This week’s local elections in England are a theatre of new battles involving insurgent parties such as Reform UK and the Greens, but the old wars haven’t vanished completely.
The ward of North Harrow in London is a Tory pocket in a Labour area of a Tory borough in a Labour city – concentric circles of Britain’s old politics that have rippled out from a time before.
It is also the site of a fierce local battle that says much about the culture war and race-driven fault lines in British politics today, and what the old guard of the fractured two-party system have to say about them.
North Harrow is a settled suburban ward not far from the famous private school of Harrow (which is actually in a different nearby ward) that educated seven British prime ministers including Winston Churchill, five monarchs including Jordan’s king, and other famous names such as actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
The wider area has a large British-Indian Hindu population while the ward sits within the Tory-run Harrow borough council, one of the most ethnically diverse local authority areas in Britain.
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The ward, with its neat rows of Edwardian terraced houses and eclectic mix of small businesses, is currently represented by two Tory councillors, but one of those scraped in last time just five votes in front of Labour, and the other by barely 60.
It may be a Tory borough but the local MP is Labour’s Gareth Thomas, who was a minister under Gordon Brown. Despite its travails nationally and elsewhere in London, Labour senses an opportunity to inflict a micro-wound here on its traditional rival party.
Controversy has swirled around the contest in North Harrow, and also next door in the West Harrow ward (also on Thomas’s patch), over alleged racist and bigoted comments made by Tory candidates running in Thursday’s elections.
Will Jackson will still appear on Thursday’s ballot paper in North Harrow as a Conservative candidate, even though he was recently suspended by the party for a string of choice comments online, which Labour alleges were clearly “racist”.
In posts over several months recently on his X account, Jackson told a slew of British-born Labour MPs such as Blackburn’s Adnan Hussain (born and raised in Lancashire) to go “back to Pakistan”. Posts on his account suggested that prominent British politicians of Asian descent were “not British” – but his own party’s former leader is Anglo-Indian Rishi Sunak.
According to messages first revealed by Byline Times, in reply to a post showing a black woman committing a crime, Jackson’s account said “windrush is working out well then”. Windrush was a ship that brought Caribbean immigrants to Britain and is now used as a moniker for a generation of black people.
Jackson, it appears, is also no fan of the Irish community in London, which Labour activists have been hammering home in the Irish pubs of North Harrow such as the lively McCafferty’s, owned by former rally driver and Donegal man Declan Boyle.
Posts passed to The Irish Times show that in response to a message about UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s former top adviser, Cork man Morgan McSweeney, Jackson tweeted that “a foreigner should never be allowed that close to government”.
Another X user tweeted: “Name at least one thing invented by the Irish that significantly improved the world? Zero. If Ireland didn’t exist, no one would notice.” Jackson, via his X account, responded: “I agree with this.”
When the Republic’s football team was defeated on penalties by the Czech Republic in March, Jackson also went online to dismiss them as “England’s B team”. Harsh, if not entirely true.
Meanwhile, next door in West Harrow, Tory candidate Nathan Smith stands accused of posting in support of mass deportations and of showing support for anti-immigration agitator Tommy Robinson.
Smith is still running under the Tory banner, but Jackson, whose posts were criticised by his own party as “wholly unacceptable”, seems to be lying low.
Anna Turley, chair of the Labour Party, wrote last week to Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asking how both candidates had been selected and vetted. “Such remarks are plainly unacceptable and demean entire communities,” wrote Turley, a UK cabinet member.
Thomas told The Irish Times at the weekend that the Tories have given no reassurances that Jackson would not be readmitted to the party if he won.
“We are not convinced at all that the Tories are taking this seriously,” he said. With Jackson still on the ballot paper, he warned, he could still end up as a councillor.
The Greens are also running in the North Harrow ward, as is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But in a throwback to the old days, the real battle here is between the Conservatives and Labour.
Alongside the prominent British-Indian community, many voters in North Harrow are relatively comfortable, older white people.
Labour’s candidates Sechi Kailasa and James Watkins, say the biggest concerns they get on the doorsteps are over potholes, uneven paths that are a trip hazard, and a lack of benches at bus stops – not the race-driven issues raised by candidates such as Jackson.
As for the wider implications of England’s local elections for the stuttering prospects of Starmer, it will take more than a possible nicked win in an outer borough of northwest London to restore the UK prime minister’s fortunes.
“We’re fighting for every seat,” said Thomas. “Let’s see what happens.”