Shots were fired early in this election campaign.
In late March, Ealing Labour issued a statement attacking the Ealing Community Independents (ECI).
Their candidates, Labour said, include people:
“expelled from the Labour Party, supporters of the far-left Socialist Workers Party, and have connections to the Communist Party of Great Britain.”
ECI, Labour concluded, are:
“hardly independent” and should “tell the truth about who they really represent.”
It is …
Yes, yes, yes, he’s on the right in this picture!
On 6 November 2023, Berkeley Group’s Southall development — The Green Quarter, rising on the site of the former Southall gasworks — handed a £2,500 cheque to the Western Road Urban Garden Project.
The cheque was branded with Berkeley’s logo and The Green Quarter’s name.
It was presented in the garden and photographed for Berkeley’s website, where the story was published on 23 January 2024.
The image is striking …
How many times have you asked yourself — or heard others ask the same question?
Why does the council never reply to my emails?!
When residents raised concerns about toxic odours from the Southall Gasworks site, they were told to keep reporting. Every call, every email, every logged complaint was encouraged.
“It’s good you’re making so many complaints,” they were told at a meeting with Peter Mason in March 2019.
Volume of reporting, the implication was, would produce …
Polling day is Thursday 7 May 2026. Southall Green’s three sitting Labour councillors — between them representing the ward for sixty-four years — are once again asking for your vote.
Between them, they have drawn well over £1.5 million in councillor allowances — Cllr Anand alone has received at least three-quarters of a million pounds over her 28 years in office. The figure has accelerated since 2022, when the Labour-controlled council voted itself a substantial uplift in the same period …
On 10 July 2019, around 200 residents packed the Dominion Centre in Southall to confront their councillors, their MP, Public Health England, the Environment Agency, and the developer of the former Gasworks site about the toxic fumes — benzene and naphthalene — that had been making their families ill for years.
The meeting was filmed. It runs to ninety minutes.
The campaign to save ten of Ealing’s children’s centres was lost in the High Court in April.
The approved judgment in R (JO) v London Borough of Ealing is on the record. The claim was dismissed. Ealing Council won.
But the judgment is worth reading carefully — because what Mr Justice Kimblin did not find is as instructive as what he did.
A reader picked me up on Facebook for writing in The Smell of Success that:
“Mason’s council took a toddler to the high court.” …
This is the story about how Ealing’s incredibly valuable and (very likely) hugely under-resourced drug and alcohol treatment service has been moved about, along with its vulnerable service users, for what appears to be — at least partly — political gain by Ealing Labour.
The scale of the borough’s substance misuse crisis is real.
According to the council’s own 2025 Substance Misuse Service report, Ealing has an estimated 2,103 opiate and crack users and 3,658 alcohol dependent drinkers. …
Yousef Qandeel was not born in al-Dawayima. He arrived five years too late for that. But he carries the keys.
Three iron keys on a ring, dark with age and heavy in the hand. They open nothing now — the house they belonged to no longer exists. The village it stood in no longer exists. In its place, since 1955, sits an Israeli settlement.
Where Palestinian families once marked the boundaries of their homes by planting prickly pear cactus — sabr in Arabic, the same word as patience — the land has …
Six days before local elections polling day, Southall Green councillor and Ealing Labour council leader Peter Mason has been named a semi-finalist for SME4Labour’s Labour Councillor of the Year 2026 award.
It seems only right to mark the occasion by celebrating Peter Mason’s achievements as a councillor.
The nomination form had a strict set of criteria to narrow down the list of possible winners from almost 6,000 Labour councillors nationwide. To make it to the last sixteen is an …
Great Scott. Ealing Council’s welcome guide for new residents was written in 2010. The DeLorean is still parked on their website. And they haven’t changed a word.
If you moved to Ealing recently, you may have been directed to the council’s Welcome Guide for New Residents.
Well, no, you probably weren’t. Unless you’re Ukrainian.
The welcome for the rest of you is sixteen years out of date.
It’s still live on the Ealing Council website, cheerfully promising …
Update, 1 May 2026: A reader has correctly pointed out that the Defra 2024-25 fly-tipping statistics cover April 2024 to March 2025 — and therefore predate Ealing Council’s “This Is Our Home, Not a Tip” campaign and Peter Mason’s claimed 55% reduction in fly-tipping across Southall, both of which relate to 2025-26. The Defra figures establish the pre-campaign baseline, not the campaign’s results.
However, the contradiction at the heart of this piece does not depend …
I attended the West London Citizens “Accountability Assembly” at St Anselm’s Church in Southall Green on Tuesday night. I left after an hour, before any of the candidates had answered any of the preset questions.
In that hour, I listened to Peter Mason talk — yet again — about his family upbringing in damp and mouldy temporary accommodation.
[Video courtesy of another audience member.]
Three months that made him a lifelong socialist, committed to ensuring others don’t …
I arrived late to the Ealing Community Independents' Southall Wards Engagement Evening at Parkside Yards — the usual traffic gridlock on The Green and South Road up to the station. Normally I would walk, but I’d walked all the way up to Oswald Road via the canal footpath the previous afternoon and my poor feet and body were telling me no. After a beautifully warm and sunny spring day, the heavens looked like they might open soon, too. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.
I …
Two weeks ago, and again today, Ealing Labour attacked Grace Hunter, a Conservative candidate for Pitshanger ward, after a TikTok clip surfaced in which she said:
“The solution to our housing problem isn’t building six million more houses… it’s deporting six million people.”
This is fascist propaganda reminiscent of the policies of the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s — and of our own present-day far right, which is leading the polls and looks set to reshape the …
This is a story about what happens when you speak out against Peter Mason — on opposing the closure of children’s centres, on backing a Gaza debate, on attending a public meeting with the wrong person in the audience. It is also a story about a pattern that began long before any of that.
This pattern did not begin with Padda, Crawford or Martin. In April 2021, as Mason stood for the Labour group leadership, more than fifty Ealing Labour members and activists signed an open letter to …
Last week I spent a lunch hour with my friend and former Ealing Independent Network “running mate” Minni Dogra, as she canvassed a street near me in her effort to win enough votes to be elected as a councillor in Ealing Labour council leader Peter Mason’s own Southall Green ward.
In 2022, I did the same canvassing and amassed a whole 223 votes — 2,633 fewer than Peter Mason. It is a mammoth task. But four years ago, Mason lost the largest share of votes of any Labour …
Peter Mason has spoken often and publicly about his childhood. Growing up in a pre-fabricated concrete panel council house. The smell of damp. Picking mould from window caulking. His family spending three months in temporary accommodation.
These are not details dragged out of private correspondence — they are things he chose to put on the public record, repeatedly, over several years, as the basis for his claim to understand what bad housing does to people.
They are also, now, the most direct …
This is a follow-up to Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall and Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-Tipping, which documented how fly-tipping in Ealing doubled the year weekly black bag collections were scrapped in 2016 — and remained at that high level ever since.
After those two articles, a commenter on a separate Facebook post promoting the launch of the “What Happened to Southall?” report questioned the focus on bin collections, among other things.
MW …
A substantial new report on Ealing Council’s record in Southall landed this week, and it deserves your attention.
What Happened to Southall? is published by Community Powered Reporting, a volunteer resident-led research group, and it covers waste, housing, asset disposal, health, democratic accountability and pension fund investments — with extensive sourcing from council documents, FOI responses, and public data.
I haven’t read every page yet, but what I have read is rigorous, …
Two weeks ago, I reported on the results of my research into the fly-tipping epidemic that has hit Ealing, and Southall in particular.
In short, fly-tipping across the borough literally doubled from July 2016, immediately after Ealing Council reduced household waste collections from weekly to fortnightly.
It’s remained at that high level ever since, and residents report that it’s getting even worse in recent years.
The nature of these sudden and sustained increases strongly indicate …
It’s getting heavy around here, so time for some light relief.
Ealing likes to call itself “the Home of Loud.”
It is a reference to Jim Marshall, valve amps, and the glorious feedback of British rock music history.
But after reading a few years’ worth of Leader’s Notes, another title suggests itself:
The Home of the Same Song.
Because every week, the column strikes the same chord:
Fighting inequality. Tackling the climate crisis. Creating good jobs.
Sometimes the intro changes.
One week: …
You’ve got to hand it to Peter Mason.
Every four years he manages to regenerate, reinvent and transform himself and Ealing Labour into a new and improved version of reality.
He has a creative imagination. His ambition is unbridled. He is resilient and resourceful. Nothing, it seems, can stop him recycling ever more of the same old rubbish manifesto promises while simultaneously presenting them to the public as successful achievements we should want more of.
Of course, it would be unfair to …
With council elections less than three months away, Ealing Council is busy using “Ealing Council’s magazine for residents” to promote news of Ealing Labour’s local “achievements” in an effort to persuade voters that, despite national Labour’s dismal regurgitation of failed and cruel Tory government austerity policies and shameless political scandals going right to the heart of the UK establishment, Peter Mason’s Ealing Labour are still “on your …
This is the shocking story of how for sixteen years Ealing Labour councillors talked rubbish about having to make “difficult choices” to cut services to save money, ignoring thousands of residents' protests, and in doing so created a massive mess that a decade later still costs millions to clean up every year and leaves children’s and disabled people’s lives unnecessarily poorer.
It’s a story about an ambitious New Labour leader - politically aligned with Tony Blair …
When a commenter asked why “no one from the council checked” Sam’s Recycling before the Johnson Street fire, the short answer is uncomfortable:
The council did check. Repeatedly. For over a year.
And officially, they found nothing.
Yet the risks were documented.
What follows is drawn from Environment Agency inspection reports, enforcement correspondence and Environmental Information Request disclosures obtained in early 2024 by a local resident (anonymised here). …
