Home » Politics » Weavers result: Ken bounce benefits breakaway Labour
Tower Hamlets Council has announced that the result of the by-election in Weavers Ward is:

Weavers result: Ken bounce benefits breakaway Labour

Tower Hamlets Council has announced that the result of the by-election in Weavers Ward is:

Alan DUFFELL Green Party  373 votes
Caroline June KERSWELL Conservative Party  415 votes
Azizur RAHMAN Liberal Democrats  208 votes
Abjol MIAH Respect 1260 votes
John Paul PIERCE Labour Party 1544 votes
Oli ROTHSCHILD Independent    36 votes

Labour benefited from having the by-election on the same day as the vote for London Mayor and Greater London Assembly (GLA). The turnout in the ward was a massive 44.6% – way above the usual turnout in a by-election.  John Pierce would also have benefitted from the immense amount of Labour propaganda going out in support of Labour’s London Mayoral candidate, the popular Ken Livingstone, which would have encouraged voters to vote Labour down the line when they reached the polling booth.

To be on the safe side, Labour put out a simple message that a vote for Respect candidate Abjol Miah would have been a vote for George Galloway and (by implication) only Labour could prevent the ward from having George Galloway as their local councillor.  This is clearly an exaggeration: Abjol Miah has a record as a hardworking local councillor and, even if Labour doesn’t like his anti-war stance or his anti-cuts work, he isn’t “the wicked man who took the parliamentary seat that was her birthright away from Our Oona (who favoured ‘sensible’ policies like means-testing Child Benefit, which the Tories are now introducing)”.  It remains a mystery why Abjol Miah refrained from circulating an eve of poll leaflet saying “Vote John Pierce; and you’ll get Tony Blair”.

For that is what the voters of Weavers have got.  Now, it’s not that he’s about to invade Iran or sell off Whitechapel Tube station to a spiv from Canary Wharf (as far as we know).  But Pierce is part of the “student union” faction which runs the local Labour Party.  This is the faction which would like to take over the Labour Group, where its members are already behaving like a separate group by submitting their own complaint to the Electoral Commission about allegations of fraud in Spitalfields (following the Andrew Gilligan campaign on the issue).

Pierce has benefitted from his close association with the leadership of the local Labour Party in two ways.  First, he was chosen ahead of all the party officers and local members to lead the campaign against the closure of Rushmead which was in the Budget proposals at the start of the year.  While Pierce was organising the campaign to get signatures on a petition to stop Mayor Rahman closing Rushmead, Cllr Stephanie Eaton was in the Town Hall, lobbying the Mayor and securing his agreement to find alternative ways to balance the budget.  Just before Pierce organised a mass rally of 40 people against the closure, the Mayor announced that the closure would be reconsidered.  Pierce was campaigning on the basis that local people needed a local facility: an argument many residents put forward when Labour began closing housing offices and one-stop shops and which Labour disregarded at the time.  Nor did Pierce admit that the closure of Rushmead had actually been under consideration by Labour’s Administration several months before.  The inconsistencies did not matter:  local party bosses backed Pierce to front the campaign and he was able to gain his first frontline campaign badge earned during his time in the borough, which he could quote during the Weavers campaign.

Second, Pierce was able to become the candidate in a selection procedure which is replicated nowhere else in the Labour Party.  The Labour Party has for at least five years chosen by-election candidates only from the panel of potential candidates drawn up before the scheduled elections at the start of the Administration.  Members not on that panel have never been considered as by-election candidates during that time – and this was the case in the Spitalfields by-election a couple of weeks before the Weavers one.  But when local party bosses wanted Pierce to be the candidate in Weavers, the fact that he was not on the May 2010 panel was cast aside as party bosses suddenly discovered that opening the selection up would allow them access to a wider range of potential candidates.  The Party has also had a dogmatic policy of standing at least one woman in every ward during the scheduled elections.  The spirit of this policy was cast aside when Labour chose a male candidate to replace the female Labour Councillor whose resignation caused the vacancy.  Finally, instead of letting Labour Party members in Weavers chose their own candidate, Labour drew up an ad hoc team to confirm that Pierce would be the candidate.  This included party officials and the Leader of the Labour Group, who selected newly rehabilitated Graham Taylor (who lives in the war) to join them on the selection team to provide local input.

Labour was able to time Cllr Lynch’s resignation so that the by-election occurred on 3rd May and their by-election candidate benefited from the “Ken bounce”.  However, to keep their seat in this ward they also had to throw every bit of human resources at the seat – leaving other polling districts and even whole wards virtually without a Labour presence in the campaign and on polling day.  The Labour vote came out in Weavers, but the Labour vote was left to its own devices across much of Tower Hamlets.  Ken Livingstone needed those votes, and he didn’t get them as the Borough’s party leadership concentrated on Weavers and left the rest of the Borough to its own devices.  Ironically, the said Graham Taylor refused to join a Labour campaign session for Livingstone in his own ward, famously texting the ward organiser “I’d rather stick hot needles in my eyes.”  Yet Taylor showed no reluctance to benefit from the Livingstone vote when it came to the local candidate he favoured.

Politics remains on a knife edge in Tower Hamlets.  Technically, the political composition of the council is 32 Labour, 9 independent, 7 Conservative, 2 Respect, and 1 Liberal Democrat.  Thirty-four votes are required to stop the Mayor’s budget, so Labour can, on paper, combine with the Conservatives to do this – on the sophisticated grounds that both parties hate Lutfur Rahman.  However, the Labour numbers include several councillors who are technically suspended from the Group because they have broken with petty vitriol and preferred to co-operate with the Mayor.

Labour kept its seat in Weavers with a huge effort they will not be able to replicate across the Borough in future elections.  A Respect candidate, in two solid weeks campaigning, ran them a close second with 1,260 votes.  And there’s the battle of the Labour Group AGM to come, which will see further splits and fractures in the Borough’s largest political group.  They have kept this seat, but it is unlikely that Labour councillors are sleeping peacefully in their beds this Bank Holiday weekend.

4 comments

  1. “Labour was able to time Cllr Jackson’s resignation so that…” Surely you mean Cllr Lynch?

  2. To be fair the Weavers by-election should have been a walk in the park for Labour, it wasn’t.

    Abjol came very, very close. Of course Labour will enjoy the fruit of victory but when is all said and done “Labour holds safe seat” is all that has happened.

    Given all the fuss made by Gilligan et al regarding postal vote fraud in Spitalfields I have not read any reports of postal vote fraud in Weavers, strange that, don’t yer think?

  3. You should be referring to him as Cllr Pierce not ‘Pierce’ it’s rude ELN. I don’t think he was headhunted by anybody for the grand task of running the Rushmead campaign but I might be wrong on that one.

    ELN: “But Pierce is part of the “student union” faction which runs the local Labour Party”.

    I love that quote it made me laugh. I do agree with some of your points though. It’s a shame that we lost two women and ended up with two men – gender balance always goes out the window in the Labour party and I hope some of our female delegates make a fuss about it at the AGM. Meh. We won’t have to wait long since Cllr Kabir auto-expelled himself twice in a month they’ll be an opportunity to have a female Labour candidate in there soon.

    I suppose the selection process is odd but in 2010 all our candidates were imposed and we had our best ever result so there’s no correlation between democratic procedures and a good result for the Labour Party. I don’t know why we bother with democracy at all forget about it, we ought to have saved on the stamps and just imposed him.

    A tad mean to attack the guy less than 24 hours after he won …

    @Stuart a wins a win?

  4. Stuart Madewell

    Comparing the Weavers by-election result with the local elections in 2010 shows the following;
    Labour’s percentage share of the vote rose from 37.6% to 40.3%.
    Respect increased their share from 17.9% to 32.8%
    Lib dems were the big losers from 25% to 5.4%
    Labour gained 2.7% Respect gained 14.9% while the Tories gained 2.5%. The Greens lost 1.5%

    So Labour did not gain as much from the Lib dem collapse as Respect! Bear in mind that Weavers formed part of the base of Lib dem support in the eighties when the Liberals ran the council, it has a traditional white working class culture and the Liberals played their ‘Sons and daughterrs’ housing policy in this ward.

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