🐸 Going Green 🐸

Peter Mason celebrated another election victory yesterday morning by going green.

Solomon Cuthbertson, a Labour activist, posted a photograph at 6:08 a.m. captioned:

“Good morning from Ealing where @EalingLabour has just won an historic fifth term."

The photograph shows Mason at a podium against the Ealing Council branded green backdrop, in an olive-green suit.

Mason had spent much of the final week of the campaign amplifying national Labour’s attack line that the Greens risked repeating Labour’s antisemitism crisis — despite the party being led by Zack Polanski, the only Jewish leader of a national political party in the United Kingdom. Mason had previously dismissed the Greens' hopes of winning even a single seat in Ealing, saying:

“the Greens have never won a single councillor in Ealing and I doubt that they’re going to win a single councillor in the future.”

The Greens won five seats with 20.6% of the popular vote.

Mason’s and Labour’s victory in Ealing is real. Labour retained control of the council with 46 of 70 seats. He has now overseen a fifth consecutive Ealing Labour victory — 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022, 2026 — which is, by any reasonable measure, a historic record.

It is also a record secured on 27.7% of the popular vote — Labour’s lowest borough-wide vote share in living memory, down 18.4 percentage points on 2022.

The party that won the council with a huge 22 seat majority won barely more than one in four votes cast.

The Greens, on 20.6%, were the second-largest force in the borough by popular vote, but gained just five councillors.

The Conservatives took 16.7% and also have five.

The Liberal Democrats 15.6% share gained 13 councillors (who needs proportional representation?).

Reform, contesting Ealing for the first time with a slate made up entirely of no-hoper paper candidates, took 11.3%.

In a borough where 57% of residents are from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds, more than one in ten voters backed a party whose political project centres on mass deportations and anti-immigration politics. I’m pleased to say Reform won zero councillors.

Other independent candidates and parties, including Ealing Community Independents, took 8.1% of the total votes despite fielding far fewer candidates.

The cost of Labour’s victory is significant.

Last night Ealing Labour lost ten seats. The Greens and the Liberal Democrats gained five each. The Conservatives gained one. Former Labour councillor John Martin retained his seat as an Independent in Norwood Green. Swaran Padda, another former Labour councillor, stood against Mason in Southall Green and was not elected. Neither was Kate Crawford in East Acton.

Mason’s own personal vote fell 44%. In 2018, he parachuted into Southall Green, Labour’s safest ward in the borough. Eight years later, he achieved the lowest individual Labour vote ever recorded in this ward.

🗄️ Cabinet Cut 🗃️

❌ Shital Manro — Cabinet Member for Good Growth and New Homes. GONE. Lost in North Greenford, where the Conservatives swept all three seats.

❌ Polly Knewstub — Cabinet Member for Healthy Equal Lives. GONE. Lost in Hanwell Broadway, where the Greens swept all three seats.

❌ Josh Blacker — Cabinet Member for Closing Children’s Centres. QUIT. Didn’t stand for re-election in South Acton.

❌ Gareth Shaw — the Labour Group’s Chief Whip. GONE.

Shaw had abandoned his Walpole base in the face of an obvious Liberal Democrat surge — they took all three Walpole seats — and switched to Blacker’s seemingly safe South Acton ward, where he was beaten by Husam Alharahsheh of the Green Party.

Shaw was reportedly inconsolable when the result came through at the count.

There is a detail worth pausing on. Alharahsheh, the Greens' winning candidate, was a paper candidate — the only Green on the South Acton ballot. Alphabetically, he appeared at the very top of the ballot paper. Shaw, by virtue of his given surname, sat near the bottom. Primacy effects (a psychological bias towards the first option in a list) are real and well-documented in multi-member ballots.

The Green paper candidate at the top of the ballot beat the Labour chief whip at the bottom of it. Shaw is no longer a councillor. South Acton has a Green councillor for the first time.

🎶 It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To 🎶

Channel 4 News political editor Gary Gibbon, on the eve of polling day, reported that Labour had briefed its activists not to cry on camera if the results were bad. The party’s central operation knew, in other words, that the results were going to produce activists who wanted to cry. They tried to manage the optics in advance.

PJ Lynch, the Local Democracy Reporting Service journalist present at Ealing’s count, posted at 5:23 a.m.:

“Labour members in tears here at the moment. Some looking totally shocked."

That was after the South Acton result. Mason was photographed in his green jacket consoling Shaw at the exit.

❌ Gordon Gone, Tighe Turfed ❌

In Hanwell Broadway, Yoel Gordon — one of three Labour councillors swept aside by a Green wave.

✅ Clare Welsby, who led the Save Ealing Children’s Centres campaign that this council fought in the High Court in order to carry out its plan to close ten children’s centres in order to improve them, was duly elected along with two other Green Party candidates.

Welsby is now, as of yesterday morning, a councillor in the same chamber as the people who closed the children’s centres she fought to save.

✅ John Martin’s re-election, now as an independent in Norwood Green relegated Labour candidate Claire Tighe into fourth place.

Tighe worked as part of Keir Starmer’s 'Green Army' alongside Morgan McSweeney until he (Starmer) became Prime Minister. After failing to win a seat in the House of Commons, she went to Northern Ireland to work as Hilary Benn’s SpAd.

Norwood Green has returned a full Labour slate at every election since at least 2002 — the year Local Elections Archive Project (LEAP) records begin and beyond which we have no data, but anecdotally for considerably longer than that. Last night it elected an independent at the top of the poll and pushed the Prime Minister’s former staff member off the council entirely.

In the Walpole Wipeout, the Liberal Democrats took all three seats. Shaw leapt from the LibDem frying pan into the Green fire.

💊 The Drugs Don’t Work 💊

When The Drugs Don’t Work was published two days before polling day, the argument was simple: Ealing’s drug and alcohol service had been relocated from West Ealing to Southall, where Labour was electorally safer. West Ealing residents being the ones who had asked for the change and Southall residents being the ones who had not. The story drew on three years of police.uk crime data showing that crime around the West Ealing site had fallen, and crime around the Southall site had risen exponentially, since the move.

The 2026 results have made the political calculus underlying that decision unmistakable.

The two wards where residents complained loudest about the West Ealing service — Walpole and Hanwell Broadway — were both wiped out for Labour last night. Walpole went to the Lib Dems. Hanwell Broadway went to the Greens. Labour lost six seats across two wards that the council had effectively listened to when it came to relocating the service away from them.

The two wards where the service was moved to — Southall Broadway and Southall Green — Labour retained, but with massive vote losses to Ealing Community Independents.

Angela Fonso received 804 votes in Southall Broadway and Joe Bhangu got 1,129 in Southall Green.

Labour’s lowest winners returned with 1,043 and 1,596 respectively.

The “safe” wards delivered the seats.

They did so on the smallest margins in a generation, with the largest insurgent challenge in two decades.

The decision that helped residents in Walpole and Hanwell Broadway did not, in the end, save those seats. The decision that hurt residents in Southall Broadway and Southall Green produced the closest results either ward has seen in a generation. Both halves of the calculation have come back to the people who made it.

🚀 Independents Lift-Off 🚀

ECI’s overall vote share across the wards it contested was just under 19%. For a local party registered with the Electoral Commission less than seven months ago — running its first borough-wide campaign, in many wards without a full slate, against well-resourced incumbents — that is a remarkable opening showing.

Ward by ward, the picture looks like this:

[Stats courtesy of ECI candidates Florence Pinaud and Glen Miller for the breakdown stats]

Five wards above 17%. Three above 19%. The strongest performance by a new local party in Ealing by some distance — Respect peaked at 21.5% in Southall Green in 2006, but never sustained a five-ward bloc above 17%.

The Southall corridor is now ECI’s. The wider borough is a longer project. The numbers in Northfield (10.3%) and South Acton (11.4%) suggest solid foundations to build on. In every ward, there must be a fully co-ordinated and mutually co-operative strategy to win the anti-Labour vote.

🥬 The Greens 🥬

Mason had told anyone who would listen, in the final stretch of the campaign, that the Greens would not win a single seat in Ealing. He also spent most of the last week accusing Zack Polanski — the only Jewish leader of a national political party in the United Kingdom — of leading a party with pro-Palestine policies an antisemitism problem. According to Mason’s analysis of national and local politics, the electoral door was firmly closed shut to the Greens, and they were not invited to a seat at his anti-democratic table.

The Greens broke Mason’s half-built door down and took five seats at his wonky table. They swept Hanwell Broadway. They took a seat in South Acton from the chief whip. They took a seat in North Acton. They came within 122 votes of breaking through in North Hanwell. Their borough-wide vote share was 20.6% — second-largest in Ealing — and behind Labour’s by just over seven percentage points.

Polanski, whose Jewish identity Mason (himself a Jewish convert [evidence cited here not for the faint-hearted]) worked to delegitimise during the final week of campaigning, leads a party that has now established itself as a meaningful political force in the borough Mason runs.

And the man who self-identifies as left-wing attacked the only Jewish leader of a national pro-Palestine party wore green all election night.

⚓ Blue Peter ⚓

Mason’s path through Labour politics is worth tracing because it explains the green attire.

He stood as Labour’s candidate for Ealing Common in 2010 and lost. He was selected for Elthorne in 2014 and won. He served Elthorne as a councillor while also working as a researcher for Onkar Sahota AM at the Greater London Authority. In 2018, with Swarn Singh Kang’s retirement creating a vacancy in Southall Green, Mason was selected for what was then Labour’s second-safest ward in Ealing.

Before any of that, he was a student at the University of Birmingham, running for student union office under the slogan “Vote Blue Peter Mason” — painted blue, in a hand-drawn shirt with a Blue Peter ship logo, distributing leaflets on Birmingham’s campus. By his own confirmation, in a Twitter comment eleven years ago:

“I have committed the ability to draw a half decent blue peter badge to muscle memory”.

He posted (and since deleted) on Twitter:

“Most looking forward to ‘The Jewish roots of Blue Labour’ session by Maurice Glasman at S.London #Limmud on Sunday."

Blue Labour. Maurice Glasman. The conservative edge of the Labour tradition — communitarian, socially traditional, friendly to private capital and the property-development model. Friendly, in particular, to Berkeley Group, whose Southall Waterside development poisoned the air over a primary school (Toxic Town) on Mason’s watch as Cabinet Member for Housing, Planning and Transformation.

The man who painted himself blue at Birmingham went on to become the architect of Ealing’s developer-led housing strategy. The man who held the planning brief while the Section 106 money raised in Southall was spent elsewhere is the same man whose national Labour positions have, more recently, taken him into territory where attacking the only Jewish leader of a national political party in the country has become an acceptable thing to do.

Yesterday morning at the count, Mason was wearing green.

🧻 Walpole Wipeout 🧻

PJ Lynch posted a photograph of Mason posing with his Southall Green running mates Anand and Dhindsa, captioned:

“EALING COUNCIL RESULT — Southall Green — Labour HOLD all 3 seats including Council Leader Peter Mason, who saw a 44% drop in his personal vote compared to 2022."

What Lynch’s photograph shows, intentionally or otherwise, is Mason near a green sign reading FIRE EXIT, with an arrow pointing right.

Asked by the Local Democracy Reporting Service what went wrong for Labour, Mason told LDRS:

“Well, I think you have to look at the national picture. You have to look at the situation that we find ourselves in. We’re absolutely committed to making sure that we represent the incredible people of Southall and we deliver for them on all the promises that we’ve made and all the promises that we’ve demonstrated that we’ve delivered over the last four years. Elections come every four years and I’m totally hopeful that in four years time that we’ll be able to secure that important historic sixth consecutive election and perhaps even get more councillors."

The national picture.

Not the Section 106 money. Not the children’s centres. Not the toxic gasworks. Not the drug service relocation. Not the divestment campaign. Not the planning record. Not the four-times-the-national-average fly-tipping rate. Not the 44% personal vote collapse in his own ward.

The national picture.

The national picture came to Walpole this morning.

Sir Keir Starmer, addressing the results from the national perspective Mason invoked, posted to X with the caption:

“These are tough results for Labour. There’s no sugarcoating it. We’ve lost brilliant Labour representatives who’ve stood up for their communities."

The accompanying video showed the Prime Minister at a community hall in Walpole ward — the same ward whose voters, less than 4 hours earlier, had replaced their Labour councillors with three Liberal Democrats.

The councillor visible behind Starmer’s right shoulder, watching adoringly as the Prime Minister spoke, was Peter Mason.

Whether anyone advising the visit had thought through the optics of staging “tough results, no sugarcoating” in the ward whose voters had just sugarcoated nothing in delivering a three-seat Lib Dem sweep is unclear.

Another success story for the councillor of the year semi-finalist?

🎯 Broken Records 🎯

Two records were set in Southall Green on 7 May.

Mason’s record.

His 1,596 votes is the lowest individual Labour vote in Southall Green ever.

Lower than the worst year of New Labour following Iraq in 2006, when George Galloway’s Respect Party threw everything it had at Southall and pulled in 21.5% of the vote.

At Respect’s high water mark, the lowest Labour winner — Swarn Singh Kang — polled 1,794.

Mason has now achieved, in 2026, what George Galloway could not in 2006.

Joe Bhangu’s record.

The Ealing Community Independents' lead candidate took 1,129 votes. All three ECI candidates polled over 1,000 votes each.

Salvinder Dhillon, Respect’s lead in 2006, took 763.

ECI did not exist in 2022. The party was registered with the Electoral Commission seven months before this election.

At its first serious attempt, in a ward where Labour has held all three seats for as long as anyone can remember, ECI broke a 20-year insurgent record by 366 votes.

The combined ECI vote — Bhangu, Dogra, Rajput — was 3,272.

Four years ago the equivalent independent slate (the Ealing Independent Network) polled 712 votes between three candidates.

ECI has multiplied the local independent vote by a factor of 4.6 in a single cycle, with no incumbent benefit, no national party machine, and a slate of three first-time (in Southall Green) candidates running against three sitting councillors with sixty-four years of office and £1.5 million in allowances between them.

The gap between Labour’s lowest winner (Mason, 1,596) and the highest unelected challenger (Bhangu, 1,129) is 467 votes.

In 2018 the equivalent gap was 3,024. In 2022, 2,053.

The trend line points one way.

😢 Counting Tears 😢

The picture from inside the count tent in the early hours of yesterday morning, as relayed by ECI campaigners and supporters present, is one Labour will not enjoy reading.

The most senior councillor reportedly visibly distressed was Cllr Steve Donnelly, returned for East Acton, Cabinet Member for Inclusive Economy — and, according to long-running observation by local residents and campaigners, one of the three councillors who effectively run the borough alongside Peter Mason and Shital Manro. Of those three, one is now out (Manro), one has lost 44% of his personal vote (Mason), and the third was in tears.

Campaigners who have spent two years pursuing the council on its pension fund investments in defence contractors connected to Israel — investments that have been the subject of repeated petitions, council questions, and demonstrations — observed the symbolism without comment. The former chair of the pensions fund panel, who has held the line against thousands of signatures asking for divestment, was the cabinet figure most visibly affected when the results came in.

He had not been briefed by Labour HQ. Or if he had been, he was overwhelmed by his feelings.

🏗️ Wrecking Ball 🏗️

The Israeli divestment campaign is one of several issues on which Ealing Labour has held a line that increasingly few residents support. Over the past two years, petitions on pension fund investments in companies supplying weapons to a state currently subject to International Court of Justice proceedings have been ignored. Council meetings have been managed past the question. The chair of the relevant committee has not moved.

The same pattern recurs elsewhere. The Southall Gasworks air quality data was never independently analysed and residents reports of odour, air pollution and ill-health were ignored or downplayed.

The fly-tipping numbers have been managed past every cabinet meeting. The £13m of Section 106 money raised in Southall and spent elsewhere has been managed past every scrutiny opportunity. The relocation of the borough’s drug and alcohol service from Walpole — where Labour was at risk — to Southall, where it wasn’t, has been signed off and managed past anyone who might have asked questions about why crime then fell where Labour was vulnerable and rose where it was safe.

A council that responds to its own residents' emails with silence eventually finds that residents stop sending the emails and start sending other signals.

The signal from Hanwell Broadway sent Polly Knewstub home and Clare Welsby — who fought the children’s centre closures — to the council chamber.

The signal from North Greenford sent Shital Manro home and three Conservatives in his place.

The signal from Walpole replaced the Labour slate with a Lib Dem one, in the same ward the Prime Minister visited yesterday morning to record his commiserations.

The signal from South Acton ended the chief whip’s career.

The signal from Norwood Green sent a deselected Labour councillor back to the chamber and the Prime Minister’s former staffer to fourth place.

The signal from Southall Green left Mason 467 votes ahead of the local party which didn’t exist seven months ago.

The wrecking ball metaphor is not a flourish.

At the Southall Gasworks site, Berkeley Group’s contractors dug up a hundred years' of contaminated petrochemical sludge that left a toxic chemical cocktail in the air over local schools and homes. The impact on people’s health is, perhaps, yet to be fully realised.

Mason was Cabinet Member for Housing, Planning and Transformation.

While Southall residents coughed and choked on the poison air, Mason was wining and dining with Berkeley Group in the south of France, all expenses paid.

The wrecking ball that swung over Southall in the late 2010s has been swinging over the local political settlement ever since.

It has now reached the man who signed it off.

🔍 Looking Forward ➡️

Mason will form an administration that has lost ten seats and two cabinet members. He will run it from a position of visible personal weakness in his own ward, on the lowest borough-wide Labour vote share in living memory.

The Forvis Mazars audit, the Local Government Association Peer Challenge, the Housing Ombudsman determinations — these documents already exist. They will continue to exist.

The Section 106 money will continue not to be spent in Southall.

The fly-tipping will continue to be twice the London average.

The legacy of the toxic air from the Southall Gasworks site and other local pollutants will continue to need monitoring that the council has chosen not to do.

Cabinet member Jasbir Anand — Mason’s running mate, returned with the highest Labour vote at 1,789 — will continue to be the councillor who signed off the relocation of the drug and alcohol service to Southall that brought with it a massive increase in crime.

Labour councillors waking up in Ealing this morning will be asking themselves the same question every other observer is asking:

will they still be councillors in four years' time?

It is, of course, a long way away. A week is a long time in politics, let alone a four-year cycle.

But it is hard to come back from a record of supporting investments in a state most of the world now considers to be conducting genocide.

It is hard to come back from a fly-tipping rate four times the national average.

It is hard to come back from a toxic town.

It is hard to come back from emails the council does not answer and ward forums the council has cancelled and Section 106 money the council has spent somewhere else.

It is hard to come back from accusing the only Jewish leader of a national party of having antisemitism problem in the same week that party broke through in your council for the first time.

It is hard to come back from winning the council on 27.7% of the vote and then blaming the national picture.

For ECI, the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats, the 2026 result is strong encouragement. ECI ran a brilliantly organised and unifying campaign, and multiplied the independent vote by 4.6 in a single cycle, polling just under 19% across the wards it contested and above 17% in five of them. That’s some achievement.

I know from my own efforts in 2022 how exhausting it is and how devastating it is to lose despite all the hard work. I just hope they all take heart from such an incredible result and start planning and campaigning now (or don’t leave it too long after recovering) for 2030. It’s a huge ask.

The Greens went from zero seats to five — the door to the council chamber broken open for the first time, with a borough-wide vote share of 20.6% just behind Labour’s 27.7%. The Liberal Democrats added five and could, on this trajectory, challenge for control of Ealing in 2030 if Labour continues at its current rate of decline.

The arithmetic of opposition consolidation — Northfield (Green + ECI = 5,564 vs Labour 5,287), Norwood Green, possibly North Hanwell — is no longer a thought experiment.

It is a strategy waiting to be executed.

For ECI specifically, the path forward in Southall Green is similar.

Mason’s lowest Labour vote was 1,596. ECI’s highest was 1,129. The gap is 467 votes.

To close it, ECI needs to do three things: convert the protest vote currently going to Reform (960), the Conservatives (1,780) and the Greens (554); recover the Padda vote (240) which, given Padda’s history as a deselected Labour councillor with his own grievances against the party, plausibly drew from the same pool of disaffected Labour voters that ECI was reaching; and mobilise some of the 7,000 registered electors who did not vote at all. In a ward of 11,000 voters, that is a tractable problem.

The conservative projection — assuming Labour partially recovers, ECI grows only modestly — has Mason on roughly 1,200 in 2030 and Bhangu on roughly 1,355. That is a 155-vote ECI lead. It is the conservative projection. The optimistic one has him losing by considerably more.

The man who arrived in Southall Green in 2018 with 3,602 votes left the count yesterday morning with 1,596.

He left it in a green jacket, by a fire exit, comforting his tearful ex-chief whip who had just lost his seat to a Green paper candidate, while other colleagues wept over a result for a residents-led campaign Labour had treated as unwanted background noise for years.

He stood beside the Prime Minister hours later in Walpole, of all places. He had spent the last week of the campaign attacking the only Jewish leader of a national party. He had dismissed the Greens' chances. He had been wrong about both.

There is a story in there about what governing without listening looks like, and about what eventually happens to people who do it.