There were three London borough by-elections on Thursday – two in Hounslow and one in Barnet. The results were among the more interesting in London lately. The standard by-election outcome has tended to be a Labour hold with a much-reduced vote share on a low turnout and Reform UK gaining ground, but only one of this week’s three contests conformed to that generalisation.
Brentford had a double by-election following the resignations of two Hounslow Labour councillors. One of them, Balraj Sarai, was at the centre of allegations that he was not performing his duties as he should and racking up a list of absences from council meetings. He resigned his Syon & Brentford Lock ward seat in January. He was joined by Rhys Williams of Brentford East ward, who stood down because of the pressure his council duties was putting on his working and family life.
Let us deal first with Brentford East. A couple of weeks ago a by-election took place in the ward overlooked by the Hammersmith Flyover. Now it is time to move a few miles west and consider the territory under the M4 Elevated Section around its curious double-deck junction with the A4 running underneath the flyover. Industrial development between the wars produced the “Golden Mile” of modern factories along the Great West Road. The ward is also the location of the Brentford Community Stadium, home of Premier League Brentford Football Club, and the Musical Museum.
While not strictly a council estate ward, Brentford East has mostly been built by social housing providers. According to the 2021 census, 43 per cent of households were in social housing (plus four per cent shared ownership), 28 per cent were private renters and only 24 per cent owner-occupiers. There are some 1920s “homes fit for heroes” council estates in the north of the ward and the high-rise 1960s Brentford Towers estate, with its six 24-storey blocks by Green Dragon Lane. The ward’s population is 50 per cent white and 50 per cent from a range of other ethnic backgrounds.
An oddly illustrious cast of five candidates, one from each of the main parties, stood in the by-election. Defending for Labour was Max Mosley, a senior economist at the National Institute for Social and Economic Research and not to be confused with the late Formula One impresario. The Conservative candidate was Christine Cunniffe, principal of LVS Ascot school and a media critic (for GB News) of Labour’s policies around private education. Liberal Democrat Bernice Roust is a lighting engineer who appeared as an extra in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The Greens’ Rashid Wahab has an impressive CV of teaching, business and artificial intelligence. David Kerr of Reform UK stood for that party in Brentford & Isleworth in the 2024 general election.
The result resembled the standard pattern. Mosley was elected with 430 votes (48 per cent, down 15 per cent on 2022) on a dreadful turnout of 15 per cent. The main challenge came from Reform, whose candidate polled 197 votes (22 per cent, the party’s best so far in a London by-election) with the other three candidates all polling fewer than 100 votes. The third-placed Conservatives were looking particularly bedraggled – the drop in their vote share (eight per cent) was their worst result since the general election.
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Syon & Brentford Lock ward is to the west of Brentford. As the name suggests, it contains part of Brentford, namely the area around the River Brent just before it flows into the Thames. Brentford Dock was closed in 1964 and redeveloped for housing by the Greater London Council in the 1970s, though the Conservative majority on the GLC at the time of the scheme’s completion decided to sell most of it on the private market.
There has been further development since then. Brentford Lock itself is a little upriver. The Brent here is canalised as access from the Grand Union Canal to the Thames. West of the Brent, the ward includes a swathe of north Isleworth, including the large park landscaped by Capability Brown around the Robert Adam Syon House, the London home of the Dukes of Northumberland.
Most of the housing, though, is inter-war suburbia. Syon & Brentford Lock has more suburban demographics than Brentford East, being 41 per cent owner-occupied, 29 per cent private rented and 17 per cent social renting. The ward’s northern border is defined by the Hounslow Loop railway line. It is served by Syon Lane station, and Isleworth and Brentford stations are near each end of the ward. It is rather whiter (57 per cent of the population) than average for a Hounslow borough (44 per cent). The second largest ethnic group is Asian (20 per cent).
Six candidates stood, one from each of the five main parties plus Theo Dennison, an Independent. Dennison is a former Labour councillor who had served as Hounslow’s Cabinet member for finance. He polled a creditable 21 per cent here as an Independent in May 2022, having served as councillor for the predecessor Syon ward since 2010. He is now a political campaigns consultant whose clients include George Galloway’s Workers’ Party;
Dennison put up a strong challenge to Labour in the May 2024 Brentford West by-election, but a contest on his home turf gave him an optimal chance of getting back on the council. Two of the other candidates had also contested Brentford West last year: Mike Denniss for the Conservatives and Freya Summersgill for the Greens. And Lib Dem Jack Ballentyne ran in Syon & Brentford Lock itself in 2022. Chinmay Parulekar for Reform UK was a new candidate, as was Jennifer Prain, a textile designer who represented Labour.
The result was a squeaker. Dennison won, but with a majority of only 12 votes over Prain. He received 615 votes to her 603, each total representing 33 per cent of the vote. It was the first Labour loss to the Left since Stoke Newington in Hackney went Green in September. However, the threat from this quarter seems to have ebbed since just after the general election. The swing was relatively small: Labour’s vote was down only five points, which was a smaller drop than that suffered by the Tories. This amounts to a technical swing of 0.8 per cent from Conservative to Labour.
That, though, that will be of little consolation for losing the seat and Hounslow’s ruling Labour group will be rueing those 12 votes. The administration now has an articulate, effective and annoying opponent in the council chamber. One may note that Dennison has said that Galloway was but one client among others, but if he wishes to align a bit closer there is already a Workers’ Party councillor in Hounslow – Amritpal Mann of Heston East who defected from Labour in March 2024 following his suspension for a social media post about Gaza.
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Barnet’s by-election came three weeks after the borough’s previous electoral engagement in the Burnt Oak ward on 13 February. The contest in Finchley Church End came about because of the death of long-serving Conservative councillor Eva Greenspan, who had first been elected in 1990 and served a term as the borough’s mayor in 2006-07. At the time of her death, she led the twinning committee between Barnet and the Tel Aviv suburban borough of Ramat Gan. Current (Labour) Barnet mayor Tony Vourou paid tribute to Greenspan as “a beacon of leadership, integrity, and compassion”.
Finchley Church End ward is defined on two sides by major roads – the A406 North Circular and the A1 Great North Way. In public transport terms it is served by Finchley Central station on the Northern Line. The ward is mainly residential and affluent. There is hardly any social housing – 58 per cent are owner-occupiers and 35 per cent are renting privately.
A new landmark is Edgewood Mews, a striking development (half affordable) on a small patch of land by a particularly aggressive section of the North Circular. Finchley Church End is majority white (62 per cent) with an Asian population of 17 per cent, but its most distinctive feature is that it is one of the wards at the centre of Barnet’s, and therefore London’s, Jewish community. The population was 30 per cent Jewish by faith in the 2021 Census, and more than that by community identity (19 per cent professed no religion and eight per cent did not answer the Census question).
The forces of liberal Judaism are stronger here than they are in Golders Green or Hendon. The ward has been reliably Conservative in recent rounds of local elections, although lately by much smaller margins than in other strongly Jewish wards. In May 2022, the Tories were on 41 per cent to 25 per cent each for Labour and Lib Dem and another eight per cent for the Greens.
The Finchley Church End ballot paper was in part a reunion of candidates who had fought the Brunswick Park ward in 2022. Conservative candidate Josh Mastin-Lee, Green David Farbey and Reform candidate Lisa Rutter all stood there, although Rutter was then an incumbent Conservative councillor. Two others were veterans of the Golders Green by-election in February 2023: Lib Dem James Goldman and Rejoin EU’s Brendan Donnelly. Donnelly, a Conservative MEP in 1994-99, has a long and variegated electoral career. Independent Brian Ingram fought Garden Suburb ward in 2022. Fitness instructor Beverley Kotey was a first-time candidate for Labour.
When the votes were counted, Mastin-Lee (pictured, centre), a solicitor, had held the seat for the Tories with 1,509 votes (45 per cent) on a turnout of 25.5 per cent. Labour took a creditable second place with 977 votes (29 per cent). Remarkably, Labour’s share of the vote was up from where it was in 2022, when the party won a Barnet majority for the first time ever and the swing to the Conservatives was a nugatory 0.2 per cent. Compared with 2014, Labour’s pre-2022 high Barnet tide, the swing was three per cent to Labour. Barnet Labour will regard the Finchley Church End result as encouraging. The ward is more typical of the borough than Burnt Oak, where Labour had a bad result last month, and therefore a better portent for the coming battle for control of Barnet in May 2026.
However, Labour had an advantage in Finchley Church End in the form of a pool of potential liberal recruits. The big losers in the by-election were the Lib Dems, whose share fell from 25 per cent in 2022 (their best in the borough) to just six per cent (213 votes). The explanation is to be found in the broader politics of the Finchley & Golders Green parliamentary constituency.
The Liberal Democrats came second in the 2019 general election with former Labour MP Luciana Berger as their candidate, and in 2022 still had some hopes of building a local base. But it was not to be – they did not win any seats in Barnet. The Lib Dem vote went on to collapse in Labour’s favour in the 2024 general election as Sarah Sackman (now a minister of state) gained the seat. Their vote is dependent on local activism, which seems to have dried up. Rutter’s third placed finish (351 votes, 11 per cent) will please Reform in a ward that was never going to be fertile territory.
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Taken together, the three by-elections – with Westminster Vincent Square last week – show a slackening in the anti-Labour winds that have blown hard since July 2024. It is possible, of course, that this is a statistical blip caused by variations in local circumstances, but it is also possible that it represents a change in the political weather.
The next by-election contest in London is in the Mayfield ward of Redbridge on 27 March.
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