Southall Stories

What the gasworks air monitoring shows: preliminary findings

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:00:43 +0100

Between June 2018 and May 2019, the developer of Southall Waterside measured the air around the former gasworks every week. Its contractor’s laboratory, Chemtest, tested tubes from up to 29 monitoring points for volatile chemicals while contaminated soil was dug up and treated in the on-site “soil hospital”.

Those results were released under the Environmental Information Regulations in 2019, as hundreds of pages of lab certificates.

The impossible job

Some were saved as machine-readable PDF pages, others appeared to be scanned images. They were not in chronological order, and many of the column headings appear to be mislabelled. Over the last seven years, I spent many a miserable evening attempting to input the data by hand into a spreadsheet, but gave up each time. It was an impossible job, made worse by the emotional impact of seeing the extent and locations of many of the highest readings, and correlating them with my own records of odour reports and the impact I felt it had on the health of my family, friends and neighbours.

Last year, I made a breakthrough using artificial intelligence applications like Claude and ChatGPT to read screenshots of the PDF pages. But again, I couldn’t complete the work – it still required me to do too much of the work manually.

This year, AI capabilities have surged considerably (so much so that we are told that there’s every chance they will destroy humanity before humanity destroys the world), along with my own still rudimentary knowledge of how to use it and get the most out of it. Suffice to say that I have now succeeded in automating the data extraction and verification process. It’s not perfect, but it’s close, and these are my preliminary findings. As far as I’m aware, this is the only independent analysis of the 2018–19 air monitoring data at Southall Gasworks.

I have now put all 684 samples into one dataset, checked each value against its source page, and set residents’ own odour reports against the hourly wind.

I must emphasise that these are preliminary findings. They describe the monitoring; they do not measure anyone’s exposure or health. The full interactive version, with the map, charts and every station, is here: Southall Air Monitoring 2018–19.

The hot spots were by the soil hospital

Naphthalene is the chemical that gives mothballs and coal tar their smell. It was one of the site’s main contaminants. At the stations along the southern boundary, next to the soil hospital (Air 1, 5, 8 and 9), naphthalene typically read 3.5 to 4.8 times the median of all stations sampled the same week. Comparing within a week takes out the effect of weather and season.

Benzene rose too at those stations, but much less: 1.8 to 2.8 times. Traffic raises benzene more than naphthalene. Here it was the other way round, which points to the ground rather than the roads.

The highest single week of naphthalene was 248 µg/m³, at Air 5 in November 2018. The World Health Organization’s indoor guideline is 10 µg/m³ as a yearly average. One week above a yearly guideline is not a breach of the law or proof of harm. But the hot-spot stations read high week after week.

The wrong kind of wind

In July 2018 Ealing’s council leader said the smells had become worse because of “high temperatures and unusual wind directions”. Residents’ records show what that meant.

From the Scotts Road area of Southall Green, south of the soil hospital, the gasworks lies to the north and north-east; the FM Conway and Tarmac asphalt plants lie to the west. Of 104 timed odour reports from that area in 2018–19, 73% came while the wind was blowing from the gasworks. By chance you would expect 34%. Only 12% came with wind from the FM Conway direction, against 48% expected.

Winter was supposed to be better

In autumn 2018 residents were told summer was the worst period, and that readings would fall in cooler weather. At the ten stations monitored throughout, the opposite happened. Average benzene went from 2.4 µg/m³ in summer 2018 to 5.3 from November to April; naphthalene from 7.3 to 17.8. Naphthalene rose at all ten stations.

Winter air disperses pollution less well, and traffic and heating add to it everywhere. So this shows the forecast was wrong, not on its own that the site emitted more. The same-week comparisons above allow for that.

Readings did not fall when the soil hospital stopped

The soil hospital stopped treating soil at the end of March 2019. Once wind direction is allowed for, April’s naphthalene at the hot-spot stations was statistically the same as in the operating months (×0.94). Levels fell only in May.

A solvent in the park

In the week to 4 April 2019, two tubes recorded trichloroethene (TCE), a solvent classed as a known human carcinogen: 400 µg/m³ at Air 4 on the north-east boundary and 475 µg/m³ at Air 19 in Minet Country Park. Smaller amounts recurred into May.

The official explanation, from the developer’s consultant Atkins and repeated by Public Health England, was road asphalting or off-site tarmac plants. But Atkins’ own 2016 risk assessment had found TCE in the site’s groundwater along the northern boundary, at up to 100 times the water standard, and made it a clean-up target there. On the record I hold, that was not mentioned when the readings were explained. The source is still not settled.

Who was considered?

Naphthalene can damage red blood cells. People with G6PD deficiency, an inherited condition far more common in families of South Asian, African and Middle Eastern heritage, are more vulnerable; Public Health England said so for this site in July 2019. In March 2019 PHE said naphthalene levels “should urgently be reduced”.

Southall is one of the most South Asian communities in Britain. In the 2021 census, 74% of residents of Southall Green ward and 80% of Southall Broadway ward were of Asian heritage. A full health impact assessment, involving local people, was recommended before planning permission was granted. The one produced in 2008 assessed dust and traffic, not vapours from the soil. I have found no assessment that asked how many people living downwind might be at greater risk.

What residents were told

In September 2018, at a meeting with residents attended by Berkeley’s chairman, Tony Pidgley, and executive director Karl Whiteman, residents were told emissions were all “within legal limits”. That same month, at Ealing’s air quality scrutiny panel, councillors asked whether the benzene standard had ever been breached and, according to the official minutes, “heard that it had been breached”.

The missing pages

Planning permission required a site-wide construction management plan before any remediation began. Condition 12 said it must include “a suitable and efficient means of monitoring and suppressing dust, vapours and odours”, and identify the most sensitive homes and businesses where monitoring would take place.

The site-wide plan drawn up in May 2016 by St James, part of the Berkeley Group, mentions vapours only when quoting that condition. Its air monitoring is for dust: daily visual checks, particulate monitors and weather records. It sets no vapour or odour monitoring and no level at which work would stop. Its list of “most sensitive receptors” comes from a noise assessment.

Each phase then needed its own plan. The one for Phase B, on the eastern side of the site south of Beaconsfield Road, covered the basement dig, remediation and building work there. Berkeley submitted it in March 2019, during the monitoring period, and Ealing approved it on 15 July 2019 (ref. 191339CND). The copy on Ealing’s planning portal has only 14 of its 32 pages. Its contents list air quality on page 22 and noise and vibration on page 24, but the scan stops at page 13. In 2022 a local group asked for the missing pages. Ealing confirmed the gap and said: “We do not hold the paper file in our archive either.” It sent the 2016 site-wide plan instead, and then a 2021 plan for a later phase.

The version Ealing approved was revised in June 2019 after comments from Transport for London. In the copy I hold, its contents stop at site access, with no air quality section at all. The officer’s report notes only that TfL was now content.

That 2021 plan does set a stop rule for dust: if PM10 passes 190 µg/m³, “works should cease”. In 2018, Berkeley had told the scrutiny panel there were “no formal scores for odour complaints that would trigger a decision to stop”. Even in 2021 there was no number for vapours: Tenax tubes were to be used only when digging below the clean cover layer, where the ground is still “considered as contaminated material”.

What next

This is a first account. I am still waiting on information requests about the spring 2019 works, the developer’s vapour action levels and the monitoring officer the council was paid to fund.

If you lived near the site in 2017–2019 and kept a record of smells or symptoms, I would like to hear from you.

Corrections are welcome. The full interactive page, with sources and caveats, is here.

RISE at Southall Town Hall: "No Recorded Information Held"

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:36:50 +0100

Ealing Council has told Southall residents that it updated its equality assessment, consulted partners and considered local impacts when it moved its drug and alcohol treatment service, RISE, into Southall Town Hall. It has also said there is “no evidence” that the move is behind the problems residents are reporting.

In two Freedom of Information responses dated 16 October, the council has set out what records it holds to back those statements.

On most of the questions, the answer is none.

The equality assessment that wasn’t updated

The council’s RISE webpages say it “used and updated the findings of the borough-wide Equality Impact Assessment completed in 2018” when deciding to locate the service at the Town Hall.

Asked for that update, the council replied:

“The Council does not hold recorded information constituting an update to the earlier Equality Analysis Assessment. No separate or discrete updated assessment was created for Southall Town Hall.”

It also holds no record of how the earlier assessment was applied to the Town Hall, and no record of a decision, or reasons, not to carry out a Town Hall-specific assessment. Since the service opened, it has done no site-specific equality, safeguarding or community-impact monitoring:

“The Council does not undertake location-specific monitoring or evaluation of this nature.”

The council says the wording “was intended to refer to the earlier assessment informing subsequent operational consideration; it did not refer to a recorded update”. It is reviewing the wording.

A warning from inside the council

The only pre-opening assessment the council says it holds is an email of 8 January 2025 from a team leader in its Safer Communities team. The officer was writing about a proposed side entrance to the Town Hall for RISE clients.

The officer praised RISE’s existing work in Southall as “invaluable”. But they were “alarmed” that a new alleyway might be created, warning that it “would likely create a further unregulated space that cannot be policed” and “would leave female access user incredibly vulnerable due to the location and limited visibility”.

Referring to the council’s work on male violence against women and girls, they concluded:

“I strongly believe this is not appropriate.”

They added: “I am not sure whether a planning application has been submitted, or whether the location has been surveyed with options considered.”

The council says the email informed the final design of the building. The response does not say what changed as a result.

The council also says officers and RISE spoke with its Community Safety team, the Metropolitan Police, Southall Community Alliance and representatives of the neighbouring Mandir, but that it “does not hold records of most of those discussions”.

“No evidence” — on what basis?

In August, and again in September, the council said:

“There is no evidence that the current issues are being caused by the relocation of RISE. What we are seeing reflects a more complex picture, including displacement from enforcement activity elsewhere and existing pressures in the area.”

Asked what that statement relied on, the council said it was “based on operational intelligence” from the summer’s police and council operation in Southall, which “indicated that the majority of individuals identified as involved in criminal or anti-social behaviour had no identified link to services delivered by RISE”.

It has “not identified a discrete report, dataset or formal causal analysis created for the purpose of making that statement”. It identified no recorded analysis of whether crime or anti-social behaviour changed after the move, and it acknowledged that the ward-level figures it points to “are not a site-specific before-and-after assessment of the Southall Town Hall location”. Nothing in the response addresses “displacement from enforcement activity elsewhere”.

What this does and doesn’t show

None of this shows that RISE caused crime, or that consultation never happened. People who need drug and alcohol treatment deserve a service, and the council’s own officer called the existing one invaluable.

It does show that several assurances given to Southall residents rest on assessments the council cannot produce.

A further response, on what the council’s Community Safety team advised about the move, is due shortly. Southall Stories will publish a fuller investigation once it arrives.

Ealing Council was invited to comment and has said a response will follow.

Sources

FOI 26-1795 (equality assessment, site impact and safeguarding), with the 8 January 2025 email.
FOI 26-1807 (“no evidence” statement)
Ealing Council RISE pages, “Equality assessment for Southall Town Hall” (archived 16 October 2026).
Council statements: EALING.NEWS, 7 August 2026; North West Londoner, 23 September 2026.

Bingo! Ealing Tells the Truth About Southall

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:23:49 +0100

A regular haunt for many years when trekking up to Cleethorpes to visit family was a night out at the bingo.

Not because I was particularly fond of bingo, but because it was a family pastime. It was a social night out. I don’t remember it being a den of iniquity, but times have changed, and not all for the better.

In what feels like another lifetime, I also did a few shifts as a bingo caller in the old people’s home where I worked. While it’s true that my customers were taking a lot of drugs, I’m fairly sure they were prescription only.

Which is all to say it came as something of a surprise to learn how differently a modern “bingo hall” can be viewed.

The name still conjures up callers, dabbers and a social night out. But modern bingo premises can also include significant numbers of gaming machines, which is one reason applications can raise questions about gambling harm, crime and disorder, safeguarding and vulnerability.

But before we get into that, let’s look at how bingo halls come into being in the first place: through the wonderful world of planning.

What are the chances?

What are the chances of a planning application being approved in Ealing?

Plenty of people complain that their own private residential applications for, say, an innocuous kitchen or loft extension are rejected for what seem like spurious or bureaucratic reasons. Meanwhile, profit-seeking developers with planning experts and lawyers can sometimes get approval for schemes that residents find shocking because they know which boxes to tick and which words to use.

Ealing is actually one of the more efficient councils when it comes to processing planning applications within required or agreed timescales. In its own Barriers to Delivery and Action Plan, the council says its Development Management service handles around 5,000 applications a year, makes 100% of major decisions and 98.5% of non-major decisions within the statutory period or an agreed extension, delegates around 95% of schemes to officers and approves around 80% of applications overall.

So it is not simply a rubber-stamping exercise.

Public planning-record analysis from Planning Atlas puts the long-run Ealing approval rate at around 77%, with Southall Broadway at about 70% and Southall Green at about 67%. The Southall Green ward profile records the highest refusal rate in the borough.

What about gambling venues?

Of the gambling-related applications I have so far identified going back around twenty years, fewer than four in ten were approved. In the last ten years, it is fewer than two in ten — one in six. I am still building the underlying dataset, so those figures should be treated as a working count rather than a definitive borough statistic.

But the recent cases are striking enough.

Earlier this year Ealing refused permission to convert Unit 2 at the old Three Horseshoes pub on South Road into a bingo hall. The Three Horseshoes itself was a landmark Southall pub designed by Nowell Parr, later converted into shops and flats. The 2025 application concerned one of those ground-floor retail units.

Ealing refused application 254625FUL in February 2026. The refusal reasons included loss of an active retail use, harm to town-centre vitality, failure to provide healthy, inclusive and safe space, existing anti-social behaviour problems and harmful concentration of gambling-led evening uses.

There were zero public comments on that application.

Its appeal was nevertheless dismissed on 23 July 2026.

Five days later, on 28 July 2026, another bingo appeal was dismissed, this time at 153-155 Uxbridge Road, Hanwell, application 252255FUL. That proposal had generated a quite extraordinary 1,978 public comments.

Then, just three days later, on 31 July 2026, application 262964FUL arrived for another bingo hall — this time at 48 South Road, Southall.

The timing is curious.

It becomes even more curious when you remember that Ealing’s new Gambling Licensing Policy 2026 had come into force only 29 days earlier, on 2 July.

The policy makes clear that some parts of the borough are areas of heightened risk and vulnerability. Applicants are expected to show how their proposals will not exacerbate local risks and to take account of matters including proximity to schools, local crime, safeguarding and existing gambling provision.

If whoever prepared the South Road application had done their homework, they had plenty of homework to do.

If they were playing bingo, they might have been shouting “LINE!” or “HOUSE!” before all their numbers were up.

A remarkably sloppy application

The application documents do not exactly give the impression of a forensic assessment of this particular Southall site.

The transport report refers to a hotel and elsewhere to a banqueting suite and hotel.

There is no hotel.

The security material contains references to videophones and apartments.

The planning statement discusses Dormers Wells High School, more than a mile away, while making no mention of the much closer Hambrough Primary School on South Road.

The noise assessment uses measurements from a bingo hall in Leysdown-on-Sea, Kent, taken on a Tuesday evening in November, as a comparator for a proposed Southall town-centre venue that would operate until midnight seven days a week.

None of these things by itself proves anything about the applicant’s motives.

It may simply be a poorly assembled application. It may be speculative. It may be an attempt to establish the planning principle before spending more money on the later gambling-licence stage.

We don’t know.

What we do know is that someone inside Ealing Council thought the community-safety implications serious enough to intervene.

An unusual intervention

The most interesting objection does not come from one of the residents living near the site.

It comes from Ealing Council’s own Head of Community Safety.

And the manner of the intervention is unusual.

Community Safety does not appear among the formal consultees for the 48 South Road planning application. The planning portal records just two: Pollution Technical (Environmental Health) and Waste and Street Services.

The Head of Community Safety instead lodged a detailed objection through the public comments section, explicitly stating:

“I am submitting this objection in my capacity as Head of Community Safety for Ealing Council.”

That is not simply a resident saying they are worried about a bingo hall.

Nor does it appear to be a routine technical-consultee response generated by the planning system.

For comparison, the Three Horseshoes bingo application recorded no formal consultees at all. The Hanwell proposal recorded five — Pollution Technical, Transport Services, Hanwell and Canals Conservation AAP (East), the Conservation Officer and Waste and Street Services — but Community Safety was not among them.

The planning portal screenshots tell the story rather neatly.

Hanwell: five formal consultees

Three Horseshoes: no formal consultation

48 South Road: Community Safety intervenes through public comments

Hanwell: nearly 2,000 comments and refusal

Whatever prompted the intervention at 48 South Road, the Head of Community Safety chose to put a professional assessment of Southall’s vulnerabilities on the public record.

And that is where this stops being a story about bingo.

What Ealing says about Southall

What happens when Ealing Council needs to explain why Southall might be the wrong place for another gambling venue?

It starts describing Southall in much the same way residents have been describing it for years.

The Head of Community Safety describes Southall Town Centre as a place with vulnerable communities and significant existing demands on local services. Another gambling-related use, the objection says, has the potential to increase those pressures, particularly in the evening when town-centre management resources are already stretched.

It could create additional demand for enforcement, community safety, outreach and partnership services.

The objection goes further.

It says vulnerable residents already experience:

“disproportionate levels of harm associated with financial hardship, social isolation, poor mental health, addiction, and exploitation.”

And rather than considering one shop unit in isolation, the Head of Community Safety explicitly urges the council to consider its cumulative impact in the context of existing town-centre pressures and the needs of the local community.

The full objection can be read among the public comments on application 262964FUL.

Where on earth has the Head of Community Safety got all this from?

Residents?

What Happened to Southall??

Maybe.

But it is not as though Ealing Council doesn’t already know any of this.

The council has mapped it

Ealing’s new Gambling Local Area Profile maps gambling premises against deprivation, crime, anti-social behaviour, proximity to young people and alcohol- and drug-related incidents.

Southall already has 11 licensed gambling premises.

The profile warns that concentrations of gambling premises can increase exposure and create cumulative risks where other vulnerabilities are present.

Its deprivation analysis highlights significant pockets of high deprivation in Southall.

Then it overlays deprivation with existing gambling provision.

The result?

Southall – particularly Southall Broadway and Southall Green – is explicitly identified as one of Ealing’s “higher-risk” gambling zones.

The profile says crime and anti-social behaviour are concentrated around town centres and that higher crime and ASB are also co-located with gambling premises in Southall.

It identifies Southall town centre as one of the places where young people may regularly pass or encounter gambling premises.

It also shows alcohol- and drug-related ambulance call-outs overlapping with Southall.

Its conclusion is pretty stark: the highest-risk areas tend to be those where gambling availability, socioeconomic vulnerability, youth exposure and alcohol- and drug-related pressures intersect.

In short: Southall.

The council even consulted residents before adopting this framework. The responses are published in full in the Gambling Policy consultation results, including concerns about clustering, deprivation, schools, crime, addiction and the cumulative impact of gambling premises.

And anyone who has followed Southall Stories will recognise the wider context. Earlier this year I wrote about crime, drugs and anti-social behaviour in Southall. The council’s own Local Area Profile now places some of those same pressures inside an official gambling-risk framework.

Cumulative vulnerability

This is the really important part.

The Head of Community Safety says the proposal should not be viewed in isolation.

For years, decisions affecting Southall have tended to be compartmentalised.

Housing developments are considered in isolation from neighbouring housing developments.

Pollution sources are assessed separately from other nearby pollution sources.

New data centres are considered as individual data centres, not together as two or more data centres, and not as another burden in a place already carrying several others.

Residents, meanwhile, live with the cumulative impact.

That is why the Community Safety objection’s emphasis on cumulative vulnerability matters so much.

Once you accept that another gambling venue has to be considered alongside deprivation, crime, disorder, drug- and alcohol-related harm, youth exposure, existing gambling provision and pressure on public services, one rather serious question remains.

Why is cumulative vulnerability so visible here, but so often fragmented into separate assessments elsewhere?

The same people live here when housing schemes are considered.

The same children walk these streets.

The same public services have to cope.

The same residents breathe the same air.

The same town centre absorbs the consequences.

Southall does not become a collection of unrelated planning applications simply because that is how the paperwork is filed.

Ealing may come out of this looking good

And it should be said: Ealing may well come out of this looking good.

If planning permission is refused, the council can point to its new Gambling Licensing Policy and Local Area Profile and say it has put its evidence into practice.

Residents objected.

The Head of Community Safety intervened.

The evidence identified vulnerability and cumulative risk.

The council acted.

If that is what happens, it may be exactly the right decision.

But there is no escaping the wider implication.

In order to explain why another bingo hall might be wrong for Southall, Ealing Council has put on the public record that Southall contains vulnerable communities, stretched local services, socioeconomic deprivation, crime and anti-social behaviour, exposure to addiction and existing concentrations of potentially harmful uses.

The council has mapped those pressures.

It has written them into policy.

And one of its own senior officers has now relied on them in a live planning objection.

That evidence does not disappear when application 262964FUL is decided.

The most interesting thing about this bingo hall may turn out to be that it forced Ealing Council to say publicly what residents have been saying for years:

You cannot understand what is happening to Southall by looking at each incident in isolation.

Bingo!

Sources

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:40:41 +0100

I grew up in rural Lincolnshire and moved down South permanently in 1999. Ever since, I’ve been trekking back up to the East Midlands and the North Sea coast to visit family and enjoy holidays from my childhood with my own kids at Butlins and caravan parks.

On one such trip many years ago, we visited Lincoln and its famous and beautiful cathedral, and its imposing castle.

Inside the castle there’s an archive room containing items of historical interest, one of which is one of the last remaining copies of an 800-year-old legal document. The Charter of the Forest remained on the statute book in part until the remaining provisions were repealed by the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Act 1971.

Most people have heard of its big brother, Magna Carta, a copy of which also resides in the same room. The lesser-known Charter of the Forest caught my eye. While Magna Carta was concerned largely with the legal relationship between the monarch and the nobility, the Charter of the Forest seemed more relevant to the ordinary person.

It was concerned with protecting the rights of free men to use land and resources subject to royal forest law: to graze animals, gather resources and maintain customary rights needed for everyday life. Royal forest did not simply mean woodland fenced off for the King’s hunting. It was a legal jurisdiction imposed over land. The Charter restricted that jurisdiction, required some land to be disafforested and restored or protected customary rights over resources people depended upon.

Of course, most ordinary people in those medieval days were not free men at all. They were peasants and serfs and had no rights. Still, it was a step in the right direction!

What’s the point of all this? And thanks for sticking with me if you’re still here!

I wasn’t much into History at school — it was all about learning by rote the Kings and Queens of England and how various Royal Families interbred and murdered each other. That’s all highly revered in the Houses of Parliament still. As I’ve got older, like many, I have developed more of an interest in history, albeit later than might have been helpful to me personally. Nevertheless, it’s never too late to learn and try to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

The Charter of the Forest may be an 800-year-old law, but it raises a question that is still recognisable: > who gets to control access to resources that people rely upon?

That gives us a useful framework for thinking about public and private ownership — not just of land and resources for living, but also of knowledge, information and the means of accessing it and sharing it.

But what’s all this got to do with Southall and Ealing?

When I started taking an interest in local governance, it was to ask what was happening to the part of Southall I call home — what was the smell of petrol enveloping our home and streets? Could anyone else smell it? And if it was petrol, was it dangerous to health? What I had hoped would be a simple customer service issue turned out to be slightly more complicated.

It’s been surprisingly hard to get or find reliable and authoritative answers to those three questions, if at all. No one has ever really answered the first question straightforwardly. The answer to the second question, I was told — along with many others, I subsequently found out — was, no, I was the only one and I must be too sensitive. The answer to the third question was a resounding no from all the authorities, in spite of all the evidence from people’s testimonies to the contrary.

The verdict is still very much up in the air, and quite likely in our lungs, and our blood, and in the cells and tissues of our vital organs. An enclosure, in this instance, would have been welcome!

Questions inevitably lead to more questions.

What happened to the air-quality data? The complaints? The petition? The homes? The money? The bridge? The hotel? The cinema? The health centre? The school? Local democracy?

Why was it so difficult to get answers? Why was it so difficult to find out what happened?

Many of the answers to these questions are hidden in plain sight. But only if you know where to look. And sometimes, the evidence simply disappears.

Southall Stories came into existence to try to address some of those problems, and to put the record straight. But it is just one version of history, and it is still a fragmented history at that.

The resident-led Community Powered Reporting brought much of it together, along with many other official sources, in the powerful What Happened to Southall? report in March 2026. It was a tremendous effort gathering all the evidence and putting it all together into one coherent whole.

Wouldn’t it be useful if there was a way to make the digging less of a chore, and to make connecting the dots to see the bigger picture easier?

I don’t know about you, but I gather my information and stories from a wide range of sources, some more useful than others. When I was younger, I used to love looking through my grandparents’ set of encyclopedias, and when I was a student, the university library was like a second home. The internet has brought unimaginable quantities and qualities of information to our fingertips, but what started out in the universities as a means for knowledge exchange and sharing soon became monetised and siloed. Almost all of our news and social connection online now lives within the confines of one proprietary app or platform or another, owned by a billionaire.

There are still some renegades on the World Wide Web, and there are still some of the original foundations of the information-exchange mechanisms that aren’t owned by anyone and are free to use.

Anyone who uses social media will be familiar with the feeling of seeing their friends and family disappear from their timelines to be replaced by whatever it is the algorithm has decided it wants you to click on and respond to.

But there is another way.

Back in 1999, as I was moving to London and everyone was preparing for a new millennium, a mechanism for sharing information openly and freely on the internet was developed called RSS — Really Simple Syndication. The history of RSS reaches back to Netscape in 1999, and the RSS 2.0 specification remains an open way for websites to syndicate what they publish.

A website publishes stories in a feed or timeline. Readers subscribe to it.

That’s it.

No walled garden, no paywall, no algorithm boosting some stories over others. You subscribe to the websites you enjoy reading and you receive their newly published articles.

One of the pioneers of RSS, Dave Winer, has recently been experimenting again with ways to socialise feeds — allowing people to share information and comment using the same open mechanisms. People have been sharing and commenting online for years, of course. That’s not new.

What is interesting is the potential to bring together lots of different sources of information into one place with all their individual RSS feeds, and then build a social layer on top.

For Southall Stories, and Ealing, that means bringing together sources related to local democracy and governance, health, environment, housing, social care, jobs, the economy and more into one place on the internet, while also facilitating contributions from residents — submitting sources, articles, evidence and comments.

What began as a weekend project rather quickly snowballed into a grand idea of a Civic Commons.

A place on the internet where anyone can go to gather information and evidence, make connections and join the dots, and contribute to a lasting and living archive of local democracy in Ealing.

Not just a news feed, but a civic memory and record.

This is how Ealing Civic Commons came about.

The wider project now has a network front door, a borough-wide Ealing view, and a Southall doorway (and one for each of the seven towns):

Anyone can read and, if they want to, follow and subscribe to areas, places or topics of interest. They can also contribute sources, evidence and knowledge to help build a bigger, fuller picture.

Nothing is mandatory. It’s all free. There are no adverts or algorithms.

Because it’s newly developed by me, I currently own it — I bought the domain name, pay for hosting and all the development costs, including my own volunteer time. If there is any interest in actually using it, I want to look at how to transfer ownership and maintenance to a civic body.

That’s why there is a Charter of the Commons.

The Charter sets out the principles which emerged from building it: open civic access, plural sources, transparent provenance, local stewardship, interoperability, inclusion without endorsement, correction without historical erasure, and resistance to enclosure.

Southall and Ealing’s civic record is not literally an enclosed royal forest. But it’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for.

What should be public knowledge can often become, to all intents and purposes, enclosed.

I can’t be the only one who has had to submit a Freedom of Information request — after failing to get answers from officers or councillors — only to receive back a link to a public document.

If only I could have found that same document myself!

Indeed, while setting up the Ealing Civic Commons, I discovered many hitherto unknown-to-me nooks and crannies of the Ealing Council website, and many information gems hiding behind multiple menu navigation layers and obscure or unhelpful document titles.

Platform sites like Facebook and WhatsApp contain vast quantities of potentially invaluable local knowledge that is forever locked behind a login screen or private group access.

The World Wide Web was built on principles of open access and links, while the modern web seems increasingly to build walls and gated communities around information.

For anyone who wants to find out what happened to Southall, or Ealing, or here, it’s a structural barrier to what can be remembered and who can be held to account.

All of that said, I don’t want or expect people or information to leave their online spaces and relocate to the Civic Commons.

Rather, the Commons is an attempt to connect all these valuable sources together, index them, sort them, show their source, preserve them, allow people to follow areas of interest, and expose the links between them.

This is what the web was built to do.

One particularly satisfying outcome of setting up Ealing Civic Commons was the realisation that it was the perfect opportunity to replant the Ealing oak discarded by the council’s 2026 rebranding exercise.

It’s the perfect symbol in so many ways of what the civic record in Ealing could look like: rooted, stable, historic, interconnected, branching out, a home and a safe haven for a multitude of sources.

The Gasworks and Me (and You)

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:47:09 +0100

Since 2018, I have been campaigning against the adverse health effects of the Southall Gasworks remediation, along with many other local residents.

It’s been a tough battle for many reasons, not least the vast power imbalance between the developer Berkeley Group and their myriad subordinate shell companies making half a billion pound profits every year, and a community living in one of the most economically deprived and racialised areas of the country, not just Ealing borough.

It hasn’t been helped by what I believe has been the extraordinary influence Berkeley has acquired with Ealing Council and some local community leaders and organisations, while residents’ voices and lived experience have consistently been undermined, downplayed and dismissed.

At various times, we’ve faced legal threats from council officers and been prevented from speaking at or attending community meetings. There have also been incidents involving our jobs, families and property which I can’t conclusively connect to the campaign, but taken together, they’ve sometimes left me wondering what on earth was going on.

There are many stories of Southall residents whose health has been affected through respiratory and pulmonary diseases, and more.

In the Guardian newspaper produced video above, community members report suffering from severe symptoms, including asthma, headaches, and cancer, which they attribute to toxic odors and soil contaminants like benzene.

My whole family was affected, including our lovely young and healthy little rescue cat who died suddenly from multiple organ failure in September 2018.

My symptoms at the time were an otherwise unexplained series of chest infections, the number and severity of which I hadn’t experienced before or since that period.

Then, in 2024, I was diagnosed with chronic lung disease otherwise known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (or COPD if you’re short of breath).

Late last year, I became aware of a planning decision notice published by Ealing Council in 2008.

The notice relates to early stage Gasworks development plans, and instructs interested parties at that time that, among many other things, a community Health Impact Assessment must be carried out.

Below is the full text of that particular section, with my emphasis added.

HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENT

A full Health Impact Assessment (HIA) should be commissioned to identify the potential and negative health impacts of the development on those living in both existing and new housing, and the means to address them, in both the short and longer terms.

The HIA should consider short and long term effects on health status and on the need for primary and secondary health services. Considerations would range from (for example) increased need for child health services arising from an increased population, to potential exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases arising from temporary decreases in air quality (if identified) and positive and negative effects on mental well-being of changes in the environment.

The HIA should involve local communities and take into account their views, following best practice on community engagement.

Recommendations from the HIA should be incorporated in the final plans for the site.

As far as I’ve been able to establish, no such community Health Impact Assessment was ever carried out that considered the potential exacerbation of COPD arising from temporary decreases in air quality, or anything else identified in that recommendation.

Why does this matter now?

Well, one reason it matters is because at least two massive hyperscale data centres are being built in Southall and others right next door in Hayes, across the canal from the Gasworks site.

This is and will be its own story, but residents’ health and environmental concerns are already being fobbed off by Ealing Council.

As I keep saying to people, it’s like the Gasworks story all over again.

Watch this space!

Full document available here: p-2008-3981-decision-notice-2053662.pdf.

The original document url on Ealing Council’s planning portal is the memorable: https://pam.ealing.gov.uk/online-applications/files/04D0D49869ABA343B7405B14A536D99E/pdf/P_2008_3981-DECISION_NOTICE-2053662.pdf, but sometimes when I check to see if it’s working it gives me a “document unavailable” error.

The planning application number is P/2008/3981, so you should be able to find it by searching for that.

The full planning application is here.

Holding The Line

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:42:12 +0100

It’s been a long, hot summer and I don’t know about you, but I have definitely been feeling the heat!

After the local elections in May, I needed a rest from all the very intense and exciting few months leading up to it.

Between January and May, I published thirty-three articles, 58,027 words, with thirteen of those articles and 25,797 words in May, and eighteen articles, and 22,000 words in less than three weeks in the run-up to the elections and a couple of days afterwards for a post-election analysis.

It’s absolutely not something I ever planned to do – I started the year with an appeal for Southall residents whose health - like mine - was, or still is, affected by the toxic Southall Gasworks remediation. It’s still something I want to do, but it quickly became less of a priority.

The day after I posted that appeal there was a massive fire at the paper recycling plant around the corner from where I live. That rekindled a whole host of unresolved health and safety issues local residents had raised with Ealing Council since 2022.

Despite evidence from residents of the obvious fire risks, and despite the Environment Agency’s own investigations which clearly informed Ealing Council of their statutory responsibilities, the council’s own year-long investigation found nothing. I complained at the time and got no response.

I followed up my complaint after this year’s fire only to be told that the council had no record of ever receiving it.

I filed a Stage 2 complaint about the obvious governance failures of operating a communications system where any message can disappear at any time without any record of it ever existing.

That, too, was dismissed.

Because they had no record of it, the complaint didn’t exist. Because the complaint didn’t exist there was nothing to investigate.

The council directors making these decisions are earning upwards of £100,000 a year. But that’s another story.

I filed a further complaint with the Local Government Ombudsman, but there is a six- to eight-month wait before they can even look at it. I’ll keep you updated!

The whole saga inspired a parody of Ealing’s bureaucratic approach to reporting nuisances and pollution.

I also started gathering together and publishing in one coherent place a series of articles on Southall Green councillor and Ealing Council Leader Peter Mason’s many failures in public office.

From “Demolition Man”, “Bangarang!” and “Boomerang!” to “The Smell of Damp” and “The Smell of Success”, Peter Mason appears to be the epitome of a career politician promoted way above his ability, despite an almost heroic lack of achievement in any of his previous roles.

The question remains:

who does Peter Mason really represent?

Sources: Andrew Teale’s LEAP, 2018 and 2022, and Ealing Council 2026

No doubt Mason and his ever-diminishing number of supporters will point to his record of success in elections as the one thing that matters. If that’s what they believe, it tells its own story.

I enjoyed doing something a little different with a couple of musical parodies, too: Ealing’s Burning and Individuality.

During the relentless heatwaves of the summer I have still been paying attention to what’s happening to Southall and Ealing, and I have been close to publishing stories on the data centres and the protest outside the RISE offices at Southall Town Hall, among others. In each case, events overtook my drafts and I had to revise or start over. They will come.

That I wasn’t able to publish in time made me think about my method and my workflow, and the end result. For some time, I have been thinking it would be a good idea to publish shorter, more concise stories to make them easier to read and understand – as well as to write! The long pieces I’ve written take a lot out of me researching and putting them all together. Knowing me, I will probably try to do both!

If you have been here at Southall Stories before, you will notice (I hope) a slightly new look and design. It should make things easier to navigate and to find.

I also revamped my personal website, which is where Southall Stories originated.

Not quite Southall Stories pieces, but perhaps of interest nevertheless, I took a walk around Southall Green a couple of weeks ago and wrote up a few thoughts by hand and shared a few photos including some of a hidden treasure.

Not a hidden treasure, but this photo of the strange-looking tower going up on the site of the old Barclays Bank building at the top of The Green by the Station Road roundabout reminds me of the Statue of Liberty.

Some more photos from my walk, including the old Southall Library, The Tudor Rose, St Anselm’s Church, Manor House, and Manor House Grounds. Bonus picture from last week at Southall Station.

And back in May, as an antidote to all the election stuff, I also took my eldest lad to meet the legendary Southall band Misty In Roots at the Dominion Centre in Southall Green.

“without the knowledge of your history you cannot determine your destiny”

Now, I better get back to finishing off some of those drafts.

Individuality

Fri, 29 May 2026 22:09:15 +0100

Without any consultation, Ealing Council has unveiled its new logo.

The old logo was a mature municipal (socialist?) oak. Forty years of recognition, instantly legible, sitting in the lineage of the borough’s heraldic tradition.

Bin lorries, school gates, planning notices, council letterhead.

The kind of brand asset most local authorities would pay handsomely to acquire — and which Ealing already had, free of charge, through the cumulative work of decades of public service.

🎶 I’ll chop you down, like an old dead tree… 🎶

The replacement is a stylised “fingerprint” of seven disconnected branches floating in a green (party?) ecosystem.

No roots, no leaves, no canopy, no trunk.

Stripped of almost everything that might make it recognisable, or function, as a living tree.

An unnamed council spokesperson assures us:

“The new logo is still a tree.”

But, I hear you ask, what is a tree? When is a tree not a tree?

According to the Forestry Commission:

To be considered a tree, the plant must have at least one woody stem and be expected to achieve a height of at least 5 metres.

But let’s be fair. This isn’t a real tree, but a representation of a tree, and what that might mean to anyone who sees it. A symbol of the London Borough of Ealing, its seven towns, and its diverse people.

“while the council supports those distinct 7 towns and their communities, it also believes in respecting the individuality of each of the people it serves.”

Those seven abstract and disconnected white branches represent and respect the unique identities of Acton, Perivale, Ealing, Northolt, Greenford, Hanwell and Southall — and each and every one us.

Carefully cultivated and contained individuality.

Ward forums gone. Election hustings invitation-only and no questions from the floor. Public meetings no longer attended.

The once “broad church” of the Labour Party, now excludes everyone who refuses to conform to the leader’s vision.

Many of our community assets sold to developers.

Disconnected branches.

No trunk to gather them. No root system to anchor them. No canopy to shelter them. Floating freely. Structurally separate.

Accessibility compliant. Representation variable.

At no cost to the taxpayer

Echoing former leader Julian Bell’s rationalisation of his many trips to MIPIM in Cannes, the in-house designers did the work “at no extra cost.”

Officer time is a cost. Communications team capacity is a cost. The opportunity cost — what those staff could have been doing instead — is also a cost. The council does not capitalise its brand equity on the balance sheet, but it had some, and it has now disposed of it.

It is, on the other hand, the perfect council tree.

It needs no soil. It will never need watering. It has no growing season.

It cannot drop leaves, cannot fail to thrive, cannot be planted in the wrong neighbourhood.

It cannot be subject to a canopy survey.

It will require no maintenance budget, no enforcement officer, no Section 106 contribution, no construction management plan.

It is, of all the council’s recently planted trees, the only one guaranteed to survive.

Specimen

The borough’s seven towns are now honoured by an abstract emblem of growth and individuality — two days after a piece documenting the borough’s ninth-worst position in England for heat vulnerability, the £5 billion retrofit gap signed by the Leader to government, and the 41,500 trees the council has planted almost entirely outside the seven priority neighbourhoods most of those seven towns contain.

It is the council’s other published documents — the heat vulnerability rankings, the canopy cover map, the air quality focus areas, the EREC overcrowding statistics — that record which of the seven the council has actually served, and which it has not.

The old logo was a tree.

The new logo is a values statement.

Both are now part of the brand.

SS · 002

With the help of Billy Bragg, I wrote a song. Thanks to Suno AI, it sounds more like The Only Ones. And I feel fine.

A lost Billy Bragg protest 7" from an alternate universe where he lived in Southall and got obsessed with local governance and the A4020 arterial road to the country.

Individuality

after Billy Bragg

I’ve got good neighbours
And friends from many nations
I’ve shared glasses
With folk from English classes
And unless you’re a fascist
I won’t turn you away
If you stick around
I’m sure that we can find some common ground

Individuality
Each and every one of us
Individuality
Your rules can’t contain us

The new logo for the London Borough of Ealing
Accessibility standards now it’s meeting
While Southall’s vulnerable prayed
In the heat to find some shade
“It’s still a tree!” the council has spoken
At least it’s finally out in the open

Individuality
Each and every one of us
Individuality
Your rules can’t contain us
Individuality
Or express all our qualities
Individuality
Or hide inequalities

I’m sure that everybody knows
How much my council rates me
It lets me down most every time
And leaves the streets so dirty
Please don’t shirk
Responsibility for your work

I’m getting weighed down (weighed down)
With all this information (information)
Consultation
Without representation
Stop raising allowances
While services grow poorer
I don’t want a superhero
Or accountability zero

Individuality
Each and every one of us
Individuality
Your rules can’t contain us
Individuality
Come eat and drink and speak with me
Individuality
We can be what we want to be

Previously on Southall Stories: SS · 001 — Ealing’s Burning.
Feeling the Heat: the council’s £5 billion gap, in the council’s own words.

Feeling the Heat

Mon, 25 May 2026 15:34:05 +0100

Above: the council’s own climate risk map for Ealing. Reds and dark reds mark the highest-risk neighbourhoods. Source: Ealing CEES 2025 Progress Report, p.13.

On 11 July 2018, I recorded a video for the Clean Air for Southall and Hayes campaign’s petition to stop the toxic and odorous open-air remediation of Southall’s massive old Gasworks site by the mega rich developer Berkeley Group.

In the video, I described how I had to keep my windows closed all night and all morning in the middle of a sweltering three-month heatwave.

Why?

Because of the stink of petrol outside, a result of Berkeley’s “clean-up” operation.

With very little respite, we were enveloped in the sickly-sweet smell for most of that year’s three-month heatwave.

As a result, and as Berkeley refused to stop, the temperature inside my home — 26°C — was around 5°C higher than the temperature outside.

Almost eight years on, we are having a mini-heatwave in the last week of May, with temperatures topping 30°C for the next few days in London.

In 2018, the highest temperature in May was 28.5°C.

In June, it was 29°C. In July, 34°C. In August, 32°C.

The all-time UK record temperature in May, set in 1944, was 32.8°C.

“So what?” you might ask. “It’s nothing to worry about. Most people will be fine. It’s worse in the Global South, and people survive there with less to cope.”

It is true that most people will be fine.

But does that mean we should not worry about those who won’t?

Last year, there were more than 1,000 excess heat-related deaths in the UK.

Just last week, the Climate Change Committee warned that the majority of homes in the UK will overheat by 2050, water shortages will worsen, and the costs to public welfare could reach hundreds of billions of pounds a year.

What has all this got to do with Southall?

Quite a lot, actually.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that the impact of excess heat is worse in Southall.

But don’t worry! Ealing Council is here!

In April 2019, as the so-called “soil treatment hospital” at the Gasworks was officially decommissioned, Ealing Council declared a Climate Emergency.

And they’ve been “fighting” this climate emergency ever since.

Mostly, some might argue, by closing recycling centres, blocking roads with giant plant pots, and granting planning permission to transform the “Queen of the Suburbs” into a new Manhattan.

But the council has a strategy.

Ealing Council knew

On 11 January 2021, Ealing Council adopted its Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy.

The strategy committed in writing to climate justice, acknowledging in Section 6 that low-income households contribute least to emissions, are most negatively affected by climate impacts, and are least able to participate in decision-making.

Section 15 commits the council to use its planning powers — described as “one of the most influential tools available to the council to mitigate the effects of climate change” — to “maximise urban greening”, “protect and enhance our network of open spaces”, ensure new developments are “Air Quality Positive”, and “steer development to the areas with the lowest probability of risk from flooding.”

The targets are testable.

Tree canopy cover from 16.9% to 23% by 2030 (N1.1).
50,000 energy efficiency measures in private homes by 2025 (E1.4).
10,000m³ of additional surface water storage by 2025 (N3.4).
All major developments built to net zero (E2.2).

Ealing knew, in 2021, exactly which residents would bear the cost.

Veteran Southall Green councillor Jasbir Anand was appointed to lead the fight for residents.

Residents knew

Six weeks after the April 2019 declaration of a Climate Emergency, Ealing Transition Initiative submitted a detailed community response — pages of specifics, costed by category.

Among the asks:

retrofit of existing housing stock beginning with local authority homes;
shade trees in every street rather than ornamentals;
Passivhaus or equivalent standards for all building works and conversions; - and no further building on green spaces.

Seven years on, none of the four has been delivered in the borough’s most heat-vulnerable neighbourhoods.

Warren Farm Nature Reserve was saved but is scheduled to have building works right next door as new sports pitches and facilities are erected.
Passivhaus applies to new council-built housing only.
The trees that have been planted have mostly gone elsewhere — not in Southall.
And the retrofit numbers will be addressed below.

Only in Southall

Three years ago, I went through the council’s draft Air Quality Strategy line by line.

The strategy named Southall as an Air Quality Focus Area, identified BAME and low-income populations as disproportionately exposed, and committed to “fighting inequalities.”

But by then, the council had already:

approved continued open-air remediation of the contaminated Southall Gasworks site, including through the 2018 heatwave, when residents pleaded with leaders to halt work
failed to enforce the Construction Management Plan — and confirmed in an FOI response that it did not hold a complete copy of the original
refused to widen South Road bridge by the train station, the one mitigation promised when the Mayor overruled local planning objections
proposed destroying most of the rewilded Warren Farm Nature Reserve to build sports pitches the consulted public did not want.

Southall already has the lowest tree canopy cover in Ealing.

What I suggested in 2023

“If Ealing is serious about ‘fighting’ inequalities, action must be targeted to protect vulnerable people in Southall to reduce air pollution and its impact on the health of its large, mostly economically deprived and non-white population.”

“The Strategy and Plan must target children and older people, people with lung conditions, and pregnant women: outside schools and school run hours.”

[I wrote that in January 2023. As it happens, I was diagnosed with chronic lung disease the following year.]

“The Council must question if it is ethical to promote active travel in Southall when it knows that it is a high pollution area and that most of its population is particularly vulnerable to its adverse health impacts.”

I also proposed something specific:

“If the council’s air quality strategy is to have any real meaning and intent to address air pollution and multiple inequalities in the Southall Air Quality Focus Area and beyond, it must surely include a vast tree-planting project, and proper maintenance of our existing parks if no new ones can be created on non-contaminated land.”

The council adopted its draft strategy with some minor adjustments, and apparently ignored my submission.

The 10,000 trees planned in the new adaptation strategy are going to the new regional park, not into the priority neighbourhoods.

The council’s schools climate-change resource page, run by the School Travel Team, still does not mention heat adaptation, and still promotes active travel in a borough now confirmed as ninth worst in England for heat vulnerability.

Ninth worst in England

In July 2022, Friends of the Earth published an analysis of research led by Professor Sarah Lindley at the University of Manchester, ranking every English local authority by the number of neighbourhoods most socially vulnerable to extreme heat.

Ealing came ninth out of the whole of England.

Seventy-nine priority neighbourhoods for adaptation. Worse than Haringey, Brent, Lambeth, Hounslow, Wandsworth, and every other west London borough. Better than only Birmingham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Nottingham, Southwark, Leicester, and Enfield.

The research, drawing on University of Bristol heat-exposure modelling and over forty social vulnerability indicators, identified where heat would land hardest, who lived there, and what they could afford to do about it.

Friends of the Earth then overlaid the rankings with Leeds University carbon-footprint data and found that priority neighbourhoods have lower than average carbon footprints. The communities most exposed to the climate impact are least responsible for the climate cause.

And one finding largely ignored at the time of publication:

People of colour are four times more likely than white people to live in a priority neighbourhood for adaptation.

The council had this analysis nearly four years ago.

As Professor Hannah Cloke, Regius Professor in Meteorology and Climate Science at the University of Reading, put it last week:

“The solutions exist. The challenge now is turning adaptation plans on paper into streets, homes, rivers and infrastructure that are ready for what’s coming.”

The plans on paper, in Ealing’s case, are five years old. The streets, homes and infrastructure have moved in the opposite direction.

The Leader’s own words

It wouldn’t be Southall Stories without a quote from our newly re-elected leader.

In June 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the man who would become Leader of Ealing Council the following year, Peter Mason, posted to his then-Twitter account:

“we’re basically operating a system that’s structurally racist. We can’t figuratively keep washing our hands of this, whilst telling BAME communities to do it literally. #BlackLivesMatter”

Three years later, at the unveiling of replacement memorial plaques for Blair Peach and Gurdip Singh Chaggar — both killed in racist attacks on the streets of Southall — Mason named structural racism as the cause of Southall’s gaps in life expectancy, earnings and housing.

He’s not wrong.

He’s also been Leader of the council during the period in which the Friends of the Earth analysis has sat on the public record. That analysis quantified one component of what the Leader publicly described.

People of colour, four times more likely to live in priority heat-adaptation neighbourhoods.

The council’s measured delivery against its 2021 climate justice commitments, in those neighbourhoods, is what the Leader’s stated diagnosis describes in practice.

Feet to the flames

In January 2022, the Ealing Race Equality Commission — set up by the council and chaired by Lord Simon Woolley — published its final report.

Mason had been in office as Leader for eight months.

Woolley’s framing was direct: previous reports across the country had ended up “gathering dust on shelves – and we do not want that to happen with this report.”

Priority 7 of the recommendations called for an independent body that would keep “feet to the flames” in order to “hold the next Ealing administration to account for progress”, with the Leader required to report on progress annually from 2023.

The council established the Citizens’ Tribunal in response.

Two years on, the Tribunal’s own evaluation report records that 58% of its members reported difficulties in obtaining the necessary data from the council. “This in turn diluted their ability to make informed recommendations.”

The council’s own accountability body has said, in writing, that the council will not give it the evidence it needs to hold the council accountable.

EREC’s housing recommendations — empowered tenant groups, a private-renters rights campaign, ward-level housing advice hubs — sit alongside one statistic from the same report.

Citing North West London Community Voices research, EREC recorded that BAME households in the borough are four times more likely to be overcrowded than the borough average. Private renters six times. Social renters eight times.

That is the demographic of the seventy-nine priority neighbourhoods, set out in the council’s own commissioned report, six months before Friends of the Earth published the heat-vulnerability rankings.

What the Council knew, and when

In January 2021, the council adopted its Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy, committing in target E1.4 to 50,000 energy efficiency measures in private homes by 2025.

By July 2021 — six months later — the council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Climate Action, Cllr Deirdre Costigan (since July 2024, the Labour MP for Ealing Southall), wrote to the then Secretary of State, Kwasi Kwarteng, telling him in writing that “the major levers to reduce costs and make retrofitting affordable for more households do not sit with local government”.

Without national VAT cuts, the costs of retrofitting would “fall beyond the means even of relatively financially comfortable households.”

In November 2021, the London Assembly published a written answer from the Mayor to a question from Onkar Sahota AM.

The question recorded that “Ealing has only enough funding to start work on 68 council homes out of the 5,000 that are ready for refurbishment.”

That is the council’s own social housing backlog, on the record. 68 out of 5,000, ten months into a strategy promising 50,000 private homes by 2025.

By August 2023, Cllr Peter Mason and Cllr Costigan jointly wrote to Grant Shapps, then Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Their letter quantified the gap in writing:

“this is estimated to be in the order of £300M for Council-owned properties – and £5B for all domestic properties within the Borough. The gap between existing funding from central government and the task in hand is profound.”

Five billion pounds. The council’s own figure, signed by its Leader, for the cost of decarbonising the borough’s housing stock.

On 21 January 2026, the council’s own Around Ealing magazine confirmed the delivery numbers.

Since May 2022, 1,207 of its own homes have been upgraded.

A further 732 council homes are scheduled for retrofit by 2028 — part-funded by £6.5 million from the Government’s Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund, and £35.5 million from the council over three years.

£35.5 million from the council, against a £5 billion gap the Leader had quantified two and a half years earlier. 0.7% of what the council itself told the government was needed.

The arithmetic looks worse still when set against Southall’s housing tenure.

In October 2022, speaking at a Southall Community Alliance forum, Mason described his own ward with unusual candour.

“If you live in Southall,” he said, “your opportunity and your access to get onto the housing ladder is next to nothing. 80% of the homes in Southall Green are in the private rented sector. The challenges and the quality of accommodation available leads people having to live in terrible situations.”

The council’s current retrofit programme — its own social housing stock — touches at most 20% of homes in the Leader’s own description.

The other 80% depends on the £5 billion private-sector decarbonisation the Leader himself told government, ten months later, was not funded.

Cadent Gas, the regional gas network operator, published its own data in March 2023 confirming that 16% of households in Ealing Southall live in fuel poverty — higher than the average both nationally and in London.

The same housing stock now ranked ninth in England for summer heat vulnerability is also among London’s worst for winter cold. Cadent privately funded a £94,540 community grant to mitigate this.

The public retrofit programme that would have reached most of those households is the same one the Leader told government, in writing, was £5 billion short.

Where did all the trees go?

The council’s own 2023 progress report confirmed the “commitment to plant 50,000 trees by 2026.”

The council’s 2025 Progress Report records over 41,500 trees planted since 2022 — the majority within the West London Regional Park, connecting Pear Tree Park, Warren Farm, Churchfields Recreation Ground and Horsenden Hill. A further 10,000 are planned, the report says, “prioritising areas with the least greenery.”

The areas with the least greenery, on the council’s own iTree data, are in Southall.

The planting to date has mostly gone elsewhere.

The very last “Going forward” item in the Nature section of the 2025 report is more revealing:

“Undertake an updated canopy cover survey to guide our approach to enhancing wildlife and connecting people to nature.”

The council is commissioning a new canopy survey in 2026 — after most of the planting has been completed.

Berkeley Group’s “Poison Park” — the so-called “green” space grafted on to contaminated Gasworks land — will be counted towards Southall’s green infrastructure on paper.

The site’s contamination history is well documented.

In May 2019, The Observer reported that fifty Southall residents (including me) interviewed by Jo Griffin described “breathing difficulties, the onset and worsening of asthma, eye irritation, irregular heartbeats, migraines, skin rashes, chest infections, nausea, dizziness, memory problems, a sensation of ‘internal burning’ and other symptoms.”

The soil was found to contain “hydrocarbons including benzene, a known carcinogen, naphthalene, asbestos and cyanide.”

The same Observer article cites a toxicology report obtained via Freedom of Information request.

The note, from Berkeley’s own consultants Atkins, reads:

“there are no private gardens proposed cannot grow veg on the contaminated soil ever ! [sic]”

That is the developer’s own technical record, on the site of the council’s new “green infrastructure” for Southall.

A pattern of unmet targets

The 2021–22 Council Plan set three “transformational targets” against the climate priority:

shifting residents away from car use,
hitting a 60% recycling rate by 2022,
and improving the energy performance of “social housing stock, council buildings, and resident homes throughout the borough.”

As I documented in detail, the council’s 2016 switch to fortnightly collections — sold to residents on the promise of cost savings and higher recycling rates — produced an immediate 103% spike in fly-tipping, and recycling barely changed: from 45% in 2015 to 49% in 2024.

The car use target has not been measurably reported against in any way the average resident can see.

The 2025 Progress Report introduces a new “Better Living Framework” promising six outcomes, including “Comfortable spaces: more homes, workplaces, public- and private- spaces are thermally comfortable all year round.”

That is the heat-adaptation commitment, restated yet again.

It joins a series: the 2019 declaration, the 2021 strategy, the 2021–22 Council Plan, the 2023 Air Quality Strategy, the 2026 Adaptation and Resilience Strategy.

Each iteration commits to the same outcome in different language.

None of them has been delivered in the priority neighbourhoods such as Southall.

The Local Plan in Examination

Section 15 of the 2021 strategy described the Local Plan as “one of the most influential tools available to the council to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

On 10 December 2025, the draft Local Plan was tested at the statutory Examination in Public.

Ealing Friends of the Earth’s Nic Ferriday presented evidence to the inspectors arguing that the plan’s “overriding policy” was to build “tens of thousands of flats, mostly in huge tower blocks” with “no mention of the fact that building and running high tower blocks emits huge quantities of carbon. Terraces of around five storeys are, in contrast, much more energy efficient but can still provide a similar density of housing.”

Ferriday also noted that the council’s “change team” — the unit responsible for delivering climate action — did not attend the EiP climate session, despite climate action being listed as one of the council’s three core aims. The accountability mechanism the council set up to drive climate delivery did not turn up to the formal planning examination where its strategy was being tested.

The council’s response to public criticism cited “the largest deployment of solar power in west London, planted more than 40,000 trees, installed over 1,000 electric vehicle charging points” and the borough’s score in Climate Emergency UK’s 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecard.

The council mentioned one figure from the assessment: “90% in the planning and land use category.”

The remaining categories are publicly available on the same scorecard.

Ealing scored 53% on Buildings & Heating — no change since 2023.
54% on Transport — down one point since 2023.
62% on Collaboration & Engagement, 57% on Biodiversity, 51% on Governance & Finance.

The borough’s headline 65% total score places it joint tenth out of 186 single-tier councils.

But the gap between its 90% on what it has written and its 53% on housing decarbonisation — the category most relevant to the £5 billion retrofit gap — is the entire argument of this piece in two numbers.

Tenth in policy. Ninth in measured vulnerability.

The council is celebrating the assessment of what it has written, against the measurement of what its residents experience.

The 2026 strategy

The forthcoming Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy, previewed by MyLondon, proposes:

Passivhaus standards for new council-built housing. The 2021 ETI submission asked for this seven years ago, for all building works and conversions.
A 575-hectare regional park with 10,000 more trees and a rewilding project including beavers — alongside the 41,500 already planted in the same regional park.
District heating powered by waste heat from data centres, which currently consume 25% of the borough’s energy supply. At least two more are planned for Southall.

The strategy will be put out to consultation. The council has said it wants input from “community leaders.”

Act For Ealing, launched in January 2021 by Ealing Transition Initiative and community partners as “an online hub and network through which existing and emerging community groups can come together,” is described in the council’s 2025 Progress Report as a network of “60 organisations” that the council “wants to build on its role as a convener” of.

Ealing Transition Initiative’s detailed 2019 community proposals remain unanswered.

The ward forums through which residents could directly question councillors on the record have been replaced by the council-convened Your Voice, Your Town programme.

What next?

A serious adaptation strategy for a borough ranked ninth in England would publish, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, what has actually been delivered against the 2021 commitments.

It would acknowledge openly that the most-exposed neighbourhoods are the same ones bearing the air pollution, the gas works contamination, the canopy deficit, overdevelopment and the demolition of half-built new council homes. It would commit replanting and retrofit funding to those neighbourhoods in proportion to risk.

It would give the Citizens’ Tribunal the data its own members say they cannot obtain.

It would answer the question I asked them three years ago:

Is it ethical to promote active travel in Southall when the council knows the population is particularly vulnerable to the adverse health impacts of the air it is being told to breathe more deeply?

It would ensure that the climate team responsible for delivering the strategy turned up to the statutory Examination in Public testing it.

And it would stop treating “consultation” as a stage in a process whose outcome is already decided.

The council declared a climate emergency in 2019, and had the Ealing Transition plan in response.

Ealing had its own strategy in 2021. By July 2021 it was privately telling government the strategy could not be funded. By November 2021 the GLA was publishing that it had funded 68 of 5,000 council homes ready for retrofit.

By January 2022 the Ealing Race Equality Commission was telling it to hold its own feet to the flames. Ealing missed its own 2022 recycling target. It received Friends of the Earth’s climate change analysis.

It received my submission on the Air Quality Strategy in January 2023. Cadent Gas published Southall’s 16% fuel-poverty figure in March 2023. By August 2023 the Leader was telling government the retrofit funding gap was £5 billion.

Peter Mason has repeatedly publicly named the system he operates as structurally racist.

The Climate Change Committee published its national warning this week.

This bank holiday weekend and half-term we are cooking in our homes.

More vulnerable people will die.

Across that period, in the same neighbourhoods named in every successive evidence base, the council has approved more density, less canopy, more contamination, less green space, and fewer of the social rent homes that house the residents who carry the risk.

Ealing did not stumble into ninth place in England. It knew. It was warned. It legislated. It built anyway.

If you can’t stand the heat, don’t declare a climate emergency.

And don’t live in Southall.

Lift-Off! Ealing Elections Special

Sat, 09 May 2026 18:20:45 +0100

🐸 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 2002 — the year Local Elections Archive Project (LEAP) begin. 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:

Ward	ECI %
Southall Green	24.6%
Southall West	19.4%
Dormers Wells	19.0%
Southall Broadway	18.4%
Norwood Green	17.5%
South Acton	11.4%
Northfield	10.3%
Greenford Broadway	6.7%
Perivale	5.8%
Walpole	3.9%
Pitshanger	1.6%

[Stats courtesy of ECI candidate Florence Pinaud 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 an 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.

Who Does Peter Mason Really Represent?

Thu, 07 May 2026 17:09:21 +0100

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 an astounding statement.

Not because the associations it describes are inaccurate — some are accurate — but because of who is making it, and what it reveals about the man at the centre of Ealing Labour’s operation.

A Little History

Peter Mason is the leader of Ealing Council. He has represented Southall Green — home to a majority south Asian Indian-heritage community. And one of the poorest, most deprived wards in Ealing borough — since 2018.

As National Secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement for eight years, Mason led an organisation commited to “socialist Zionism”.

Mason led the campaign to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government in 2019.

The first Indian Labour MP elected to the House of Commons in 1922, was Shapurji Saklatvala. Saklatvala was a staunch Communist and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The CPGB(ML)’s headquarters is Saklatvala Hall in Peter Mason’s council ward in Southall Green.

This was the venue — granted free and in solidarity — for the launch of the resident-led report “What Happened to Southall?”, which documents Mason’s record, and is recommended by the London Forum to its members for its “depth of analysis and implications”.

Mason self-identifies as a left-winger and a municipal socialist. He has spoken at the unveiling of replacement plaques commemorating Blair Peach and Gurdip Singh Chaggar, killed in racist attacks on the streets of Southall, where he named structural racism as the cause of Southall’s gaps in life expectancy, earnings and housing, criticised the borough’s role as a dormitory town for wealthier commuters, and committed Ealing Council to reindustrialisation, high-quality local jobs, and the dismantling of inequality.

Mason used SWP membership and “communist links” as a smear against candidates including those standing in his own ward (and which are entirely inaccurate in that ward).

That is where this story begins. It does not end there.

The Purge

The pattern did not begin with this election.

In April 2021, more than fifty Ealing Labour members and activists signed an open letter urging left-leaning councillors not to vote for Mason as Labour group leader, describing him as “a real and present danger to the future of the left in the Labour Party” and documenting his role in national-level disciplinary processes that had seen left-wing members suspended and expelled. Mason became leader anyway.

Lewis Cox, then Labour councillor for Hobbayne, resigned immediately rather than serve under what he called Mason’s “toxic brand of politics.” His resignation letter described a system “based on patronage, back-room deals and cronyism.”

What followed was a pattern of deselection extending well beyond the ideological left.

Swaran Singh Padda — sixteen-year Labour councillor for Lady Margaret — was told by Mason in July 2025 he would not be selected anywhere, then suspended in October 2025 after being photographed at a public meeting attended by Jeremy Corbyn. He is now standing as an independent in Mason’s own ward. “I only want Mason’s votes,” he told me.

Kate Crawford, Labour councillor in East Acton for 28 years, was told in early 2026 she could not stand again. She joined the Liberal Democrats, calling Mason “a very controlling leader” and adding, “I know where the bodies are buried.”

John Martin, Labour councillor for Norwood Green, resigned and is standing as an independent in his own ward, citing principles that “cannot and should not be compromised.”

When Ealing Labour says ECI candidates are “hardly independent” because some were expelled, they do not mention that it was Mason himself who was instrumental in those expulsions. The people he expelled did not choose to leave. As a member of the NCC, the body that decides expulsions, he removed them.

The Network

Asa Winstanley’s book Weaponising Anti-Semitism (OR Books, 2023) documents Mason’s broader institutional trajectory in detail.

Yesterday, Jody McIntyre brought the story to a wider audience, and today posted the details.

Mason’s political formation did not begin with Ealing. It began in student politics — specifically with the Union of Jewish Students, where he served as Campaigns Officer from August 2008 to April 2009. He has said on video, (around the 3:30 mark in the full version) that he was recruited into student politics by his predecessor in that role, describing that person as one of his closest friends, now living in Israel.

Mason’s predecessor as UJS Campaigns Officer was Yair Zivan, confirmed in that role by the Guardian in May 2008 — three months before Mason took over.

LinkedIn records confirm that Zivan served as UJS Campaign Director from June 2007 to July 2009, overlapping with Mason’s nine months as Campaigns Officer from August 2008 to April 2009.

Both men grew up in Leicester.

(It’s likely that Mason’s former Ealing Labour colleague Josh Blacker knew Zivan separately from their shared time at University College London.)

Zivan subsequently spent 18 months as an IDF Press Officer before becoming Foreign Affairs Adviser and International Media Spokesperson to former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, where his Jewish News profile describes him as “the standard-bearer for a new generation of Israeli political advisers.” Mason follows Zivan on Twitter.

The man Mason describes as one of his closest friends — the person who recruited him into political life — is now a senior diplomatic adviser to the Israeli state, and was for years one of the most senior international communications operatives for an Israeli prime minister.

Winstanley documents that Mason’s path to JLM National Secretary ran through Progress, the JLC’s London Jewish Forum, an advisory role to the Labour group at the London Assembly, and a stint as office manager for Liz Kendall MP. From JLM Secretary (2013–2021), Mason moved to Labour’s National Constitutional Committee including as Vice Chair (2016–2024), then to the National Executive Committee in September 2024 on the ‘Labour to Win’ slate, and now sits as Deputy Leader of the LGA Labour Group, Deputy Chair of the Local Government Association, and on the executive of London Labour.

In January 2026, Mason was named by the Telegraph as one of the eight NEC officers who personally voted to block Andy Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election — a decision that, the paper noted, “very possibly” determined “the future of this country’s leadership.” The piece singled Mason out by name alongside Starmer himself, describing the NEC under Starmer and McSweeney as a machine that “ruthlessly stamps out dissent.” Mason is not peripheral to this operation. He is a driving force.

In a public statement made in 2019, Mason declared that anti-Zionists have no place in the Labour movement — a position held by a councillor representing a ward where large Sikh, Muslim and Arab communities hold anti-Zionist views as a matter of political conviction.

Hilary Wise, expelled from Labour during the period when Mason was operating through the NCC, described him in December 2025 as:

“the main Rottweiler for me and other people in West London” on Palestine-related issues.

She described him as:

“a passionate Zionist” and “indifferent to Israel’s decades of violations of international law.”

Mason has every right to hold those political commitments. Southall voters have every right to know about them.

The Municipal Socialist

In December 2018, Mason tweeted from a council chamber debate on Ealing’s housing plan:

“Municipal socialists of the past tackled their housing crises with big dreams of the future, so will we.”

The link to that housing plan — on ealinglabour.com — now redirects to an Indonesian pornography and gambling website. The dreams, it turns out, have a similar trajectory. (Even the Internet Archive doesn’t have a copy.)

Around the same time, Mason told The Atlantic:

“I consider myself to be left-wing. There’s not much in the manifesto I disagree with. But because I talk about anti-Semitism and I’m Jewish, I’m pigeonholed as being more right-wing than Genghis Khan.”

What the record actually shows is this.

In 2018, Ealing was awarded approximately £100 million by the Greater London Authority to deliver 1,138 genuinely affordable homes. By early 2026, just 180 had been completed. 16% of the target. £71.9 million spent.

The waiting list rose from 9,000 to over 12,000 under Mason’s watch. In September 2023, the council removed all Band D applicants from the register. The list dropped to 7,500. Families were not rehoused — they were simply no longer counted. The council cited the fall as evidence of progress.

Ealing demolished more social homes than any other London borough in the decade to 2023. The Community Infrastructure Levy — promised in Mason’s 2022 manifesto to raise £12 million per year — was not adopted until December 2025. The council approved the expansion of the Southall Gasworks development from 3,750 to 8,100 homes just months before the levy came into force. And between 2019 and 2024, Southall generated £13.1 million in Section 106 contributions; £4.9 million was spent locally.

Mason attended MIPIM — the world’s largest property developer conference, held in Cannes — with travel and costs funded by a consortium that included Berkeley Group and others with active planning interests in Ealing. He later apologised, calling it “a mistake.” The apology did not address what a decade of developer-hosted relationship-building had done to the framing of housing strategy, and the impact on private sector rents (a story in itself, and will be published post-election).

In October 2022, Mason himself told the Southall Community Alliance:

“If you live in Southall, your opportunity and your access to get onto the housing ladder is next to nothing. 80% of the homes in Southall Green are in the private rented sector.”

He was describing the outcomes of a strategy he had shaped as cabinet member for Housing, Planning and Transformation. He holds an MSc in Urban Regeneration from the Bartlett. He had both the expertise and the executive responsibility.

The municipal socialists of the past built homes. Under Mason’s stewardship, 84% of the target went unbuilt.

The Democratic Decline

Municipal socialism is not only about building homes. It is about accountability — about the structures through which communities hold power to account.

In July 2025, while the Save Ealing Children’s Centres campaign petitioned outside Perceval House, Mason’s administration voted to more than double the threshold for a petition to trigger a full council debate — from 1,500 signatures to 3,671. Every Labour councillor voted in favour. Every Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillor voted against. The same meeting banned hybrid paper-and-online petitions.

For comparison: Westminster requires 100 signatures. Barnet requires 25. Brent requires 5. Hillingdon has no threshold at all.

The petition demanding Ealing debate divesting its pension fund from companies linked to the conflict in Gaza gathered thousands of signatures. Under Ealing’s rules, it was insufficient. The Pension Fund Panel has never placed divestment on its agenda. Mason sat on the board of London CIV — the body managing those investments — from December 2021 until July 2024, leaving the seat vacant when he departed. Three months later, the LGA — on whose board Mason now sits as a Director — commissioned a legal opinion from Nigel Giffin KC concluding that local authorities were under no public law obligation to divest. That opinion is now the primary institutional argument cited by councils resisting divestment calls across England and Wales.

Ward forums — the mechanism through which residents could directly question councillors on the record — have been replaced under Mason’s leadership with the council-controlled “Your Town, Your Voice” programme.

The ten children’s centres proposed for closure or repurposing in 2024 included three of the six in Southall — the borough’s most deprived area. The projected saving: approximately £750,000. In the five years of Mason’s leadership, the council spent over £1 million on increased councillor allowances. Mason’s own leadership allowance rose by 70% to £58,000, justified on the grounds of attracting “higher calibre candidates” — in communities where 35% of children grow up in poverty after housing costs. Mason leader’s allowance today is almost double what it was five years ago.

Southall Has Been Here Before

Ealing Labour’s attack on ECI cited SWP connections as disqualifying. It is worth being precise about what the SWP was doing in Southall.

On 23 April 1979 — St George’s Day — the National Front held an election meeting at Southall Town Hall, in the heart of a community they wanted removed from Britain. The community organised against it. Workers struck. Ten thousand residents signed a petition. Thousands marched.

Blair Peach was 33 years old, a teacher of children with special needs, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He travelled to Southall to stand with the community against the NF meeting. By the end of the night, 345 people had been arrested. Blair Peach was struck on the head by a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group. He died the following day. No police officer was ever charged. The internal police inquiry, suppressed for thirty years, concluded he had almost certainly been killed by one of six SPG officers who had preserved their silence.

Eight thousand people filed past Blair Peach’s body. Between five and ten thousand followed his coffin. A primary school in Southall bears his name. Blair Peach was killed in what is now Southall Broadway ward.

Peter Mason stood at the unveiling of replacement memorial plaques for Blair Peach and Gurdip Singh Chaggar and committed Ealing Labour to fighting “inequality and structural racism.”

He then used SWP membership as a smear against candidates standing against him in Southall Green.

The people who stood with Southall in 1979 were not asking about party cards. The community did not ask Blair Peach which organisation he belonged to before it filed past his body. It honoured him because he came, and because he died here, standing against fascism.

Mason knows this history. He invokes it when it suits him.

What the National Labour Government Is Doing

Ealing Labour’s attack on ECI for alleged far-left connections sits alongside something that deserves equal scrutiny: what the national Labour government whose NEC Mason sits on is actually doing.

It has doubled the qualifying period for permanent settlement from five to ten years. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has told migrants they must “earn the right to be in the UK.” This Labour government has stripped newly recognised refugees of permanent status, replacing it with temporary protection renewable every 30 months. It is reviewing how UK courts apply the European Court of Human Rights provisions that protect people from deportation to dangerous situations.

The Institute for Government is unambiguous: there is now “a race to toughen immigration controls among parties that lead the election polls.”

Mason said this election should not be a choice between “extreme-Left and extreme-Right.” He is right that the Conservative candidate’s remarks about deportation represent something extreme. The difference between what she said and what his government is doing is a matter of volume, not direction.

Southall residents are not obliged to choose between a party that says fascism loudly and a party that does it quietly.

Conclusion: The Oldest Question

Ealing Labour asks ECI to be honest about who they represent. It is the right question. Let us apply it consistently.

Peter Mason was born Peter Robert Ness. He is now Labour’s NEC member, Deputy Leader of the LGA Labour Group, and Deputy Chair of the Local Government Association — a man whose primary political orientation has been national rather than local, whose career has been built through party machinery, internal disciplinary processes, and national bodies rather than through the granular work of improving conditions in Southall.

He is a professionally qualified town planner who presided over a 16% affordable homes delivery rate.

He was a board member of the investment vehicle managing Ealing’s pension assets during the period in which divestment was never placed on the agenda.

He attended developer-funded conferences in Cannes while Berkeley Group was remediating the contaminated Gasworks site adjacent to Blair Peach Primary School.

He launched a programme called the Southall Reset — the fourth major regeneration framework in fifteen years — while planning to close three of Southall’s six children’s centres.

He invokes Blair Peach’s memory while using the political affiliations of Peach’s own organisation as a campaign smear.

Mason’s political choices — consistently applied over more than a decade, consistently at odds with the interests of the communities Mason represents, and consistently insulated from the democratic accountability that might have changed them.

On your side?

The full evidential record — drawn from FOI responses, council documents, planning records, and published investigative journalism — is archived at southallstories.uk and documented in depth by Community Powered Reporting.

Read both before you vote.

Today, on 7 May, voters in Southall Green get to decide who Peter Mason really represents.

The Man in the Middle

Thu, 07 May 2026 10:29:47 +0100

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 for reasons that go well beyond a small community grant.

The person presenting the cheque on Berkeley’s behalf was Jags Sanghera, Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement.

The person present as chair of Southall Community Alliance — the umbrella organisation through which the grant was directed — was also Jags Sanghera.

A Career That Connects the Dots

To understand why this matters, it helps to trace Jags Sanghera’s career.

Between April and October 2015, he worked as Community Liaison Regeneration Officer at Southall Community Alliance itself — the charity he now chairs.

In November 2015, he moved to Berkeley Group as Community Liaison Officer, a post he has held continuously since (since promoted to Head of Business & Community Engagement at St George PLC, yet another Berkeley Group subsidiary).

Sanghera is also named as a Berkeley Foundation “Community Champion”, a role he took over in Southall from Rick Watler (Berkeley’s head of construction at the gasworks site, who was a local authority appointed governor at Blair Peach Primary School).

Berkeley’s own SouthAll Community News newsletter (Issue 1, Winter 2016) featured Sanghera in its Staff Spotlight, describing him as someone who had been “working with the Southall community for many years” and was helping to deliver Southall Waterside for “current and future generations.”

His role, as described on his LinkedIn profile, is “to facilitate, own and manage key stakeholder engagement” for Berkeley St Joseph — the Berkeley subsidiary responsible for the Southall gasworks site.

In other words: Jags Sanghera’s professional role, for over a decade, has been to manage Berkeley’s relationships with the Southall community. The organisation he previously worked for — and now chairs as a volunteer trustee — is one of the most prominent community bodies in that same space.

An example of Sanghera’s engagement with the community is from Berkeley’s 2023 “consultation” report.

The consultation report for The Green Quarter was prepared by BECG (now rebranded as Cavendish), the lobbying firm that hired former Ealing leader Julian Bell and former Berkeley executive Judith Salomon. It gave The Green Quarter’s community inbox as the contact, and featured Jags Sanghera’s face prominently in its pages, including as the host of an “open door” consultation event, and at a meeting of Berkeley’s “independent” Community Engagement Steering Group, also chaired by BECG.

The consultation asked local residents adjacent to the Gasworks site, many of whom have suffered years of bad smells, toxic air pollution, ill-health, damage to the structure of their homes and roads, loss of enjoyment of their gardens, and loss of light into their homes what they thought.

This is what Berkeley and BECG published about them:

“The response from residents to our engagement activity was generally ambivalent or positive. There was, however, a pocket of discontent towards the end of Beaconsfield Road, where residents took issue with a re-occuring smell, noise from the construction site and loss of views. There are still a substantial number of residents who do not really understand what is happening at The Green Quarter, despite their proximity to the site. However, many of these residents appear to take little interest in the community more generally.”

To anyone who knows anything about Southall and the impact of the Gasworks redevelopment on local residents, it’s an absolutely shocking and appalling thing to say. It shows a complete lack of empathy, and a total absence of any sense of regret, responsibility or accountability.

On 27 October 2022, the Charity Commission register records, Jagjit Singh Sanghera was appointed as a trustee of Southall Community Alliance (charity number 1104671). He is now its chair, as listed on the SCA’s own website.

The Cheque

Berkeley’s Community Chest programme distributes small grants to local community projects. A £2,500 award to a community garden is, in isolation, unremarkable. The grant was also reported by Ealing.News.

What is not standard is the arrangement visible in the photograph published on Berkeley’s own website.

The grant was presented by Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement.

It was received by the chair of Southall Community Alliance.

Both roles were held by the same person.

The cheque passed, in a literal sense, between two positions occupied by a single individual.

Neither Berkeley’s published account of the event nor SCA’s public-facing materials flag this overlap.

There is no declaration of interest on the public record in relation to Berkeley Group funding received by SCA.

The Charity Commission’s published guidance on conflicts of interest requires trustees to identify, declare, and manage situations where their personal or professional interests intersect with the charity’s.

Where a trustee is professionally employed by an organisation providing funding to their charity, that relationship requires active management — typically including the trustee stepping back from decisions about that funding. No such process is visible in the available public record.

The Political Dimension

Jags Sanghera has stood for election three times in Ealing.

In 2010, he stood as a Conservative Party candidate against Julian Bell — who would go on to lead Ealing Labour for more than a decade in power — in Greenford Broadway ward, receiving 1,478 votes.

By 2022, he had changed party: he stood for Labour in Ealing Common ward, coming close to winning a seat on a strong Labour night across the borough.

This year — on 7 May 2026 — he is standing again, as one of three Labour candidates in Norwood Green ward, as confirmed on his Ealing Labour candidate profile.

Sanghera’s selection as a candidate in Norwood Green — usually a safe Labour ward in the Southall constituency — comes after he facilitated Cllr Jasbir Anand’s catering business to take over the coffee cart opposite Southall station, ousting a small local business which had built up the customer base — more on that story post-election!

Jags Sanghera explains how Anand came to operate the coffee cart opposite Southall station, on Anand’s Instagram.

If elected, Jags Sanghera would become a councillor on Ealing Council — the same council that determines planning applications for Berkeley Group’s Southall developments, negotiates section 106 community benefit agreements with Berkeley, and makes decisions that directly affect the financial and operational interests of his employer.

That is a conflict of interest of a different order of magnitude to the community grant.

The Southall Town Team

Southall Community Alliance’s reach extends beyond grant-receiving.

SCA has a presence on the Southall Town Team, a council-facilitated body that brings together community stakeholders, local businesses, and the council to plan for Southall’s future.

The Town Team has a formal role in shaping how community benefit funds and developer contributions in the area are directed.

Through SCA’s participation in that body, Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement — in his separate capacity as SCA trustee chair — has a seat at a council-facilitated planning table.

Community stakeholders engaging with that body in good faith may not be aware of this overlap.

Greenwashing, corporate capture and conflict of interest

I am not alleging that the Western Road Urban Garden Project did anything improper in receiving a grant. The garden project serves a genuine community purpose, and the volunteers who tend it deserve support.

I am not alleging that Berkeley Group acted unlawfully. Corporate community grant programmes are entirely legal.

But these activities can also be used for purposes that ultimately extract resources and wealth from the communities they take over for the benefit of company shareholders.

The United Nations calls it “greenwashing”:

Greenwashing manifests itself in several ways – some more obvious than others. Tactics include:

Claiming to be on track to reduce a company’s polluting emissions to net zero when no credible plan is actually in place.
Being purposely vague or non-specific about a company’s operations or materials used.
Applying intentionally misleading labels such as “green” or “eco-friendly,” which do not have standard definitions and can be easily misinterpreted.
Implying that a minor improvement has a major impact or promoting a product that meets the minimum regulatory requirements as if it is significantly better than the standard.
Emphasizing a single environmental attribute while ignoring other impacts.
Claiming to avoid illegal or non-standard practices that are irrelevant to a product.
Communicating the sustainability attributes of a product in isolation of brand activities (and vice versa) – e.g. a garment made from recycled materials that is produced in a high-emitting factory that pollutes the air and nearby waterways.

Jags Sanghera’s marketing video for The Green Quarter as posted on Anand’s Instagram.

Readers can decide if any of that applies to the contaminated old gasworks site now rebranded as “The Green Quarter”.

I recommend that curious readers who like to verify things for themselves (and who doesn’t?), visit the Green Quarter. Free parking for three hours at Parkside Yards! Just be aware to follow all the rules, including:

“Unauthorised filming, photography, audio recording, or live streaming of any part of the site (including external façades, communal areas, residents, staff, or visitors) is not permitted under any circumstances”

The Center for Constitutional Rights calls it “corporate capture”:

“Corporate capture” is a phenomenon where private industry uses its political influence to take control of the decision-making apparatus of the state, such as regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. When corporations draft legislation privately with lawmakers that they have significant influence over, this results in laws and policies that benefit corporations, while often harming the environment, low-income people, and communities of color.

Jags Sanghera, among his many other roles, also sits on the Ealing Safer Neighborhood Board (see also https://esnb.org.uk/).

The overlap between his roles — as a Berkeley employee managing Southall community engagement, as chair of a Southall community charity that receives Berkeley funding, and now as a Labour candidate for the council that regulates Berkeley’s planning interests — raises serious questions about conflicts of interest that do not appear to have been formally declared or managed.

Those questions are in the public interest, during an election in which he is a candidate.

There is also a structural question about the revolving door between community organisations and the developer whose long-term presence in Southall depends on maintaining community legitimacy.

Sanghera moved from SCA to Berkeley in late 2015. He returned to SCA as a trustee — and became its chair — in October 2022. Berkeley describes his work as facilitating and managing key stakeholder engagement. The community body through which he does part of that work is one he also leads in a voluntary capacity.

The Allotment Question

This article began, in a sense, with a YouTube comment.

ECI’s recent video report on Manor Way Allotments documented the neglect of a community site maintained largely by elderly volunteers — volunteers who, as a commenter on that video rightly noted, have given years of quiet, unpaid work to their community.

The video raised the question of why these volunteers had not received funding support, and noted that another project in Southall had.

The other project was the Western Road Urban Garden Project. The funding came via Berkeley’s Community Chest. The grant was presented by and received by Jags Sanghera.

A commenter challenged this comparison as unfair: if one project applied and another did not, that is simply a different outcome based on different actions. It is a fair point, as far as it goes.

But the structural question is different.

The allotment volunteers at Manor Way are not the subject of this article, and nor are they responsible for any of the arrangements described above.

The question this article asks is whether those arrangements — the multiple roles, the undeclared overlap, the revolving door — represent the kind of transparent, accountable community governance that Southall deserves.

And whether the voters of Norwood Green are entitled to know about them before they cast their votes today.

Computer Says No

Thu, 07 May 2026 07:12:57 +0100

Update, 10 August 2026: Ealing Council’s press office contacted me today to ask for a minor amendment to this article. Their email arrived without difficulty.

The April email from the Head of Environmental Health confirmed the council was working to ensure my emails were “not unnecessarily blocked.”

Presumably, the blocking was, at some prior point, considered necessary.

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 results.

It didn’t.

And now, after eighteen months of correspondence with Ealing Council about environmental enforcement failures in Southall, I understand why.

There isn’t one filter between a complaint and accountability in Ealing. There are at least three. And the council has, at various points, been aware of all of them.

Filter one: the complaint that never arrives

The Head of Environmental Health & Trading Standards wrote to me in April to confirm that some of my emails had been blocked before they were received. She had followed up with the Head of ICT, she explained, and been advised that emails:

“have indeed been blocked due to factors such as email length, content, or the size of the chain.”

This is the first filter.

Note the word content.

Not size. Not formatting. Content.

Who decides which content triggers a block? On what basis?

The council’s response offered no answer — but the question matters, because detailed, evidenced correspondence is precisely the kind most likely to require action, and precisely the kind most likely to be silently discarded before it enters the system.

No notification to the sender. No record on the council’s side.

No complaint, no failure to respond.

No problem. No action required.

What makes this harder to dismiss as a technical glitch is that the evidence was already in the council’s own file when my Stage 1 complaint was closed. The response itself quoted a Pollution Control email from June 2025 stating:

“Our IT systems must have blocked it due to links included within the email.”

The council knew. It closed the complaint anyway.

The Stage 2 response, from Assistant Director Joe Blanchard, upheld Stage 1 in full. Instances of filtering were described as “extremely rare.”

No governance review. No apology. No procedural changes.

That response closed the council’s internal process.

My complaint is now with the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (Case 26000430), submitted on 21 April 2026.

Filter two: the complaint that isn’t counted

Of the complaints that do arrive, many are never counted.

The reporting system itself is documented to exhaust complainants into silence: fragmented across multiple hotlines, dependent on telephone menus, requiring each incident to be logged in isolation.

Odour complaints about the Gasworks site had to be reported separately to Ealing Council, the Environment Agency, and Berkeley Group’s own PR company. Each body counted only its own tally. None shared a running total.

The official figure given by council leader Julian Bell at the July 2020 public meeting was 250 complaints over three years — 79 in 2017, 51 in 2018, 82 in 2019, and 38 in the first part of 2020. Those 250 were the ones that got through and were logged.

But at the March 2019 meeting with Peter Mason — the same meeting at which residents were told their volume of reporting was welcome — one resident alone had already called the Environment Agency over a hundred times. The official response to that volume of contact was that Berkeley Group was “going above and beyond what is expected.”

Residents at last month’s ECI meeting in Southall described being told they were “the only one complaining” — a response familiar to anyone who has tried to hold this council to account on anything.

Low complaint counts, in this system, are never evidence of low harm. They are evidence of effective filtration.

Filter three: the complaint that isn’t verified

Of the complaints that arrive and are counted, the council’s own investigation records show a striking pattern: investigating officers verify almost nothing.

As I documented following the January 2026 Johnson Street fire, Ealing Council conducted a year-long daily investigation of the Sam’s Recycling site on Johnson Street.

Its conclusion: no evidence of statutory nuisance. No enforcement action warranted.

In three visits made in response to strong burning plastic odours entering my home, I had documented open incineration, burning of treated wood and plastic waste, smoke affecting residential areas, and explicit fire risk.

The site burned down thirty months after my formal written warnings, causing over half a million pounds of damage.

The Ombudsman submission sets out the problem precisely: the council relied on monitoring methods unsuited to detecting intermittent emissions, did not properly consider information already held by the Environment Agency, and carried out no internal review after the fire of its monitoring approach, its complaint handling, or its escalation processes.

The verification methodology requires officers to witness a statutory nuisance threshold at the precise moment of a visit. Residents’ photographic evidence, video documentation, and patterns of complaint do not meet this threshold.

The result is that investigation techniques function as designed — not to verify harm, but to avoid the enforcement obligation that verified harm would create.

This is the same pattern documented across Southall’s pollution cases.

At the Gasworks site between 2017 and 2020, residents reported respiratory symptoms, hospitalisations, and toxic odours. Public Health England’s assessments relied on site-wide averages that masked localised readings consistently above legal limits.

Residents were encouraged to keep reporting.

The data was there. The verification never came.

The system in full

Set out together, the three filters describe something more troubling than administrative failure.

Complaints are encouraged — volume is welcomed, residents are told it is “good” to keep reporting, Berkeley is praised for going “above and beyond” — because volume without verification is harmless to the institutions being complained about.

The IT system silently discards the most detailed correspondence.

The fragmented reporting architecture ensures counts remain low.

The verification methodology ensures that what is counted rarely produces enforcement.

At each stage, the absence of a finding becomes evidence that there is nothing to find.

The 250 complaints Ealing Council recorded from the Gasworks site were the ones that passed through all three filters.

The questions the council has not been asked — and has not asked itself — are how many were blocked before arrival, how many arrived but were never properly counted, and of the 250 that were counted, how many were ever verified by an investigating officer visiting the site while the problem was actually occurring?

The Ombudsman is now being asked to determine whether a complaints system with documented filters at every stage — one that then uses the absence of complaints as justification for inaction — constitutes maladministration.

The desired outcomes I have set out include an independent review of the council’s monitoring methodology, its correspondence handling, and its coordination with the Environment Agency.

Whether the Ombudsman agrees those are reasonable expectations will be a test of whether the system has a fourth filter — or whether there is, finally, somewhere the complaint actually lands.

Sixty-Four Years On Your Side

Wed, 06 May 2026 18:41:28 +0100

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 it began closing children’s centres on grounds of affordability.

Their latest leaflet, delivered two days before polling, lists the headline achievements they want you to remember.

What it does not say is also worth reading.

Peter Mason

Council leader since May 2021. Cabinet member, planning lead, and the public face of Ealing Labour. His record across the gasworks, children’s centres, regeneration, asset disposal and council governance is extensively documented on this site.

For an independent assessment of his sixteen years of Labour leadership in Ealing, read the Community Powered Reporting investigation — a forensic account of whose interests Ealing Labour has actually served.

Read everything Southall Stories has published about Peter Mason »

Jasbir Anand

Cllr Anand has represented Southall Green since 1998 — twenty-eight years — and currently holds the cabinet portfolio for crime and anti-social behaviour.

The public record includes: a long-running illegal food business reported by the Ealing Gazette in 1999, pursued through council enforcement and a rejected planning appeal; a 2006 legal dispute with a neighbour that cost her £35,000 in damages, paid only under threat of bankruptcy; a 2007 allegation against the same neighbour’s daughter — the singer Tasha Tah — which led to Tah’s arrest before the case was dropped; and her now-infamous remark to a room of disabled residents whose day centre she had closed:

“I own half of Southall. I’m very popular.”

Her food business now operates a coffee cart at Berkeley’s Green Quarter development — the toxic former gasworks site — at a prime location opposite Southall station, promoted by Berkeley’s community engagement manager Jags Sanghera.

Today, I published the story of how Anand was responsible for the decision to move Ealing’s drug treatment centre from West Ealing to Southall, a move that coincided with a dramatic increase in crime in Southall.

Kamaljit S Dhindsa

Cllr Dhindsa has served Southall Green since 1998.

You can find Cllr Dhindsa’s achievements here »

A note on the leaflet

The 2026 leaflet headlines a claim that fly-tipping is “down 54% across Southall.” Readers may wish to compare that figure with “This is Our Home. It’s a Tip”, which uses Defra’s published data, indexed against national trends, to show what actually happened to fly-tipping in Ealing after the switch to fortnightly collections.

Find your polling station »

The Meeting that Ended Local Democracy in Southall

Wed, 06 May 2026 17:44:53 +0100

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.

It is, in retrospect, the most important hour and a half in recent Southall political history.

Cllr Peter Mason, then Cabinet Member for Housing, Planning and Transformation, chaired the meeting. He lost control of the proceedings within thirty seconds and never recovered it.

The panel — councillors, the Environment Agency, Public Health England, Berkeley Group — was asked, repeatedly, by parents, by a doctor in the audience, by a local lawyer, the question that mattered:

Whose side are you on, the community? Or Berkeley Homes?

The panel stayed silent.

The MP, Virendra Sharma, slipped in late, said nothing, and left before the end.

Sharma had survived a Constituency Labour Party trigger ballot challenge only months earlier, in part by promising members closer engagement with the constituency he was failing.

Ealing’s Director of Safer Communities and Housing was asked what he would do if he were in residents’ shoes. His response was instant and emphatic:

“MOVE!.”

Another resident in the room described what she saw that night with brutal clarity:

a meeting that “laid bare” a class divide, “the avarice of big businesses rampant and unashamed,” and “an all round disgrace from our elected representatives who are supposed to be Labour.”

The meeting ended in uproar at 9pm when the chair tried to close it. Many residents wanted to continue, even without the panel. They were told they could not.

This was the meeting that scared the living daylights out of the Labour council.

The response

It was not silence. It was systematic.

Within months, the ward forum system across Ealing was wound down. The last meeting of the Southall Broadway ward forum on the council’s own record took place on 12 February 2020. Then nothing.

When the council was eventually pressed on why, its stated justification was that ward forums had become spaces where:

“the same voices were heard over and over again” and were “unrepresentative of the communities they were supposed to serve.”

That phrase — “the same voices” — has done a great deal of work since.

The voices Mason wanted gone were not unrepresentative. They were the voices of the parents, the doctor, the lawyer, the residents whose children were having nosebleeds, the voices that had stood up at the Dominion Centre and demanded answers his administration could not give.

In place of ward forums came a promise: town forums.

By April 2024, more than £70,000 had been spent on consultant fees with no functioning replacement delivered.

Ealing’s Liberal Democrat group leader put it plainly at the time:

Labour councillors seemed “totally afraid of being in front of the public to face criticism.”

The eventual product, Your Voice, Your Town, arrived in Southall in 2025.

It has a 25-member Town Team, a £120,000 community fund, and an officially determined headline priority: making Southall “a clean and pleasant area.” Its meetings, the council’s own page notes, are “invite only.”

Look at the Town Team membership and the council’s justification for scrapping ward forums collapses entirely. Southall Community Alliance. Let’s Go Southall. APNA Youth. Southall Residents’ Alliance. Hope for Southall Street Homeless. Asian Community Concern.

The same organisations, many of the same people who attended ward forums for years. Three elected Labour councillors sit alongside them. Mason himself confirmed, at the launch event in May 2024, that this was the replacement for the old ward forums.

The same voices, in other words. Just curated. Channelled. Sat next to the very councillors they once questioned.

What’s been removed is not the voices. It’s the room. It’s the ability to walk in unannounced, with your neighbours, and ask your councillor whose side they are on.

The hustings tradition that died

Until 2019, Southall had a functioning hustings culture. The record is on the public web.

In June 2017, the Southall Faiths Forum and Featherstone High School hosted a parliamentary hustings. All six candidates attended. The Revd Mark Poulson chaired. Questions came from the floor on litter, public toilets, Ealing Hospital, the proposed disposal of Southall Town Hall, anti-social behaviour, affordable housing.

The same voices. The same concerns. Speaking to power.

In April 2018, Southall Community Alliance and Ealing Community Network organised a full council election hustings at the Dominion Centre. Conservative, Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates all attended. A 10-point Voluntary Sector Manifesto was put to all parties.

In December 2019, six months after the Gasworks meeting, the Southall Faiths Forum hosted another General Election hustings. Five of seven parliamentary candidates attended.

In March 2022, SCA hosted a Zoom hustings for the council elections. Cllr Peter Mason attended for Labour. I attended for the independents. There were three pre-set questions. Everyone got six minutes. It was, by 2026 standards, an act of accountability bordering on the radical.

In June 2024, Sri Guru Singh Sabha hosted a parliamentary hustings at Norwood Hall. Over 100 electors attended. Six of twelve candidates appeared. Labour’s Deirdre Costigan — parachuted into the constituency to replace Sharma — did not attend. Neither did the Conservative. It was, by some margin, the largest local political event in Southall in years — held without the candidate of the party that has held the seat continuously since 1983.

This is the trajectory:

2017–2019: All major parties attend Southall hustings. Rooms are full. Faith leaders chair.
2022: Mason attends, because the elections are imminent and the format is controlled.
2024: Labour’s parliamentary candidate declines to attend.
2026: Labour does not attend the council elections debate. Ten people are in the room.
2026: “Ealing Citizens” host an “accountability forum” where local and poll leading parties were actively excluded from the panel, and no questions at all were allowed from the audience.

I have written separately about whether this latter meeting was a hustings at all — and what actual accountability might have looked like had local people been invited to speak and “allowed” to ask questions.

The meeting last Sunday

On 26 April 2026, eleven days before polling, the Peoples Empowerment Alliance organised a council election debate at Gurdwara Ramgharia Sabha. Five pre-set questions. Two hours. An invitation to all candidates standing in the Southall wards.

Five independent candidates attended: Minni Dogra, Angela Fonso, Sukhi Floria, Swaran Padda, and Dan Cortese. Around ten members of the public were present.

I chaired the meeting at short notice after the planned chair, Salvinder Dhillon — a long-standing community organiser who stood as Respect’s parliamentary candidate in the 2007 Ealing Southall by-election, and previously as an independent — was taken ill.

The candidates answered seriously.

Minni Dogra was forensic on grant spending and S106 funds that should have been spent in Southall and were not.

Dan Cortese was direct on housing pressure — 800 HMO licences approved each month, family homes converted to dormitory flats.

Angela Fonso spoke to the visible deterioration of the Broadway.

Sukhi Floria covered tower blocks, congestion, and unanswered complaints.

Swaran Padda — the only person on the platform who has actually sat in the room where Southall’s decisions are made, who lost the Labour whip for challenging the leadership, and who is now standing against Mason in Southall Green — spoke about how Southall systematically loses out to other towns in the borough because residents elsewhere are more organised and aware. Padda is part of a longer pattern of Labour dissenters being silenced or pushed out under Mason’s leadership.

The most pointed contribution from the floor came from Jaginder Singh, founder of One Nation and a candidate at the 2024 Ealing Southall parliamentary hustings. His call was for mass political education: residents cannot hold councillors accountable if they do not understand how the council works, what decisions it takes, or what their own rights are. I only recognised him afterwards when he gave me his card.

He is right. And he is describing the long-term consequence of the process this article is about. When the institutions of resident scrutiny are dismantled, the population that grew up using them disperses. The next generation does not learn how to do it. Political knowledge is not innate. It is transmitted, in part, through participation in working democratic structures. Take the structures away, and you do not just lose the meetings. You lose the muscle.

That is what has happened in Southall, deliberately, over the seven years since the Dominion Centre.

What community politics looks like when it still works

The night before the PEA debate, the Ealing Community Independents held their own engagement evening at Parkside Yards. Around ten residents — comparable in number to the PEA meeting — but the difference was instructive.

Residents at Parkside Yards described, in granular detail, what living in Southall in 2026 actually feels like: rats under the floorboards, fly-tipping that doubled after waste collection was halved in 2016, footpaths so damaged that disabled residents walk in the road, asking the council for a CCTV camera to deal with fly-tipping and being offered a sign instead, forty years of complaints to get a road resurfaced.

One resident put it more bluntly:

“This place has turned into a bloody slum.”

Another:

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

That is the question this article has been trying to answer. The unity is not gone because Southall has changed. It is gone because the institutions that produced and sustained it have been dismantled.

Where is everyone?

They are still here. They still have things to say.

They are simply no longer permitted to say them in rooms where their councillors are obliged to listen.

Why this matters on 7 May

There is a respectable line of argument that says local democracy was always thinly attended; that ward forums attracted activists, not “ordinary residents”; that Your Voice Your Town is genuinely more representative; that Labour’s non-attendance at hustings is a national phenomenon, not a Southall one; that ten people on a Sunday afternoon in April is a verdict on the independent campaign, not on the governing party.

Watch the Gasworks video. The room is not full of activists. It is full of parents, of grandparents, of people in headscarves and turbans who have come because their children cannot breathe.

They are not “the same voices.”

They are the voices of a community that was, for ninety minutes, ungovernable — and that the ruling group of Ealing Council has spent the seven years since making sure cannot reassemble.

On 7 May, voters in Southall Green will decide whether Peter Mason returns to the council.

He chaired the meeting that produced this trajectory. He has presided over the abolition of the forums, the £70,000 of consultant fees, the invite-only Town Team, and a Labour council that no longer feels obliged to attend community-led election hustings.

His personal vote in Southall Green declined by 20.7% between 2018 and 2022 — and he finished last of the three Labour candidates in his ward at both elections."

Campaigners, activists and Ealing Community Independents candidates gathered on Bank Holiday Monday to protest the failings of Ealing Labour in Southall and across the borough. The mood is positive and determined to bring about real change.

The vote on 7 May will be one of the few remaining mechanisms through which the residents of Southall Green can ask, directly and on the record, the question the panel never answered in July 2019.

Whose side are you on?

It Takes Two to Tango

Wed, 06 May 2026 13:45:23 +0100

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.”

Strictly, the toddler — JO, through her father CJ as her litigation friend, as the law requires when a claimant is a child — issued the proceedings. The council were the defendant.

But defending a case is also a choice.

The council chose to instruct Rory Dunlop KC and Eleanor Leydon. They chose not to settle. They chose to take a 19-month-old child’s judicial review through a two-day hearing in the Administrative Court — at public expense — to defend a decision that the council’s own cabinet report says will save £751,000 by 2026/27.

What the judgment actually records

Reading the judgment, three things stand out — none of which the Council will be putting on any future election leaflet.

Southall is hit hardest.

At paragraph 19, the court reproduces the Claimant’s submission as the factual position:

Southall, “the area within Ealing which has the greatest level of need,” is “the worst hit of the seven towns in which centres are proposed to close.”

Half of its six children’s centres go, including the main hub at Grove House, “in the most deprived part of the borough.”

The judge did not contest this. It is now in a High Court judgment.

The Council’s comparator data was wrong.

At paragraph 24, Mr Justice Kimblin records that:

“the data for some of the comparator London Boroughs are agreed to be in error.”

The Council has, in the course of these proceedings, conceded that the graphs it relied on to justify the closures contained errors.

The Claimant did not press the point in argument, so it had no legal consequence. But the concession is on the record.

The £751k saving was always part of the picture.

At paragraph 28, the judgment quotes the cabinet report directly:

closures “will allow for a more efficient service model, through a combination of reduction in costs and increase in rental income.”

Children’s Services has “a robust savings target of £11.819m for 2025/26.”

The closures contribute £751k.

The council told consultees that money was “not the main reason for this review.”

The cabinet report read otherwise.

The court found the consultation lawful — within the wide discretion the statute affords councils, and within the case law on financial pressures driving service redesign. That is what the law required of Mr Justice Kimblin.

It is not a verdict on whether the closures are right.

Twenty-five in public, seven in court

There is a fact which has had remarkably little public airing.

Throughout the consultation and ever since, the council has spoken of having 25 children’s centres in the borough. The consultation framed the closures as a reduction “from 25 to 12.” The leadership has repeated that figure on the record.

Yet in February’s judicial review, as the Chiswick Calendar reported, Rory Dunlop KC — defending the council — argued that “not all the Council’s 25 children’s centres met the legal definition of a children’s centre. According to the legal definition only seven are classed as children’s centres.”

It is hard to overstate how striking this is.

The statutory duty to provide “sufficient” children’s centres under the Childcare Act 2006 attaches to centres that meet the legal definition. The council has, in public, used a figure of 25 to demonstrate generosity of provision. In court, it deployed a figure of seven to defeat the legal challenge. Both figures cannot be doing the same work.

Voters told that “we have 25 centres” and “we are reducing to 12” were not told that, on the council’s own legal case, only seven count for the purposes of statutory sufficiency.

Predetermination, in writing, in November

Then there is the matter of what the council was doing while the judicial review was live.

On 14 November 2025, while proceedings were on foot, the council’s own Early Help Strategy report was prepared for the Children’s Scrutiny Panel meeting of 25 November 2025. The document records that the council had received Department for Education funding to deliver the new “Best Start in Life” programme — funding contingent on a DfE readiness check in January 2026 and a programme launch in April 2026.

The same document states that the council would “refrain from further decisions until the legal claim has been resolved.”

That is a difficult sentence to reconcile with what came either side of it.

The council had accepted a grant whose conditions required implementation by April 2026 — irrespective of how the High Court ruled. Officers were mapping current provision and conducting “needs analysis and SWOT” five months after cabinet had decided to close the centres. Workforce development plans for the new model were not yet in place, even as redundancy processes for the existing one rolled forward.

This is not the conduct of a body waiting for a court. It is the conduct of a body that has decided, and is funding, the next thing — and is treating the legal challenge as a delay to be managed rather than a question to be answered.

This material was not before Mr Justice Kimblin as a discrete ground of challenge. It is, however, on the council’s own website, in the council’s own scrutiny papers, with the council’s own date stamp.

The Smell of Allowance

It is worth pausing on that £751,000 figure, because the council leadership has been pulling in the opposite direction.

Mason became leader of Ealing Council in May 2021.

According to Ealing News, his special responsibility allowance in his first year, 2021/22, was £32,100.

After Labour’s landslide win in May 2022, it jumped to £54,860 — a 71% rise in a single year.

By 2026/27 it stands at £62,814.52, a 96% increase across his five years as leader.

With basic allowance, his total annual payment is now £76,570.52.

The deputy leader, cabinet members, and majority group chief whip each take £59,395.56.

The basic allowance paid to all 70 councillors has risen more than 40% since 2021/22 — from £9,708 to £13,756.

In May 2022, when the largest of those increases was first proposed, Liberal Democrat leader Cllr Gary Malcolm called it:

“very wrong given the current cost of living crisis,” accusing Labour of “sticking their noses into the gravy boat.”

The cost-of-living crisis has not lifted. The council’s housing accounts have been disclaimed for four consecutive years. Nearly 3,000 households are in temporary accommodation. The Regulator of Social Housing notice remains in place.

And the closure of ten children’s centres — including three in Southall, the borough’s most deprived town — will save the council a sum that is, broadly speaking, the size of the increase in senior councillor allowances since Mason took the leadership.

Mason’s leader allowance increase alone — £30,714.52 a year — is enough, on its own, to keep one or two children’s centres open.

That is not what Mr Justice Kimblin was asked to rule on. It is what voters can rule on.

Where the council won, and where it didn’t

Mr Justice Kimblin found that the Medium Term Financial Strategy of February 2025 was “a compilation of budgetary proposals” rather than a fetter on the consultation, and that the reinstatement of three centres — Jubilee, Petts Hill, and Dormers Wells — after consultation responses was “strong evidence that the consultation was conducted on a genuine basis.”

That is a finding that depends entirely on the consultation responses doing the work the consultation document failed to do: forcing the council to look again. Without 2,300 responses, organised opposition, and a parent prepared to take the case all the way to the High Court, those three centres would have closed.

The campaign did not win the legal argument. It won three children’s centres back.

“Please god let this not be us”

In January 2016, Peter Mason tweeted about a London council that had spent £90,000 on a Rolls-Royce while cutting childcare.

“Every London Cllr on social media today saying to themselves ‘please god let this not be us’. #phew."

Ten years on, the leader of Ealing Council has just won a High Court case defending the closure of ten children’s centres. Half of Southall’s centres go.

The council’s own data was wrong. The savings target is £751,000. The leader’s allowance has nearly doubled.

Mrs Patel understood perfectly, as did all the grown-ups.

Polls open at 7am on Thursday 7 May.

The Drugs Don't Work

Wed, 06 May 2026 11:55:52 +0100

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.

The borough now has the highest rate of alcohol-related hospital admissions in London. (Substance Misuse Service report; Ealing JSNA 2023)

We see people struggling with addiction every day — thin, exhausted, unwell, surviving from one fix to the next — across our high streets, side streets and public spaces. Their lives can appear to have narrowed to survival, money and the next fix. They need help and support to recover and live normal lives.

And we — the ordinary residents who live here — need help to feel safe and welcome in our own towns.This is how we got here.

In Walpole ward — the West Ealing ward where residents have spent two years complaining about open drug use, shoplifting and feeling unsafe — Labour’s third-placed winning candidate took the seat by a margin of 609 votes in 2022. In neighbouring Hanwell Broadway, the equivalent margin was just 389 votes — with the Greens in second place, less than 400 votes off taking a seat.

These are the wards covering the streets where the Liberal Democrats have built their entire campaign around resident anger at visible disorder.

In Southall Broadway, Labour’s majority was 1,126 — nearly three times the Hanwell Broadway gap. In Southall Green, Labour’s lead over the nearest opponent was 2,053. Cllr Jasbir Anand topped the poll there with 3,105 votes — a margin of 2,302 over the highest non-Labour candidate.

Now look at where the borough’s main drug and alcohol treatment service has gone.

Out of West Ealing. Into Southall. Specifically: into Southall Town Hall — the same building Southall residents went to court to save when the council tried to dispose of it.

The cabinet member who signed off the decision is Cllr Jasbir Anand. Then Cabinet Member for Tackling Inequality. Now cabinet lead for crime and anti-social behaviour. Councillor for Southall Green since 1998.

The decision

In January 2024, Cllr Anand approved an Individual Cabinet Member Decision authorising a 10-year lease on premises at 68 The Broadway, Southall, public money to refurbish it to clinical standards, and a sub-lease to Change Grow Live (CGL), the borough’s RISE provider.

(For wider context on Anand’s 28-year record in office, see Canvassing with Minni Dogra: A Councillor in All But Name.)

The report is explicit:

“This will be a new main treatment hub situated in Southall.”

The 10-year lease, it argues, means:

“Public Health will not be faced with trying to source suitable premises… for at least 10 years.”

The justification rests on the 2019 Drugs and Alcohol JSNA, which records higher dependency in deprived neighbourhoods, naming Southall, Greenford and Northolt.

That is true. Southall does have higher need. None of what follows disputes that.

The question is not whether Southall needs services. The question is how and where the borough sites them, and who decides — and whether that decision-making is shaped by need, by political convenience, or by both.

A decision that drifted — and ended up at the Town Hall

The 2024 decision named 68 The Broadway as the site. Eighteen months on, the picture had changed.

A later Substance Misuse Service report describes the position in present tense:

“RISE’s main service site is currently in West Ealing… RISE will need to vacate the West Ealing site by summer, as the building site is being re-developed. CGL and the Council have been exploring various opportunities over the last couple of years, and is currently in the process of securing Southall Town Hall as one of the bases in Ealing at the time of writing this report. CGL and the Council continue to explore opportunities for an additional site…”

The Town Hall is described as “one of the bases” — not the main hub — with an unspecified “additional site” still being sought.

CGL’s own announcement confirms what’s actually happened on the ground:

“RISE has now relocated from 99–103 The Broadway, West Ealing. All services are now operating as usual from our new location at Southall Town Hall, 1 High Street, Southall UB1 3HA.”

As far as I know, the public has not been told whether this is a stop-gap while 68 The Broadway is refurbished, or whether the Town Hall has quietly become the permanent home. What they can see is the outcome: West Ealing’s residents got the relocation they asked for. Southall got the building it fought to save partly repurposed as the borough’s main drug treatment hub.

The electoral map

Set the timeline against the political map.

The push from West Ealing. Lease at 99–103 The Broadway expiring. Site being redeveloped. Two years of organised, vocal resident pressure on visible drug use and anti-social behaviour. Two ward majorities — Walpole and Hanwell Broadway — small enough that a determined opposition campaign on local issues could flip them.

The pull to Southall. A council-controlled civic building sitting available. Cheaper space, longer lease. Higher measured deprivation, providing a clean policy justification rooted in the JSNA. Two of the safest Labour wards in the borough, including Anand’s own.

That is not a description of how a service should be sited. It is a description of how a political problem is solved.

The decision is individually defensible. Southall does have higher need. The JSNA does support the case. The West Ealing site did have to close. Each link in the chain has its own logic.

But step back, and the chain runs in only one direction. Out of marginal Labour wards. Into safe Labour wards. Out of streets where resident complaints are political costs. Into the poorest, most deprived town in the borough, least able to cope with the transfer of this service and its associated pressures on the local community and already stretched services.

A Southall Green councillor signing off the relocation of the borough’s main drug and alcohol hub — out of the wards Labour might lose, into the wards Labour cannot — is not a decision without political consequences.

The service follows the users

There is a further point that the JSNA argument quietly skips over.

The borough’s main drug and alcohol hub does not only treat residents who already live near it. It draws users to it. The West Ealing site served users from across the borough, including from Walpole and Hanwell Broadway, where residents’ complaints about visible drug use and anti-social behaviour were about people attending the service, wherever they were from, in their high street.

Move the service to Southall, and you move the visible behaviour with it. The users who were causing concern outside 99–103 The Broadway, West Ealing, are now attending appointments at Southall Town Hall. The same waiting outside, the same coming and going, the same intermittent disorder that two years of West Ealing campaigning was about — relocated, with the building, into the centre of Southall’s high street.

The data is already moving.

Across the wider Southall postcode area (UB1, UB2 and surrounds), drug crime rose 63.6% in the year to April 2026 — against a national rise of 13.3% — making Southall the 10th highest postcode area in England and Wales for drug crime rate.

The two postcode sectors closest to the Town Hall, UB1 1 and UB1 2, are running at 299% and 314% of the national crime rate respectively.

At ward level, the picture is just as telling.

According to Metropolitan Police data for Southall Broadway, anti-social behaviour alone accounts for 37.8% of all reported crime over the last three years — 2,775 reports — with violence and sexual offences a further 21.8% (1,598 reports). Together those two categories make up almost 60% of crime in the ward. Drugs offences themselves are only 3.4%.

The dominant story, in other words, is exactly what surrounds a busy treatment service: not drug-dealing in isolation, but the street-level disorder, public order incidents, and visible distress that follow concentrated dependency.

The trend is rising. Quarterly crime in Southall Broadway has moved from 511 in Q1 2024 to 658 in Q1 2026 — up roughly 29% over two years. The most recent quarter is the second-highest in the three-year series, beaten only by Q2 2025 at 698.

Look at Southall Green — Cllr Anand’s own ward — and the picture is sharper still.

For the first six quarters in the three-year series, Southall Green ran at between roughly 550 and 700 reports per quarter. From Q1 2025, the line breaks: 797 in Q1 2025, 768 in Q2, 884 in Q3 (the highest single quarter on record), 782 in Q4, and 706 in Q1 2026.

The ward has averaged 787 reports per quarter for the last five quarters, against 604 for the eight quarters before. A step-change of roughly 30%. It coincides with the period in which, per the council’s own Substance Misuse Service report, CGL and the council were “in the process of securing Southall Town Hall.”

In the West Ealing wards where residents have spent two years organising against visible disorder, the trend has gone hard the other way.

In Hanwell Broadway, quarterly crime peaked at 749 in Q3 2024, fell to 688 by Q3 2025, and dropped to 531 in Q1 2026 — down 29% from the peak in 18 months.

In Walpole, the fall is sharper still: from a peak of 651 in Q3 2025 to 443 in Q4 2025 and 392 in Q1 2026 — a 40% collapse in two quarters, and the lowest quarter the ward has recorded since late 2023.

The composition is also distinctive.

Walpole’s three-year profile is dominated by theft offences typical of busy retail high streets: 13.1% vehicle crime, 8.4% shoplifting, 6.4% other theft.

That mix is much less prominent in Southall Broadway, where shoplifting is 4.6%. But in Southall Green, shoplifting runs at 8.7% of all crime — higher even than Walpole — alongside the borough-wide-leading ASB and violence figures.

The crime profile that drove West Ealing’s complaints — and the headlines about London’s “wild west” — is increasingly the crime profile of Anand’s own ward.

That divergence is correlation, not proof of causation, and the timing does not map cleanly onto a single moving date. But the direction is unmistakable.

The most recent Met Police quarter shows crime in Walpole at its lowest level in nearly three years; crime in Hanwell Broadway down 29% from peak; crime in Southall Broadway near its three-year high; and crime in Southall Green sustaining a 30% step-change above its pre-2025 baseline.

In the same period the borough’s main drug and alcohol service has confirmed it has moved out of West Ealing and is now operating from Southall Town Hall — sited within the Southall Broadway ward, on the boundary with Southall Green.

The “need” justification cuts both ways. It is exactly because Southall is the most deprived part of the borough — and is now experiencing both a steep rise in postcode-level drug crime and rising ward-level crime trends across both Southall wards — that it is the least equipped to absorb concentrated additional pressure on its high street, its public realm, and its already-stretched local infrastructure.

It is also the least equipped to complain.

There is no Southall equivalent of the Police Oracle feature on West Ealing.

There is no Southall equivalent of the organised Lib Dem campaign that turned residents’ frustration into a political threat to Labour.

The complaints exist. They just don’t carry the same weight, in the same papers, with the same effect on majorities.

That asymmetry — between what is heard in Walpole and what is heard in Southall Green — is precisely what makes Southall the politically convenient place to put the problem. Not despite the deprivation. Because of it.

The pattern

This is one decision among many.

Southall already carries a disproportionate share of the borough’s harder-to-place burdens — industrial activity, air quality exposure, waste, lower-income housing pressure, civic underinvestment.

The fuller account of that pattern — and the council’s record under Peter Mason’s leadership — is set out in Community Powered Reporting’s investigation into Ealing Council. Mason — also a Southall Green councillor — has spoken publicly about Southall’s deep-rooted poverty, low pay and structural racism. The diagnosis is correct.

The question is what follows from that diagnosis. Because the same diagnosis can produce two very different policy responses:

Concentrate resources in Southall to address the inequality directly.
Concentrate the difficult, visible, politically costly functions in Southall because that is where they meet the least resistance.

The borough’s record on Southall increasingly looks like the second wearing the language of the first.

The drug and alcohol hub relocation is the latest in a sequence in which Southall absorbs what other parts of the borough push back against, and the wards that would punish the administration at the ballot box are protected from the consequences.

That isn’t tackling inequality. That’s redistributing visibility.

That isn’t tackling crime or anti-social behaviour. It’s moving it from West Ealing to Southall.

The irony is that the borough’s own 2023 JSNA increasingly points toward earlier intervention and lower-stigma community treatment embedded in primary care settings. The direction of travel nationally and locally is toward dispersed support through GP surgeries, hospitals and neighbourhood services — not the concentration of visible dependency into a single town-centre hub.

Vote tomorrow

Southall needs investment. Southall needs services. Southall needs properly resourced drug and alcohol treatment, accessible to the residents most affected by dependency.

None of that is in question.

What is in question is why the cabinet member who signed off the relocation is the councillor for the town receiving the relocated service, why the original site decision has drifted into a temporary occupation of the very building Southall fought to save, and why the relocation has landed in a way that solves a political problem in West Ealing by transferring it — physically, materially, and in plain sight — to Southall.

That looks less like need-led siting and more like political convenience-led siting that happens to align with need.

The drugs don’t work. Not like this. Not when the answer to inequality is to relocate it.

On the doorstep, voters across these four wards keep saying the same thing: voting Labour is a habit.

Time to kick the habit.

Cactuses Never Die

Sun, 03 May 2026 23:52:46 +0100

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 been cleared and flattened.

The cactuses, though, are still there.

As Yousef puts it:

“Cactuses never die.”

They grow back among the ruins of terraced fields. They mark, in living tissue, the outlines of homes that no document records.

Yousef Qandeel, a Palestinian-British civil engineer and environmental scientist, has lived in Ealing for more than 25 years. This week he is standing as an Ealing Community Independents candidate in the Greenford Broadway ward — knocking on doors, talking to residents about cleaner streets and safer neighbourhoods, doing the ordinary work of local democracy. The keys are at home. But they are never far from his mind.

We met over coffee at Chaiiwala on Greenford Broadway, the morning after he’d been canvassing. He brought photographs. The keys laid on a Palestinian flag. Himself holding them, head bowed, in his home in Greenford. Himself standing at the Key of Return sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh — a city that has done more than most to remember what happened to his family’s village.

He also brought the map.

It is a remarkable document. Drawn from memory, testimony and historical survey by Mohamed Rajab Abu Khadra — himself from al-Dawayima, himself in exile — it records every house, every family name, every path and well and olive grove.

The village as it was.

Star-shaped, built of stone and mud, its mosque at the centre, its market busy on Fridays, its land producing wheat and barley, olives and figs, pomegranates and grapes. A population of approximately three to four thousand people, with trade routes to Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa and Haifa. Yousef has shared this map on his Facebook timeline. He circled his family’s home in green.

He has also shared, and translated into Arabic, a letter written in 1948 by an Israeli soldier named Sh. Kaplan to a colleague at the newspaper Al-Hamishmar.

The letter was written ten days after the massacre. It disappeared from the archive for years. It has since been relied upon by Jewish historians including Benny Morris.

Kaplan wrote that there was no battle and no resistance.

The first wave of troops killed between eighty and a hundred Arab women and children.
The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks.
There was not a house without dead.

A commander ordered a sapper to place two elderly women inside a house before blowing it up. The sapper refused. The commander ordered his men to do it instead. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.

The principle, Kaplan wrote, was simple:

“The fewer Arabs remain, the better.”

No one in the field command or the high command objected.

By 1948, the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Zionist paramilitaries had already become internationally known and widely condemned, including within Israel itself. Kaplan ended his letter with a question that amounted to a reproach directed at his own side:

“Is it right,” he asked, “to shout about Deir Yassin and be silent about something much worse?”

Yousef’s father was not in the village when Battalion 89 of the Israeli 8th Armoured Brigade arrived that Friday morning, approaching along three roads simultaneously. It was October. The olive harvest was under way, and his father was away from the village picking olives. That absence saved his life.

His sister and two of his aunts were murdered.

The village mukhtar, Hassan Mahmoud Ihdeib, gave sworn testimony to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine.

When the armoured vehicles arrived and soldiers disembarked, he recorded, they began shooting indiscriminately at anything that moved.

Worshippers at Friday prayers in the mosque were killed where they knelt.

Thirty-five families who fled to hide in the caves at Tur al-Zagh were tracked down, lined up, and shot.

A Forensic Architecture investigation, produced with Goldsmiths University, has since documented the cave massacre in detail.

There is also a film.

Estimates of the death toll vary. The mukhtar presented a figure of 580 to the Jordanian commander. An Israeli journalist who visited the site in 1984 estimated 332. The American consul in Jerusalem reported at the time that between 500 and 1,000 Arabs had been killed. The Palestine Land Society’s detailed account records 171 confirmed names killed in the mosque and caves alone. On any accounting, al-Dawayima was among the worst single atrocities of the Nakba — and the least remembered.

As Yousef said to me:

“It doesn’t really matter how many.”

The cover-up began immediately. Israeli forces burned the houses and buried bodies before UN observers could reach the site. When investigators tried to visit, they were told the road was mined. When they finally gained access, a week later, they reported a peculiar smell of burning flesh.

They were told the houses had been set alight to clear out vermin.

One UN officer saw a carbonised body. The Israeli officers expressed astonishment.

No one was ever prosecuted despite the IDF’s own intelligence service recommendations that they should be.

Abba Eban, the Israeli representative to the United Nations, wrote to the Security Council denying that a place called al-Dawayima existed at all.

“The Arab account of a massacre,” he wrote, “was lurid and sensational propaganda.”

This letter is in the UN archive. So is the mukhtar’s testimony. So, when it has not been removed, is the soldier’s letter.

In Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield Links, a tree was planted on 29 October 1998 — the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre — by the Rt Hon Eric Milligan, Lord Provost of Edinburgh. A stone marker reads: > Al-Dawayima, Palestine, 29 October 1948.

A carved stone monument nearby carries the same inscription. A bench beside it is fixed with a plaque quoting Nelson Mandela: > We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Yousef has been photographed at all of these sites, and at the Key of Return sculpture at St Mary’s Cathedral. He goes to Edinburgh, in part, because Edinburgh remembers.

On the land where al-Dawayima once stood, an Israeli nature reserve sign marks the ancient Tomb of Sheikh Ali — a dome of stone that served as a place of pilgrimage for centuries. The sign records two thousand years of history. It does not mention the massacre. It does not mention the bones. Among the ruins of terraced fields and the remains of old houses, the cactuses are still growing.

Under the Israeli Law of Return, Yousef Qandeel has no right to go back home to the land of his father and his ancestors.

Israeli law, however, does grant that right to anyone who is Jewish, or who becomes Jewish — by birth, by descent, or by conversion — regardless of any prior connection to the land.

A family whose roots in a place stretch back generations, who hold the keys, who kept the map, who translated the soldier’s letter so that the truth would not disappear again: none of that confers any standing under Israeli law.

Yousef is standing for a council seat in Greenford Broadway on 7 May.

That he is standing as an independent rather than for the Labour Party is itself part of the story.

Yousef was a Labour Party member for years.

He left voluntarily when right-wing factions in the party the party began attacking the Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Before that, he had put his name forward to be an Ealing Labour councillor candidate. He says he was told that he had been rejected, because, in that councillor’s words:

“You’re Palestinian. You’re left-wing”.

At the candidate assessment panel, Yousef recalls, he was asked whether he agreed to follow the Party whip. He declined — telling the panel, he says, that he was independent-minded and would assess each local issue on its merits rather than blindly follow the national party line.

The party that did not want him as a candidate is the party that runs Ealing Council. And the question of how Ealing Council relates to what is happening to Palestinians today is not an abstract one.

According to the resident-led investigation What Happened to Southall?, published in March 2026 by Community Powered Reporting, Ealing Council’s pension fund is invested, through the London Collective Investment Vehicle (LCIV), to the tune of approximately £112,896,000 in companies described in the report as complicit in Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The list, the report says, includes Maersk, Palantir, and Elbit Systems — the latter being Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. The figures are drawn from a council Freedom of Information response, screened against the United Nations Human Rights Office database, the American Friends Service Committee database, and the Who Profits database.

A formal residents’ petition demanded Ealing divest. The council refused to debate it.

The Pension Fund Panel has not once placed divestment on its agenda.

When LCIV divested from Russian holdings within weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, the report notes, it did so without controversy and without legal challenge.

On Russia: ethical clarity. On Gaza: procedural neutrality.

The report sets out the role of Ealing Council leader Peter Mason in detail.

From December 2021 until his resignation in July 2024, Mason held a shareholder-nominated directorship on the LCIV board — a seat held specifically to represent the interests of Ealing Council and its pension scheme members.

In July 2024 Mason resigned that seat and joined the board of the Local Government Association. Three months later, the LGA commissioned the legal opinion from senior barrister Nigel Giffin KC that has since been cited by other councils as a reason not to divest.

The report is careful to note there is no public evidence that Mason directed or commissioned the Giffin opinion. What it documents is the sequence: Mason left the room where Ealing’s pension investments are decided, took a seat in the room where the national legal architecture against divestment was being built, and the Ealing seat at the LCIV has, the report records, remained vacant ever since.

The report also notes Mason’s public statement that anti-Zionists have no place in the Labour movement. Mason represents Southall Green ward, which has one of the largest Sikh, Muslim, South Asian and Arab populations in London.

So this is the situation in Ealing in May 2026.

A council leader who has held, and given up, a seat at the table where pension investment decisions affecting his residents’ retirement savings are made.
A pension fund of more than £112 million invested in companies flagged for their role in what the International Court of Justice has found to involve a plausible risk of genocide.
A Pension Fund Panel that has refused, in the face of formal petitions and public protest, to so much as place the question on its agenda.
A Labour party that, on Yousef’s account, rejected him as a candidate for being “Palestinian and left-wing”.

And, standing in Greenford Broadway, a 73-year-old Palestinian engineer who carries three iron keys to a house in a village that no longer exists, whose father survived because he was picking olives that October morning, whose sister and aunts did not survive at all.

Yousef Qandeel cannot, under Israeli law, go home. The least his neighbours in Ealing might ask of their elected council is that it stop investing their money in the architecture that is doing to Gaza now what was done to al-Dawayima then.

Voters who want to support candidates committed to Palestinian rights at the local elections on 7 May can find guidance at Vote Palestine.

The Smell of Success

Sat, 02 May 2026 14:18:51 +0100

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 achievement in itself!

In support of Mason’s nomination, Southall Stories has compiled a selection of Peter’s “Greatest Hits”.

The Smell of Damp

Peter has spoken often about his childhood in a prefabricated concrete council house — the smell of damp, picking mould from window caulking, three months in temporary accommodation. These are not private memories. He put them on the public record, repeatedly, as the foundation of his claim to understand what bad housing does to people.

The auditors, the regulator, and the Housing Ombudsman have since offered their own assessment of how that understanding translated into leadership.

Ealing Council self-referred to the Regulator of Social Housing over housing health and safety failures in 2022. Three years on, the regulatory notice remains in place.

The Housing Ombudsman has issued findings of severe maladministration — specifically citing damp, mould, and repairs failures. Ealing’s accounts have received disclaimed audit opinions for four consecutive years — every year of Mason’s leadership. His external auditors identified unresolved housing governance failures for the third year running in their 2024/25 completion report. Nearly 3,000 households in Ealing are in temporary accommodation — among the highest in London.

Mason’s own leader’s allowance, meanwhile, has nearly doubled since 2021: from £32,100 to £62,815.

The Smell of Failure

On development, Southall generated over £13 million in Section 106 developer contributions over five years and received less than its share back.

Ealing Council’s own planning baseline, commissioned in 2022, counted nearly 12,000 new homes consented or under construction across Southall — and 4,171 jobs in its industrial areas, over a quarter of them in food and catering. The Southall Opportunity Area was designated on the promise of 9,000 new homes and 3,000 new jobs. The homes are arriving. The jobs are not.

On housing, Mason oversaw completion of just 16% of genuinely affordable homes paid for by a £100m grant from the GLA, while Ealing reportedly demolished 5,000 social homes — more than other London boroughs. A number of housing developments in Ealing and Southall remain unfinished after the building contractors went bust. Left to rot for years, they now face expensive demolition and rebuilding. The number of homeless families on the council waiting list rose to an unprecedented 12,000 before Mason cut it to 7,000 by removing eligibility for thousands with the lowest priority needs.

On waste, fly-tipping has more than tripled since the council’s 2016 decision to move to fortnightly collections. Ealing council’s viral TikTok “This is our home, not a tip” video was nominated for campaign of the year.

On environment, a recycling site that residents and regulators had warned about for years burned down in January 2026, costing the small business owner over half a million pounds. The council’s own investigation over more than a year had found nothing to be concerned about.

Mason’s council took a toddler to the high court to ensure that the closure of ten children’s centres across the borough can proceed to save money and “improve” children’s services.

In March 2026, a resident-led research group published What Happened to Southall? — a rigorous, extensively sourced report by Community Powered Reporting covering waste, housing, asset disposal, health, and democratic accountability under Mason’s council. It pulled together, in one place, a picture that many of us have been documenting piece by piece for years. The London Forum recently recommended it to its members stating:

London Forum members may be interested in it for the depth of analysis it shows and the implications.

The Smell of SMELabour

But perhaps I’m being unfair, and we should look at Peter Mason’s record on supporting small businesses in Southall and across Ealing? It is the Small Business Labour awards, after all.

In Southall, in his own words, Ealing Labour and Mason had pursued political policies that transformed Southall from a hub of industry and manufacturing into a dormitory town without the infrastructure to support it.

Tonight we hit the reset button for Southall, our industrious, resilient, entrepreneurial, diverse, incredible town.

It’s future is as a place of good, well-paid jobs, of culture and community pride - not a dormitory town.

As cabinet lead for housing, planning and transformation, and then as council leader, Mason oversaw the destruction of small businesses across Southall. In their place rose residential towers to house more than 10,000 new homes and tens of thousands of new residents in a town already struggling with chronic overcrowding.

A massive new data centre is set to be built around the corner from me on Brent Road Trident Way industrial site.

The proposed destruction of small businesses at The Green failed thanks in no small part to the incredible research and campaigning work of Ealing Community Independents candidate Minni Dogra, who is standing for election against Mason in Southall Green on Thursday.

Ealing Council’s own 2024 Southall Regeneration Framework acknowledges that despite over 1,800 new homes built since 2014, the jobs and employment space “has not come forward as planned.”

It confirms that Southall remains the borough’s lowest-paid town, with all its neighbourhoods ranking among the top 30% most deprived nationally. The framework sets targets for 3,000 new jobs by 2041. The council under Ealing Labour’s administration and Mason’s direction and control, has had since 2010 to make a start. But across Ealing during the past year, almost 2,000 jobs were lost.

The Smell of Success?

OK, what about across Ealing? There must be something positive we can say that will support Peter Mason’s nomination for Labour councillor of the year.

Others may know better than me, but all I can recall is Mason’s distaste for cars and community pharmacies on the high street.

The SME4Labour award celebrates dedication to local communities. By that measure, Southall Green residents — living with a regulatory housing notice, a more than trebled fly-tipping rate, a toxic gasworks legacy, and a council whose accounts have been disclaimed four years running — may have a different nomination in mind.

Vote for your own choice of Labour councillor of the year here.

The local election polls open at 7am on Thursday 7 May.

Back to the Future

Fri, 01 May 2026 20:19:06 +0100

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 you “improved services,” a magazine through your letterbox every month, and a (Conservative) council that was “named the UK’s Best Achieving Council in 2009.”

“Roads? Where this guide is going, it doesn’t need roads.”

Sixteen years of austerity, service cuts, consultations, plans, resets, a global pandemic, a cost of living crisis (driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and four rounds of local elections have come and gone. The guide has not noticed.

We know this not just from the content, but from the Wayback Machine — which, unlike Ealing Council, has actually been paying attention.

The Internet Archive has captured this URL just thirteen times in fourteen years. A flurry of saves in 2011–12, then silence until 2019, then occasional snapshots through to December 2024. There are no captures at all in 2025 or 2026.

Nobody at the council has visited, reviewed, or updated this page in nearly two decades.

It hasn’t been forgotten by the internet — only by the people who published it.

This matters for reasons beyond embarrassment. The document contains active misinformation that could harm the very people it claims to welcome. This is not nostalgia.

This is a council sending new residents back to 2010 without a flux capacitor.

The A&E that closed

The guide tells new residents: “Central Middlesex Hospital also has an Accident and Emergency Department.”

Central Middlesex A&E closed in 2014. It no longer exists. Anyone following that advice in an emergency is being sent to a closed department.

The helpline that was abolished

“You can also contact NHS Direct for health advice 24 hours a day by phoning 0845 4647.”

NHS Direct was abolished in 2013 and replaced by NHS 111. That number has been dead for over a decade. The website — nhsdirect.nhs.uk — no longer exists.

The youth service that was defunded

“Youth and Connexions — provides opportunities for young people aged 13–19.”

Connexions was defunded by the coalition government in 2011–12 — the year this guide was published.

The housing organisation that was dissolved

The inside back cover lists contact numbers and email addresses for Ealing Homes — the arm’s-length organisation that managed council housing. Ealing Homes was wound up in 2011 and housing management returned directly to the council. Both email addresses are dead.

The school building programme that was cancelled

“High schools are set to get even better with more than £300 million being invested under the national Building Schools for the Future programme.”

Building Schools for the Future was cancelled by Michael Gove in July 2010 — six months before this guide was finalised. It was abolished before the ink was dry.

The bins that became fortnightly

The guide promises weekly refuse collection, with missed collections remedied the same day if reported before 5pm. In 2016, Ealing Council switched to fortnightly collections.

As this site has documented in detail, official government data shows that switch coincided with a sustained doubling of fly-tipping in the borough — a fact Ealing Labour’s 2026 election materials have chosen not to mention.

The magazine that changed beyond recognition

> “The council’s residents’ magazine, Around Ealing, is delivered to every home each month.”

Around Ealing still exists — but it is now a quarterly seasonal publication, not a monthly one, and it is primarily a digital product hosted on a third-party platform.

The promise of something landing on your doormat every month is long gone.

The forums that were abolished — and replaced

“Ward Forums, led by the ward councillors, feature joint problem solving on local concerns. Each ward has the chance to influence how an annual budget of £40,000 is spent on local improvements.”

Ward Forums were abolished in 2020.

They have been replaced by Town Forums, which now incorporate the council’s Your Voice Your Town participatory budgeting process — a competitive application system with its own governance arrangements.

[This site is currently investigating those governance arrangements in order to determine any undisclosed conflicts of interest on the panels deciding who gets funded — but that’s another story.]

The Freedom Pass age threshold

“People aged over 60 should apply.”

Freedom Pass eligibility is now tied to the state pension age, which is 66. The guide understates the qualifying age by six years.

Your turn — the community audit

The guide’s back page lists 47 facilities across the borough — sports centres, libraries, community centres, recycling centres, golf courses. That’s before we get to the services described in the text.

The errors above are some of the ones I can verify with confidence. But a document this old, left this untouched, certainly contains others — phone numbers that ring out, email addresses that bounce, facilities quietly reduced, closed or demolished without anyone remembering to update the brochure that recommends them.

So I’ve built a community audit tool — a live, crowdsourced record of what’s still standing and what’s gone. Every entry from the 2010 map is listed. You can mark each one as still open, changed, closed, or sold and redeveloped, and add a note with what you know. All contributions are saved and shared with every visitor.

→ View and add your own record at Ealing Audit on Southall Stories

If you’ve lived in the borough, worked in one of these buildings, or watched one of them come down — this is the place to record it.

The most significant findings will be documented in a follow-up piece and, more usefully, in a formal request to the council to either update or withdraw a document that is actively misleading the people it claims to serve.

Because “we ask, we listen, we deliver” was their promise in 2010.

Sixteen years on, the document is still there.

The buildings and services, rather less so.

The Welcome Guide for New Residents has been archived on the Wayback Machine, first captured on 15 January 2012. The live — and unchanged — version remains on the Ealing Council website.

This Is Our Home. It's a Tip.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:13:27 +0100

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 on Defra data. Ealing Council’s own Q2 2025/26 Performance Report — covering the campaign period itself — states explicitly that fly-tipping “has increased by around 50% year on year since 2022/23.” That is the council’s own in-year monitoring, for the same period Mason is claiming a 55% reduction in Southall.

The council’s data and the council leader’s election claim cannot both be true.

The correction strengthens rather than weakens that conclusion.

A postscript to On the Bins Again, Boomerang! and Bangarang!

Ealing Council was shortlisted for an LGC award for their fly-tipping awareness campaign. It was called “This Is Our Home, Not a Tip.”

Defra figures published today show fly-tipping in Ealing rose by 50.9% in 2024-25 to 25,394 incidents — the highest ever recorded in the borough, sixth worst in London, and seventh out of 294 local authorities in England. At 65.8 incidents per 1,000 residents, Ealing is now worse per head than Brent was at any point before its own enforcement crackdown began.

Neighbouring Brent, running an aggressive enforcement campaign for several years and having switched to twin-stream recycling collections in October 2023, is down to 16,338 incidents — 46.3 per 1,000. Harrow, which never switched to fortnightly collections, recorded 13,925 — 51.4 per 1,000.

The enforcement comparison is particularly telling. In 2024-25, Ealing issued 1,993 fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping and saw incidents rise 51%. Brent issued 916 and saw incidents fall 40%. More fines, worse outcome. The difference is not enforcement intensity. It is the structural problem that enforcement cannot fix.

The council’s explanation? Higher figures partly reflect improved reporting by residents. The same explanation Newham offered in 2016 when their new digital reporting system inflated their counts. The difference is that Brent’s improved reporting produced a 40% fall in the same year.

Gareth Lloyd Jones, Managing Director at HIPPO Waste, told Ealing.News that Ealing’s ranking is “despite only capturing publicly reported incidents,” pointing to “a broader underlying problem.” He’s right. It has been documented in some detail: reduced waste collection capacity since 2016, a cost of living crisis reducing residents’ ability to pay for disposal, rising private sector rents driving population churn and overcrowding, and a borough where housing density and overcrowding mean the fortnightly system was never designed for the communities it serves. The council’s awareness campaign has 8 million social media impressions. Fly-tipping has 25,394 incidents.

There is one further question the 2024-25 figures raise. In a BBC London Politics Show interview earlier this year, Council Leader Peter Mason claimed a 55% reduction in fly-tipping in Southall. Ealing Labour’s election leaflet repeated the claim as a 54% reduction. No baseline year or dataset was specified for either figure, and as the Boomerang article noted, neither can be reconciled with published Defra or council performance data.

Southall’s official population is around 80,000 — almost certainly an undercount given the scale of undocumented migration into a borough with a 21.5% annual population churn and severe private sector overcrowding. Even on the official figure, if Southall genuinely accounts for roughly a fifth of Ealing’s population, and fly-tipping across the whole borough is up 51% to 25,394 incidents, then a 54% reduction in Southall implies the rest of Ealing has seen something close to a tripling of incidents to compensate. That would represent a catastrophic failure of borough-wide policy that Labour has conspicuously not mentioned. The more likely explanation is that the figure is based on a different metric, a selected time window, or simply cannot be verified — which is why no source was provided.

Ealing Council’s own Q2 2025/26 performance report states explicitly that fly-tipping “has increased by around 50% year on year since 2022/23.” The council’s own data and the council leader’s election claim cannot both be true.

Three articles. Months of Defra data. Five boroughs. One unasked question.

Has the 2016 alternate weekly collection policy been evaluated as a material cause of the sustained and now accelerating rise in fly-tipping?

Still no answer, a week before local elections.

Fly-tipping incident data: Defra Fly-Tipping Statistics for England, 2024-25. Per-capita figures calculated using ONS mid-year population estimates as published in the Defra dataset.

When is a Hustings not a Hustings?

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:13:23 +0100

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 have to endure the same hardships.

Then I listened to a succession of young people describe, in harrowing terms, how they — a tiny subset of the more than 3,000 families in unsafe, insecure and unsuitable housing in Ealing — struggle in conditions far worse, for years without end.

This is Mason’s Ealing.

Shaped in his own image over more than a decade of leadership (behind the scenes and out front):

ever-increasing housing waiting lists, thousands of demolished and half-built social homes,
millions wasted on unscrupulous contractors,
failed environmental schemes,
and obscene increases in councillor allowances.

The young people who spoke last night deserved answers. They didn’t get them.

They got choreographed applause and cheers. They got pledges.

[Video courtesy of another audience member.]

What are these pledges worth?

The organisers decided no questions were permitted from the floor. The party leading the polls in Ealing was not invited. The local organisers, activists and candidates best placed to speak to their experience were refused a seat at the table.

That is not accountability. It’s political convenience.

An accountability assembly that excluded Southall’s actual challengers tells us more about Ealing’s political establishment than any speech delivered from its podium.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

On the evening of 28 April 2026 — nine days before Ealing residents go to the polls — West London Citizens held what it billed as a “Pre-Election Accountability Assembly” at St Anselm’s Church in Southall Green.

The event’s own code of conduct stated clearly: “This is not an election debate, hustings or partisan political rally. We do not support or endorse any politician or political party.”

Three candidates were invited to make opening statements and respond to the assembly’s manifesto asks: Peter Mason (Labour), Gary Malcolm (Liberal Democrats), and Julian Gallant (Conservatives).

No other parties were invited.

Ealing Community Independents, standing candidates across multiple Southall wards, formally requested to attend. They received a direct written refusal.

This isn’t the first time

This is not a new arrangement. Four years ago, on 27 April 2022, Ealing Labour’s then-parliamentary candidate Bassam Mahfouz tweeted from an identical Citizens UK event, describing it plainly as a “Hustings” — with the same three parties on the stage.

The projected slide at that event listed two of the same names: Councillor Gary Malcolm, Councillor Peter Mason, with then-Councillor Gregory Stafford representing the Conservatives.

In 2026, the event has been rebranded. It is no longer a hustings. It is an “accountability assembly.” The code of conduct now explicitly states it is “not an election debate, hustings or partisan political rally.”

The parties on the stage are identical. The parties excluded are identical. Only the language has changed.

A controlled format

The assembly’s rules prohibited questions from the floor. The agenda had been shared with invited candidates in advance. Residents — perhaps 50 of the 700 whose voices supposedly shaped the Citizens manifesto — could listen, but not speak.

This is a legitimate format for some purposes. But calling it an accountability assembly, while excluding candidates and silencing the room, raises an obvious question: accountable to whom, exactly?

What the record actually shows

Peter Mason arrived at St Anselm’s with a confident message. Speaking to Ealing News on 25 April, he said:

“Our record speaks for itself in terms of what we’ve delivered, not just in genuinely affordable homes, but jobs for local residents and the money that we’re reinvesting back into frontline services.”

The record, examined closely, tells a different story.

In 2022, Ealing Labour promised to build 4,000 affordable homes. By 2026, the party’s own manifesto celebrated delivering 2,644 — 1,356 fewer than pledged.

The recently published report What Happened to Southall? produced by Community Powered Reporting and collating council data, local journalism and Freedom of Information responses, gives a fuller picture. It reports Conal Urquhart’s investigation, which found that of roughly £100 million allocated to deliver more than 1,100 affordable homes, only around 180 had been completed by early 2026 — approximately 16% of the target.

Conal also broke the story of Henry Construction, who were awarded contracts to build genuinely affordable homes in Southall Green, and went bust before completion — despite having a publicly documented history of prior insolvency collapses.

This site documented some of the human cost in detail:

Half-built homes have rotted on Norwood Road for three years.
The McCreesh family were made homeless after Ealing failed to deliver their promised accessible new home, with council officers telling them they were “not responsible” for new-build properties.
The Southall Market Car Park development now faces potential demolition and rebuild at enormous additional cost.

Mason attributed the shortfall to unforeseeable events: Liz Truss, Ukraine, rising interest rates.

What he did not explain was why Henry Construction — whose controllers had prior insolvency history and had extracted a £10 million dividend shortly before a previous collapse — was awarded public contracts in the first place.

That information was publicly available.

The question of who signed off on the risk has never been answered.

What Happened to Southall? documents the wider pattern.

Fortnightly bin collections introduced in 2016 linked to fly-tipping more than doubling.
The housing waiting list rising above 12,000.
A sustained closure of children’s centres, youth facilities and sports provision.

Plans affecting ten children’s centres, which hit Southall hardest of any of Ealing’s seven towns, losing three of its six centres including its main Grove House hub.

Residents campaigned and raised over £5,000 to fund a [judicial review challenge (https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2026/886), heard in February 2026.

Mr Justice Kimblin dismissed the claim on 15 April.

The closures will proceed.

At the accountability assembly on Tuesday evening, with no questions from the floor permitted, none of this went examined.

When accountability is NOT accountability

There is a phrase that has haunted Southall for years, first documented on this site in August 2019. When residents pressed Ealing Council on when the toxic remediation of the Southall Gasworks site would finally be completed, the council’s contaminated land officer — whose post had originally been funded by Berkeley Group, the developer responsible for the pollution — provided this clarification:

“The remediation for the next nineteen years is, in a sense, NOT remediation.”

Residents had been told remediation would be complete in September 2018. Then December 2018. Then March 2019. When pressed in writing on whether these repeated assurances constituted “a rather significant error” that was “extremely misleading,” the council’s Regulatory Services Officer replied that he did not agree — defending each revised deadline as based on “the best information available at the time.”

The remediation of the contaminated land is set to complete 2038.

Meanwhile, Peter Mason and his then-leader Julian Bell were accepting all-expenses-paid trips to the MIPIM property developers’ conference in Cannes, courtesy of a consortium that included Berkeley Group — the company whose contractor was producing the poisonous air that Southall’s children were breathing in their school playgrounds.

Orwell’s observation was about totalitarianism. But the instruction it describes — reject the evidence of your eyes and ears — does not require a totalitarian state. It only requires officials who have learned that language can be made to mean its opposite, and institutions willing to let them get away with it.

Remediation that is NOT remediation.

A hustings that is NOT a hustings.

An accountability assembly that excludes the candidates with the most to say about the record being assessed.

The pattern is consistent. Only the subject changes.

The pledge that accountability forgot

The Living Wage sits at the heart of West London Citizens’ 2026 manifesto.

It is one of the asks candidates were invited to commit to at St Anselm’s on Tuesday evening.

It was also one of the asks Peter Mason committed to at the same event four years ago.

Citizens UK’s own account of the 27 April 2022 assembly records that Mason made the following commitments on behalf of Ealing Labour:

making Ealing a Living Wage Place and more than doubling the number of Living Wage accredited employers from the 41 then accredited;
10 new renters rights workshops;
50 new community land trust homes;
council funding for mental health and SEN parent champions.

The 2026 manifesto asks for 100 CLT homes. Four years ago, Mason committed to 50. Citizens UK’s own records confirm the commitment was made. Last month, on 26 March 2026, West London Citizens accounted for a proposal “which could deliver around 20 genuinely affordable homes.”

Zero homes delivered.

A proposal that might see about 20. Sometime.

On the Living Wage, the record is similarly instructive.

Ealing Council signed a Living Wage Foundation Accreditation Licence in 2014, under then-leader Julian Bell. That licence covered not just direct council employees but workers subcontracted to the council. According to Michael Milne, founder of the Ealing Living Wage Alliance, those obligations went unmet for years. It took a campaign by the Alliance and Ealing UNISON in 2020 to force the belated payment of the Living Wage to school catering workers — six years after the licence was signed.

In April 2021 — while Mason was already serving as Ealing’s Living Wage Champion — Ealing school catering staff were being paid £8.91 per hour, against a London Living Wage of £10.85. Workers described it as a “disgrace” that the council had not helped them achieve accreditation.

In May 2022, shortly after making his Citizens UK commitments, Mason awarded himself a 71% pay rise, with other councillors receiving 24%.

By September 2022, the Ealing Living Wage Alliance was documenting that council care workers would have to wait until 2026 to receive the Living Wage — despite Ealing holding a Living Wage Foundation licence since 2014. Milne wrote that the council appeared to be rebranding its 2014 licence obligation as a new “plan to fix social care”:

“That is a disgrace, and a direct breach of trust.”

When the Alliance raised this publicly, both their local councillor and Virendra Sharma MP’s office blocked them on Twitter.

In November 2022, Mason appeared at a West London College Living Wage celebration event in Southall, announcing that homecare workers would receive the Real Living Wage “from this week onwards.”

By June 2023, there were 55 accredited employers and a stated target of 200 by 2026.

That target has not been met.

In November 2023, West London Citizens announced a new Living Wage Action Group.

By October 2025, Ealing reached 100 accredited employers, becoming the first borough in West London to do so — progress Mason cited as evidence his record speaks for itself.

From 14 accredited Living Wage employers in 2016, when Mason became Ealing’s Living Wage Champion, to 55 (or 58) in June 2023 when the Living Wage Action Group took over responsibility, progress has been painfully slow. 50 or so new employers in seven years.

The 100 employer milestone, reached in October 2025, represents 40 or so employers in just over two years.

100 out of Ealing’s 18,000 businesses is just 0.6%.

West London Citizens’ own 2026 manifesto provides the broader verdict on a decade of Mason as Living Wage Champion:

25% of jobs in Ealing still below the Living Wage.

Ealing remains 18th nationally for low-paid work.

These are not figures from Mason’s critics.

They are the figures presented to him on Tuesday evening at St Anselm’s — at the same event where he made his original commitments four years before, organised by the same organiser, Hilal Yazan — at an event from which the candidates most likely to scrutinise his record and hold him accountable had been purposely excluded.

On Tuesday evening, West London Citizens asked Mason to commit to the Living Wage again.

Four years ago, at the same event, he already had.

The five-party reality Mason and West London Citizens didn’t see coming

In his Ealing News interview three days earlier on 25 April, Mason said:

“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.”

On 28 April — the same evening as the assembly — independent MRP modelling commissioned by the LSE and conducted by JL Partners projected Ealing as one of the London boroughs where the Green Party is expected to achieve the highest vote share. Mason was not responding to the polling. He didn’t know it was coming.

The LSE’s wider findings are equally striking. Labour is projected to be pushed into second place in seven boroughs it currently controls, with its vote share down 15 points on average across the capital. And 60% of London voters plan to split their ballots across parties. The two-horse-race squeeze — where voters are told it is Labour or nothing — is, according to independent academic modelling, already over.

In Southall, where the Greens are standing only single paper candidates in each ward, the only progressive, local alternative to the other national party branches are the Ealing Community Independents.

The question that remains

West London Citizens says it seeks to “restore trust, integrity and accountability” in local democracy. That is a worthy goal, and the issues in their manifesto — temporary accommodation, renter rights, living wages, community land trusts — are real issues affecting real people in Southall.

Peter Mason in 2021: “You don’t trust me”

But an accountability process that issues written refusals to candidates challenging the incumbent administration — in the wards where that administration’s record is most exposed — is not accountability.

It is gatekeeping.

Peter Mason posted this on Twitter on 25 June 2020:

Words have consequences. Impact is as important as intent. Culture is defined by leadership. Redemption is possible.

Reflect, learn and change. Or move on.

It’s a choice.

On 7 May, if you don’t think Peter Mason has done a good job, you get to hold him accountable.

Peter Mason in 2021: “If you don’t think I’ve done a good job, you get to vote me out”

You get to vote him out.

Get Mason Out!

Vote Ealing Community Independents on 7 May.

Southall Deserves Better.

"This Place Has Turned Into a Bloody Slum": Southall Wards Meeting with ECI candidates

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:21:52 +0100

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.

When "deport six million" becomes mainstream: what Ealing Labour won't tell you

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:48:40 +0100

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 next government.

Where the “six million” came from

I’ll be honest. When I first read the reported quote, the figure stopped me cold. “Six million.” Whatever the context, whatever the intent, those words in a sentence about mass deportation carry an unmistakable echo. The deliberate murder of six million Jewish people by the Nazi regime is the defining atrocity of the twentieth century. In a borough where Jewish communities have deep roots, that resonance does not disappear because it may have been unintentional.

So I looked into where the figure came from.

It almost certainly derives from a July 2025 report by the Centre for Policy Studies — a right-leaning think tank with strong Conservative connections — which found the UK is short approximately 6.5 million homes compared to similar European countries. The CPS acknowledged migration as a contributing factor — but was explicit that even cutting net migration to zero would not solve the shortage. The bulk of the problem is decades of under-building.

Hunter appears to have taken the CPS’s housing deficit figure and inverted its argument entirely. Where the think tank said “we need to build six million more homes,” Hunter said “we need to deport six million people instead.” She used a Conservative think tank’s research to reach a conclusion that Conservative think tank specifically rejected.

That origin does not dissolve the echo. The Holocaust did not happen in the abstract. It began with the identification of a group of people as a problem to be solved — and with the language of removal. When that number appears in a sentence about deportation, the discomfort is not irrational. It is memory doing its job.

What Ealing’s own data actually shows

Ealing Council’s own figures tell a different story from Hunter’s. Over 3,000 households are currently in temporary accommodation in the borough, with 329 households with children in bed and breakfast accommodation beyond the legal six-week limit. Average rents rose by 12.4% in a single year — faster than anywhere else in London. The council’s own analysis attributes this to landlords leaving the market, a chronic shortage of new homes, and properties being converted to short-term lets such as Airbnb.

Immigration does not appear in Ealing’s own homelessness analysis as a cause. The council is run by Labour. These are their numbers.

Mass deportation is not a housing policy. It is fascism.

A very old idea

Mass deportation is not a new idea. It is not even a particularly Conservative idea in origin. It is the oldest demand of the British far right — and it has been with us, in one form or another, for sixty years.

The National Front was founded in 1967 with the expulsion of all settled non-white immigrants as a founding policy. By 1974, the compulsory deportation of all non-white immigrants and their descendants — including the white British partners in mixed-race relationships — was the cornerstone of their manifesto. They said it would take ten years. Before deportation, non-whites would be stripped of British citizenship and placed behind white Britons in access to welfare, education and housing.

The British National Party, formed in 1982, carried this forward. Under John Tyndall’s leadership it promoted compulsory removal of non-whites from the UK. In the early 1990s it produced stickers with the slogan:

“Our Final Solution: Repatriation.”

When Nick Griffin modernised the party’s image, compulsory deportation became “voluntary repatriation” — but any non-whites who refused would be stripped of their citizenship and categorised as “permanent guests.”

The language evolved. The policy did not.

Tommy Robinson — real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — drew around 100,000 people to a far-right rally in London in September 2025. He has spent his public life advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants and Muslims from Britain. At that rally he told the crowd that:

“an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”

And now, in April 2026, both the Conservative Party and Reform UK are standing candidates across Ealing on platforms that include mass deportation schemes targeting hundreds of thousands of people.

Reform’s plan would disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention to achieve it. The Economist described both plans as “dangerously unrealistic.”

The Overton window has not just shifted. It has been smashed. Fascist policy is mainstream.

Southall has been here before

Southall knows this history in its bones.

On 23 April 1979 — St George’s Day, 46 years ago yesterday — the National Front held an election meeting at Southall Town Hall, in the heart of a community they wanted removed from Britain. They chose Southall deliberately. It was a provocation. The community knew it.

Blair Peach was 33 years old, a teacher of children with special needs at a school in East London, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party. In the months before Southall, he had twice been attacked by NF supporters while cycling home from work. On 23 April he travelled to Southall to stand with the community against the NF meeting.

Workers went on strike. Ten thousand residents signed a petition to cancel the meeting. Thousands marched. The Tory-run Ealing Council — compelled by the Representation of the People Act — allowed the meeting to proceed despite the community’s protests.

The police sent in 2,800 officers — 94 on horseback — to protect the National Front’s right to meet. Thirty fascists attended their meeting inside. By the end of the night, 345 people had been arrested. Dozens were injured. And Blair Peach was murdered, struck on the head by a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group.

No police officer was ever charged.

The internal police inquiry, suppressed for thirty years, concluded he had almost certainly been killed by one of six SPG officers who had preserved their silence.

Eight thousand people filed past Blair Peach’s body as it lay in state at the Dominion Cinema in Southall. Between five and ten thousand followed his coffin to East London Cemetery. A primary school in Southall bears his name. This April, his partner Celia Stubbs donated the full archive of materials relating to his death to the Bishopsgate Institute, where they are now publicly available.

Southall did not passively endure the far right. The community organised, and resisted.

And Labour? Surely Labour stood with Southall?

Many people will be thinking: but Labour stood with Southall back then, didn’t they? That was the difference. Labour opposed the far right.

Wrong.

It was Labour’s Home Secretary Merlyn Rees who refused to overrule the then Conservative Ealing council to ban the NF meeting. It was a Labour government whose response to Blair Peach’s death was to defend the Metropolitan Police.

The pattern goes back further. Labour abandoned its opposition to immigration control as early as 1962, when the party decided it could not afford to be seen as “soft” on the issue. By 1968 — the year of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech — Labour had already passed its own restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Act, creating a distinction between predominantly white British citizens and predominantly non-white Commonwealth citizens who could no longer claim to be British.

Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet for the rhetoric of his speech. The policy content was already bipartisan.

Individual Labour figures did stand with Southall. Neil Kinnock spoke at Blair Peach’s graveside. Peter Hain co-founded the Anti-Nazi League. Dozens of Labour MPs supported the anti-fascist movement.

The Labour Party as a governing institution did something different: it triangulated, accommodated, and refused to act.

The difference between then and now is not that Labour used to oppose restriction and now betrays its principles. It is that the accommodation has become the policy itself.

What the National Front demanded in 1974 — strip rights, detain, deport — is now being proposed in white papers and manifestos by national parties that between them hold almost every seat on Ealing Council.

What the national Labour government is doing right now

Ealing Labour’s attack on Grace Hunter was entirely justified in its condemnation of her remarks. But voters in Southall should know what the national Labour government has done since taking office.

It has doubled the qualifying period for permanent settlement from five to ten years.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has told migrants they must “earn the right to be in the UK” — language almost identical to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s framing of citizenship as “a privilege that is earned.”

This Labour government has stripped newly recognised refugees of permanent status, replacing it with temporary protection renewable every 30 months.

Labour is reviewing how UK courts apply the very European Court of Human Rights provisions that protect people from deportation to dangerous situations.

The Institute for Government is unambiguous: there is now “a race to toughen immigration controls among parties that lead the election polls.”

Only the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party nationally are defending a rights-based approach.

Peter Mason, leader of Ealing Council, said that the election should not be a choice between “extreme-Left and extreme-Right.”

He is right that Grace Hunter’s remarks represent something extreme.

But his own national Labour Party, whose governing National Executive Committee he sits on, is implementing policies that the Institute for Government describes as a fundamental departure from decades of consensus.

Southall residents are not obliged to choose between a party that says fascism loudly and a party that does fascism quietly.

A different approach is possible

Ealing Community Independents candidates in Southall wards are standing on a platform rooted in this community — its housing, its services, its right to transparent and accountable local government — without using our neighbours as political currency. They support Ealing Friends of Palestine’s campaign for council pension divestment. They will not compete to sound toughest in a race to the bottom that Southall has seen before and refused before.

Yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn — the former Labour Party leader who Ealing Labour leader Peter Mason did so much to undermine and oppose — visited to give his support, again.

On 7 May, Ealing voters will decide whose side they are on.

First They Came for the Socialists

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:45:22 +0100

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!

Canvassing with Minni Dogra: A Councillor in All But Name

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:27:40 +0100

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 incumbent in Ealing. So there is always hope.

I met Minni at the Brent Road end of Derley Road and we made our way down the odd numbers toward Caxton Road. Minni had her list of postal voters, a couple of clipboards, pens and stacks of brilliantly designed leaflets held together with elastic bands.

Councillor Jasbir Anand

As we set off — Minni doing all the work of knocking and talking, while I checked the postal voters register for each address — I noted Peter Mason’s fellow Southall Green ward councillor Jasbir Anand’s former home — and the site of the garage from which she ran an illegal food business for the better part of a decade. The story was broken by the Ealing Gazette’s Phil McCorkell way back in 1999.

The timeline, as reported by the Gazette, is precise. Anand had been preparing food — samosas and snacks supplied to local firms — from her dining room since at least 1991. She was given temporary planning permission in April 1993 to prepare cold food at her home. That was extended. In October 1996, she applied to use her garage permanently. Refused. She appealed. A government planning inspector rejected the appeal in September 1997. The council ordered her to stop and remove all equipment. She was still running the business more than a month later. A council disciplinary committee was convened but could not examine her conduct until it recruited outside members. Her comment to the Gazette:

“I have bought a shop in Southall and will be moving out very shortly.”

Fellow ward councillor Umesh Chander, who had just taken over as planning west chair, told the Gazette at the time:

“Councillors should show other people how to behave. This is setting a bad example. It seems she just wanted to carry on until someone complained.”

This was 1999. Anand had just been elected to Ealing Council with 2,018 votes — the highest of any candidate in Southall Green (or Glebe ward as it was then known) that year.

In 2006, Anand was in the news again. Her new shop was around the corner on Scotts Road opposite the Scotsman pub. Cllr Anand got into a lengthy legal dispute with her new neighbour, which eventually cost her £35,000 in damages. She paid up only under threat of bankruptcy.

A year later, Anand — allegedly — falsely accused the same neighbour’s daughter (who went on to be the world famous singer Tasha Tah) of assaulting her. Tah was arrested, but the case never went to court and she was cleared of any wrongdoing. Tah said she would sue Anand for “malicious prosecution”.

Responding to fellow councillors’ concerns about her behaviour, Cllr Anand said:

“I don’t care what people believe. I believe in my rights.”

Never mind her personal affairs, some will say. So what about her time in office?

In 2010, at a public meeting called by disabled adults protesting the closure of their day centre — a closure she was responsible for as cabinet lead for Adult Social Services — she told a room full of people in wheelchairs:

“I own half of Southall. I’m very popular. I got voted in so at least a few people must like me.”

Ironically enough, Anand is now the cabinet lead for crime and anti-social behaviour, and has been a councillor in Southall Green for 28 years. By my calculation she has received at least three quarters of a million pounds in councillor allowances during that time. Enough for ten children’s centres.

Her food business, AN&, now operates an upmarket coffee cart at Berkeley’s toxic Green Quarter development at a prime location opposite Southall station — a commercial relationship that her colleague Jags Sanghera — simultaneously Berkeley’s community engagement manager, chair of Southall Community Alliance, and a Labour candidate in Norwood Green — has helped to promote. That is a story for another day.

Minni Dogra

It is not easy talking to people on the doorstep. Many are just coming home or about to go out. Most are deeply sceptical. They have been let down too many times by politicians making and breaking promises to care much about voting.

Many feel disenfranchised, powerless, and resentful at the perceived — and often very real — unfairness of it all.

What they hear in the media, mainstream and social, is that their problems are caused by immigration, by benefit claimants, by their neighbours converting four-bedroom houses into HMOs with fifteen tenants, and rubbish in the street. Nobody knows who to complain to, or gets any response if they do.

Minni listens to all of it without judgment. She takes notes. She offers practical help and advice where she can. She is nothing if not completely grounded in the day-to-day reality of living in Southall.

In recent years she has campaigned to save Southall’s Crown Post Office, campaigned against the closure of ten of Ealing’s children’s centres (including three of six in Southall, the most deprived town in the borough), and secured a public inquiry into the legality of the compulsory purchase orders on The Green — orders designed to buy out small local businesses to make way for yet more residential tower blocks. The inquiry found the CPOs were legal, but the developer subsequently pulled out.

Minni Dogra is a councillor in all but name.

While she is standing in Southall Green under the ECI umbrella alongside her friends and neighbours Joe Bhangu and Jatinder Rajput, Minni regards her independence as a major asset. She cannot be bought and she does not blindly follow any party line.

This is one of the things I have noticed about ECI as an organisation: its leadership has managed to formulate policies that a broad coalition can support while still leaving room for genuine individual differences — and, occasionally, disagreements on priorities.

That is a very different offer from Ealing Labour and the “controlling” Peter Mason who permits no dissent at all.

Minni has a track record of campaigning on local issues that are important to people and small businesses in Southall and serving their interest, rather than her own. She has complete integrity and is committed to democratic decision-making in the council chamber, meetings and panels.

On wider issues that also affect all Ealing residents, she is committed to divesting Ealing’s pension funds from companies who provide weapons or otherwise support the senseless death and destruction in Gaza and elsewhere.

These are all strong differentials between her and all the Ealing Community Independent candidates, and their incumbent Labour Party opponents. For all their repeated talk and “On Your Side” sloganeering, it’s clear after sixteen years in power whose interests they really serve.