By a Party member in Hackney North.
The Conservative Group on Hackney Council now has six members after Tory candidate Ian Sharer scored a resounding victory with nearly 54% of the vote in the Cazenove ward by-election on Thursday 18th January. The poll, triggered by then Labour councillor Caroline Woodley’s win in the November by-election to replace discredited mayor Phil Glanville, saw a turnout of 31.9% in a ward with a large Orthodox Jewish and particularly Charedi population.
Glanville had little option other than resignation late last summer after a selfie emerged to prove he had lied about contact with the subsequently convicted sex offender Tom Dewey, who resigned from the Council just 11 days after winning a seat in the May 2022 borough elections. Woodley had come top of the poll in Cazenove in May 2022, but in the mayoral by-election saw Labour’s vote share drop by 10 percentage points.
While some reports of the unusually high-profile Cazenove contest have described the outcome as a “shock,” other seasoned observers of the East London borough’s politics weren’t so surprised. Newly elected councillor Sharer, himself an Orthodox Jew, has sat on Hackney Council previously both for Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then as a Liberal Democrat for 16 years from 2002 to 2018. His candidacy for the Conservatives seems to have triggered a collapse of Lib Dem support with their candidate gaining only 73 votes – less than 2.5% of the total.
Sharer clearly enjoyed strong name recognition and, according to Tory statements to the local press, he had defected to their camp because of his strong opposition to the Council’s programme of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). There are undoubtedly pockets of bitter opposition to the LTNs in car-reliant households, not least in the Charedi community with a much larger than average family size.
Labour had never held any of the three Cazenove seats under the ward’s post-2002 boundaries until May 2018, when all three of its candidates drove out Lib Dem incumbents in an election where turnout approached 50% – an unusually high figure for any English local authority poll. Labour retained its three seats in May 2022, albeit on a much lower turnout (39%) and with Ian Sharer nipping at the heels of the third highest Labour vote-getter.
Against this background, a Labour candidate was likely to struggle to retain the seat, but the selection of Laura Pascal – and the circumstances surrounding the process – compounded the challenge. Originally Pascal looked set to face an opponent at a Labour branch meeting on 5th December in the person of Lucie Scott, a Black activist, who is a secondary schoolteacher and elected NEU representative.
But just 48 hours before the selection meeting, Labour’s London region emailed Scott, ordering her to attend a “change of circumstances” hearing on 4th December. The regional office made no effort to contact her by phone and she wasn’t aware of the email until after the scheduled meeting time. As a result, she was automatically excluded from the two-woman shortlist and has still not had the opportunity to answer questions about press statements in support of suspended Hackney North & Stoke Newington MP Diane Abbott and an incident at October’s Labour Party conference where she had sought to defuse a confrontation between a fervent supporter of Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
There was a good deal of disquiet about Scott’s last-minute exclusion at the ward’s online selection meeting, but local members eventually endorsed Pascal as their candidate. Pascal would almost certainly have won any contest with Scott, given her time as a ward secretary and effective election organiser. Her hard graft in 2018 undoubtedly contributed to Labour’s Cazenove success. At the same time, however, her sometimes erratic behaviour at Party meetings and aggressive antagonism towards the left had hardly endeared her to many activists.
There was also a general awareness among a layer of activists of Pascal’s “gender critical” views, but in the main Party members were ignorant of her social media activity and the virulent hostility to trans rights it illustrated. This changed swiftly after 10th January when Labour councillors reportedly received a record of posts shared and liked on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. These included an image that equated the racist practice of “Blackface” with transwomen adopting a supposedly stereotypical “Womanface.” This and other posts were sharply at odds with Hackney Labour’s (and Council’s) trans-supportive position.
By Friday 12th January, Labour’s London region had “administratively suspended” Pascal and halted its Cazenove campaign. An email to Party members offered no explanation for the decision less than a week before the poll in what was characterised as a hotly contested ward. Presumably, with Pascal’s consent, if not at her instigation, a modest “Twitterstorm” emerged over the weekend with the hashtag “istandwithlaurapascal”. A supportive statement appeared from the Labour Women’s Declaration along with backing from the “gender critical” – many would say “transphobic” – Labour MP Rosie Duffield.
There was a further plot twist when the London regional organiser for Hackney sent an email to members at 6.45pm on Wednesday 17th January that the campaign to elect Pascal was back on! Just over three hours later, a post in Pascal’s name featured on the Hackney Labour X feed. It stated that: “I offer a heartfelt apology to the people of Cazenove ward, Hackney and anyone who has been offended by my social media activity, which fell well below the standard expected of someone seeking election to public office.” The carefully crafted statement did not appear on her own account.
How much of the controversy swirling around Pascal figures in Labour’s defeat is open to question. Even before the revelations about her “social media activity” and suspension of the campaign, the Party was struggling to get members canvassing, relying heavily on councillors from across the borough. Anecdotal evidence pointed to historic Labour voters sitting out the election, disgusted at the party’s steadfast refusal to call for a Gaza ceasefire. Few switched to the Greens whose vote share was nearly identical to their 2022 tally.
There can be little doubt, however, that resignations from the party, the withdrawal from campaigning of previously active, now disillusioned, members and the de facto shutdown by regional edict of the Hackney North & Stoke Newington Party did contribute to the scale of Labour’s embarrassing loss in a marginal ward. Labour retains the mayoralty and 49 of Hackney’s 57 seats, but given the series of scandals and missteps, which have beset Labour in Hackney since Spring 2022, its hold over one of its recent bastions looks far less secure.
Cazenove Ward By-Election, Thursday 18th January 2024 Results:
- Tamara Micner – Green Party – 387
- Laura Pascal – Labour Party – 935
- Dave Raval – Liberal Democrat – 73
- Ian Sharer – Conservative and Unionist Party – 1,623 – ELECTED
Turnout: 31.92%
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Hackney#/media/File:Hackney_UK_locator_map.svg. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0
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