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 left-leaning councillors urging them not to vote for him, describing him as “a real and present danger to the future of the left in the Labour Party” and documenting his role in Labour Party disciplinary processes at a national level. Mason became leader anyway.

Lewis Cox, then Labour councillor for Hobbayne, resigned immediately, refusing to serve under what he called Mason’s “toxic brand of politics.” In his resignation letter, Cox described the Labour group’s internal culture plainly:

“Ours is not a system of meritocracy, where the most qualified or most experienced are put in the Cabinet or gifted roles with responsibility so that we might best serve the interests of residents. No — it was when I joined, and remains tonight, a system very much based on patronage, back-room deals and cronyism."

Cox did not stand as an independent. He simply left.

Swaran Singh Padda, Kate Crawford and John Martin are not leftists. None of them were part of that movement. The purge has kept going.

Swaran Singh Padda has represented Lady Margaret ward as a Labour councillor for sixteen years. Now he is standing as an independent candidate in Southall Green — not his own ward.

He is not trying to win.

He is trying to cost his former party leader Peter Mason his seat.

I spoke to Swaran this week to hear his story.

In July 2025, Mason told Padda directly that, much like Kate Crawford in Acton, he would not be selected as a Labour candidate for Lady Margaret or any other ward.

The reasons Mason gave were that Padda had:

• opposed the closure of children’s centres — a policy not in Ealing Labour’s 2022 manifesto
• supported holding a council debate on Gaza. Mason had opposed the debate.

In October 2025, Padda attended an event organised and hosted jointly by Ealing Community Independents (ECI), the Indian Workers Association (GB) and Southall Monitoring Group in Southall, at which Jeremy Corbyn was present and spoke. Peter Mason had some of his own supporters in the hall who photographed Padda with Corbyn. Mason used the photographs to have Padda’s Labour Party membership suspended.

Padda told me he is standing in Southall Green — Mason’s ward, not his own — specifically to take votes from Mason.

“If I’d wanted to win, I would have stood in Lady Margaret.”

He hopes ECI win seats. When I suggested that he and ECI and the Green candidate would take votes from each other, he said:

“I only want Mason’s votes.”

Padda’s leaflet makes his position plain in his own words:

“Labour has ignored Southall councillors and that is why I’m standing independently — because Southall is my home too."

His listed achievements include fighting the closure of children’s centres and saving Jubilee Gardens Library.

His issues are local: clean streets, fly-tipping, and overdevelopment without services, all of which will be familiar to Southall residents and readers of this website.

Kate Crawford is a different kind of dissenter — and her words are worth quoting in full. A Labour councillor for 28 years in East Acton, she was told in early 2026 that she could not stand as a Labour candidate in the ward she had served for nearly three decades, though she might be permitted to stand elsewhere “in future years.” She appealed to Labour’s national committee. She lost. She then joined the Ealing Liberal Democrats and will stand in East Acton in May.

Speaking to Ealing News on 25 March 2026, Crawford was direct about Mason:

“I find him a very controlling leader. There is very little discussion in Labour group meetings. I’ve always wanted to be loyal to him, and I haven’t been disloyal."

Her summary of her departure was three words:

“Labour left me."

When the Local Democracy Reporting Service separately asked if she had a message for Ealing Labour, she added:

“I hope we can do it in a fair and reasonable way, but if people want to be difficult, I know where the bodies are buried."

Ealing Labour’s response was the standard non-answer: “The Labour Party has thorough selection procedures and sets high standards and expectations of probity and personal integrity for all its elected members and candidates. It does not comment on the outcome of these procedures.”

Crawford’s account — 28 years of service, barred from her own ward, describing the council leader as “very controlling” — reinforces, from a different part of the borough, exactly the pattern the Padda story documents.

What Mason’s treatment of Padda and Crawford reveals is not a party disciplining wayward members. It is a council leader who brooks no dissent — on children’s centres, on Gaza, on scrutiny of officers, on attending a public meeting with the wrong person in the audience.

That is not discipline. That is not scrutiny. That is a council leader who cannot tolerate dissent.

John Martin

Norwood Green Labour councillor John Martin has resigned from the party and is standing as an independent in his own ward.

This was the message he distributed through his networks:

I have resigned from the Labour Party and now serve as an Independent councillor.

In the last four years, it has been my honour and privilege to advocate for the residents of Norwood Green ward, sometimes to my detriment. However, integrity and principles cannot and should not be compromised when holding an office to which one has been elected.

I have been overwhelmed and humbled by the recent contact from residents (of all faiths and none) from across the ward both in relation to my work over these last four years and to ask my intentions in respect of the future once they discovered that I would not be standing for the Labour Party in the local elections.

I have, therefore, taken the time to consider the future and, together with my wife whose support is unstinting, have decided that I will stand as an independent councillor in the upcoming elections on Thursday 7th May.

I can reassure everyone of my continued commitment to the residents of Norwood Green ward and to the area which I have been proud to call my home for over 30 years and hope you will consider me worthy of representing you as an independent councillor for the next four years.

His candidacy tells a similar story to Padda’s and Crawford’s — another Labour councillor who reached a point of no return with the leadership.

Martin is very well liked as an active and responsive councillor who gets things done for residents in his ward. I would be surprised if he doesn’t get enough votes to retain his seat as an independent.

Watch these ward on election night!