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 parked in the Parkside Yards car park. Free parking for three hours! Plenty of parking spaces. No two hour queues to get in and out like at Herbert Road car park.

Immediately I was confronted by the sight of a small knot of Ealing Labour Party canvassers working the street outside. Some of them I hadn’t seen for four years, but I recognised councillors Nagpal and Mohammad, and they were with two or three others.

It was an odd choice of boulevard to work, as there are no adjacent houses, only the very plush, clean, and inviting boutique shops, private Green Quarter residents' only gym and lounge/workspace, and further down the Italian coffee shop.

Outside the café stood a gaggle of counter-canvassers, the Ealing Community Independents candidates and their supporters. The Labour group had apparently been sent to find out what was going on.

Inside, the contrast with the rest of Southall was once again striking.

Parkside Yards' community space is everything Southall’s civic infrastructure isn’t — high ceilings, good light, a proper kitchen, a library corner, sofas alongside conference tables.

The kind of room that makes you ask, as I found myself asking, why there is nothing remotely like this at the Dominion Centre, or anywhere else in the town.

The ECI banner was up, the “Southall Deserves Better” poster on the wall.

On the screen: images of Southall. Construction cranes. High-rises going up. The same rubbish-filled streets these residents walk every day.

The meeting started late — gone 7pm by the time things got moving, with perhaps ten residents in the room alongside a dozen or so ECI candidates and supporters. Not a massive crowd by any means, but neither were there any empty seats. And the people who were there had things to say, and they said them.

“We are you”

Joe Bhangu, ECI candidate for Southall Green, opened making a brief video explaining who is standing in which wards and how to vote.

This is the kind of very basic political education that is needed — Ealing Labour are very good at getting their vote banks out, but obviously have zero interest in helping anyone else figure out how the system works. They’ve had more than enough time to lift up and empower people in Southall for the good of the whole community, but have done nothing.

Joe spoke about his own journey — his uncle becoming the first Asian councillor in Southall in 1967, recalling the horrors of the “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” signs, Blair Peach, the Hambrough Tavern. The history of Southall is a place that fought for its people.

“We are normal residents,” he said. “This meeting is not like typical Labour Party meetings. We are you.”

But this was no sentimental nostalgia trip. It was setting the scene and the context for where we find ourselves today.

Sukhi Floria, ECI candidate for Southall West, spoke about trying to get problems solved and being passed around. Not one councillor, he said, has ever asked why there is so much fly-tipping. Why are there no police? He described being told he was the only one complaining — a response that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to hold Ealing Council to account on anything.

Jatinder Rajput (known as JR), ECI candidate for Southall Green, spoke with the directness of someone who has been doing the work rather than talking about it. His team has knocked on 5,000 doors. On the doorstep he says to lifetime Labour voters:

“Look around you. This is Labour.”

The implication wasn’t rhetorical — it was evidential. The fight in Southall is still in the streets.

JR described a Southall culture of being “programmed from birth to vote Labour.” He wanted to leave Southall after 2015 for somewhere better, cleaner, safer. But after starting a family, the reality of the housing market means he’s here to stay. But there are drug users and drug use paraphernalia in and by the children’s playground. The children’s nursery wall is used as an open air public urinal.

“This place has turned into a bloody slum.”

He’d found Angela Fonso on Nextdoor two years ago and connected with Joe and the Southall Residents Alliance from there.

Why is he standing to be a councillor? Because he realised:

“You can’t make a difference until you’re in a position of power.”

Southall West candidate Dan Cortese moved into the Green Quarter five years ago — marketed as a development “on the up.”

He feels conned by the developer (Berkeley Group).

The reality: no planning for the community infrastructure that should have followed.

No delivery. No schools. No GP surgery. No shops.

And, since then, Ealing Council has closed three children’s centres.

The Q&A from 7:50pm produced a cascade of specific, local, documented grievances: overcrowding, fly-tipping, rats, drug dealers, an unsafe environment, no police station, no post office. Older residents unable to navigate new technology. Language barriers. The Dominion car park.

A resident asked:

“How much council tax are they taking out of Southall?”

The question wasn’t rhetorical either.

A resident described asking the Council for a CCTV camera to deal with fly-tipping on their road — and being offered a sign instead. Forty or fifty years of complaints to get a road resurfaced. Rats under the floorboards of a tenant’s house. Footpaths are so badly damaged that disabled residents are forced to walk in the road.

The Council’s response? Supply videos and photographs as evidence.

The frustration is not being seen or heard as an equal partner. Why can’t we call and say there is a problem that needs sorting without being believed?

“People are giving up,” one resident said. “The process is too complicated.”

On the Gasworks: when Berkeley Group’s vehicles used Trinity Road during demolition, residents' houses shook and cracked. Without any investigation, Ealing Council said the vibrations were “harmless.” The Council’s word, apparently, was sufficient.

One contribution stung:

“There’s no unity left in Southall. We beat the National Front, but it’s all gone. Where is everyone?”

Another:

“The Council are bringing people in from other boroughs. Southall people are moving out.”

“HMOs ‘give birth’ to mattresses overnight.”

The rats, the rubbish; all of this gives visceral life to the feeling that somewhere decisions are being made about Southall by people who don’t live here and don’t care.

That the Labour leadership of Ealing Council is not accountable to Southall — is hard to argue with.

Minni Dogra, ECI candidate for Southall Green, was clear-eyed about the trajectory. “It’s been a long journey,” she said. The Southall Library building — the old Carnegie building — stands empty and derelict. The business community lost their Chamber of Commerce at Manor House.

“It’s a deliberate breaking down of our civic life.”

Many people, she said, simply don’t have time to deal with all these issues — and all the new developments started appearing without any meaningful consultation. Minni was a solicitor in an office in Southall, and maybe more clued in than most, she said, but:

“I don’t remember any consultation.”

The development planned for The Green, she noted, would never have been proposed in a white middle class area. The CPOs. The public inquiry. The Southall Young Adult Centre. The community raised money to rebuild the YAC twenty years ago — and later the Council wanted to knock it down and build flats.

She’s standing in Southall Green, she said, because Peter Mason is the Ealing Council leader and his ward is Southall Green. That’s it. That’s the reason.

Angela Fonso, ECI candidate for Southall Broadway, was persuaded to stand by Sukhi and Jatinder. She spoke about broken pavements, rubbish, and the drug issue at Southall Recreation Ground — and how an offered meeting with the Safer Neighbourhood Team never materialised.

Her message to the room was direct:

“Residents have to believe they have the power.”

“Whether we are elected or not, we will still campaign.”

“You don’t have to vote for Labour.”

What was happening in Southall, she said, was:

“a deliberate policy of neglect and decline.”

Craig Smith, ECI Party leader and candidate in Northfield, framed the fundamental question with characteristic precision:

• what is ECI’s purpose?
• why are councillors absent and ineffective?

Because there is no opposition.

Labour has too much power, makes cuts to services, increases council tax, delivers no benefit to communities.

Labour councillors are career and status oriented.

A good independent councillor, by contrast, picks up litter, plants flowerbeds, actively helps their community.

“We will listen, consult properly, and make the changes you want to see.”

Craig connected the problems that residents had raised to structural decisions and political choices.

Waste collections were halved in 2016. Fly-tipping doubled. It’s harder to properly dispose of rubbish.

Peter Mason, he noted, has said publicly he could clean the streets in two hours — but he hasn’t, because:

“he wants residents to take responsibility for a problem he created.”

Joe closed with a harder edge.

Peter Mason, he said, gave himself a 71% pay rise. ECI has video evidence of a leader of a religious group canvassing with Labour. Labour didn’t stand with residents on the Gasworks, the Post Office, the YAC. Labour is not “on your side.”

“There is nothing we cannot achieve if we stand together.”

Jatinder showed a video of Manor Waye Allotments — a local asset, the kind of thing that gets quietly eroded.

Joe showed a graphic video of a local activist explaining where some of our council tax goes and how Ealing Council invests workers' pension funds in companies arming Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of women and children.

“Everyone’s paying council tax. This is where your money goes.”

That last point landed harder for having been repeated in different forms throughout the evening.

These political choices are why we can’t have children’s centres in the poorest part of the borough that needs them most.

These structural decisions are why our waste collection service was halved a decade ago and why fly-tipping is now an epidemic.

This is why there are drug users in children’s playgrounds. This is why there are so many, too many tower blocks. Why there is no proper library, a lack of parking spaces, not enough shops, schools, health centres, bus services, no bus stop outside the new Elizabeth Line station (really!), no public toilets.

These are all decisions made by Ealing Labour and Southall councillors with almost no opposition, no accountability and no democracy.

The meeting closed with a reminder:

3pm, King Street, on Bank Holiday Monday. The campaign’s final push before 7 May.

This was not a polished political event. The room was warm, the lift for disabled access to the first floor had no instructions on how to use it (gotta keep your finger on the button!), the meeting started late. But none of that is the point.

The point is that this is what genuine community politics looks like before it becomes something else — before it gets professionalised, managed, messaged.

A room of people who are angry about specific things that have happened to their specific streets.

A candidate who is standing because the Council leader is on the ballot in the same ward.

A candidate who found he wasn’t alone in thinking “this is all wrong”.

Labour will tell you that Southall’s problems are complex and deprivation is deep-rooted, that Tory government funding cuts means resources are limited. That they are doing their best in difficult circumstances — and better they cut services than the Tories!

Some of that is true.

What is also true is that since 2016, waste collections were cut in half and fly-tipping doubled. That the Southall Library building — a Carnegie library — sits empty. That three children’s centres are being closed. That Merrick Road Community Centre, a community asset, was sold to a private developer. That residents who asked for a CCTV camera got a sign instead.

Ealing Labour has been in power for sixteen years.

Southall has been a Labour stronghold for decades.

It’s time for something different.

Ealing’s local elections are on 7 May.

In Southall Green, the Council leader is on the ballot.

That is, as Minni Dogra put it, the reason she is standing.