Weavers result: Ken bounce benefits breakaway Labour

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

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.