tories seem to be making hard work of recovering from the historically bad result they experienced in May 2022. Their vote share in Whetstone dropped by nearly eight percentage points. The net Labour to Conservative swing in was 5.1 per cent. If this were repeated across Barnet, Labour would probably just about retain a majority, depending on how one allocates seats in the closely fought wards.
The Reform vote share was the party’s third best in a London by-election (after Brentford East and Hainault). The fact that it was higher in Whetstone than in the much more fertile territory of Burnt Oak back in February illustrates that the Reform tide has risen even in Barnet.
Its vote share in London is high enough, as in Whetstone, to deprive the Conservatives of a chance of victory but not, in contrast to most of the rest of the country, high enough to start winning broad swathes of seats. Labour, which did not lose many votes on its left flank, prevailed over the divided right.
The borough elections in 2026 will be a complex set of contests. Barnet will be interesting. It is a borough that, along with Wandsworth and Westminster, will be regarded as a key test of the state of the contest in the major party battlegrounds – if, given the growing the strength of their various challengers, that is still an adequate description for Barnet, where most of the ward battles are between Labour and the Conservatives.
A result like the one in Whetstone – Labour surviving on a low swing and a fragmented vote – seems possible. But such an outcome would probably mean Reform doing much better election in the places where they look like being the main challengers: in Bexley to the Conservatives, in Barking & Dagenham to Labour. It will tell us rather less about the boroughs fought between Labour and other centre and left parties. But Whetstone, and Barnet, are very much not “devoid of interest” in electoral terms either now or this time next year.
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