If someone had told me a few years ago, when I was at Kensington’s only comprehensive school, that Labour would soon stand a chance of winning the borough, I would have laughed. Council politics didn’t interest most of us, but it was and remains an unavoidably political community spanning cultures and classes – and fiercely proud of its diversity and compassion.
There are sharp divides in the borough: areas with Britain’s lowest incomes, and areas where houses cost 165 times the UK average. Yet despite all that you find common values across the area. After the Grenfell Tower tragedy last year, aid and support poured in from north and south, church and mosque, old and young, not just out of spontaneous feeling but out of existing, deep connections.
A recent leaked report exposed failures leading up to the horrors of 14 June, while the recovery effort has been slammed as “totally unacceptable” even by a Conservative minister.
For many of us who know the place, it fits with a broader culture at the council. There’s the time their bungled cost-cutting in disabled children’s transport left a boy hospitalised. Around the same time in 2014, the council poured taxpayer cash into a court case against a disabled former dancer whose care they refused to provide – until eventually being slapped down by European judges.
Their dire housing and planning record has been documented forensically by Labour’s Emma Dent Coad, and there are too many examples to list – proposed demolitions of multiple estates that sparked social cleansing fears, disastrous refurbishments leaving people in filthy conditions, proposals to ship tenants to Peterborough in 2013. Their attempt to flog Wornington College, where my mum worked for decades, to luxury developers, has persisted in spite of uproar.
The council has slashed vital local services from policing to youth centres over past years. Meanwhile, reports of malnutrition cases persist.
The council aims to convince voters it has changed course; replacing leaders and deselecting councillors. But the culture and most personnel remain – recently a survey was circulated to ask residents to rank how much they cared about Grenfell on a scale of one to ten. Other than these incidents you wouldn’t know the tragedy had happened from the Tories’ local election output – where glossy social media content glosses over the issue almost immediately.
The borough of the Notting Hill Carnival, Portobello Market, of cutting edge museums and universities, a thriving LGBTQ+ scene in Earls Court and of communities from across the world ranging from the Windrush generation (according to Coad, the council is currently threatening to evict a Windrush citizen over immigration status) to Kosovan refugees, deserves better than this failed council. Beyond that, if a message is sent that the safest of political heartlands are no longer safe, it will force other areas to raise their game.
But Labour did not win general election victories in Thameside seats from Reading to Canterbury via Kensington only because people were sick of Tories. Labour’s manifesto inspired people. Now local manifestoes, including Kensington and Chelsea Labour’s, are presenting a vision of how a different, inclusive, community-led style of local government could look. Change is coming.
A strong sense of local identity defines most places. That is true even in transient London, where Labour is harnessing the power of localism. This includes a programme that actively intervenes to keep existing communities together, through new council homes and the involvement of local people in planning – including the power to reject council proposals in a ballot. Plans to invest in the local economy echo those of forward-thinking Labour councils like Preston, who kept £200m in the local economy through council buying power and planning. It includes bringing local services back in house where they are democratically accountable. It includes – of course – emergency funding for neglected areas from policing to health. And it paints a picture of a council that empowers all communities rather than just imposing policy.
These council elections are about the everyday basics of life, about parking and bin collections. But they’re also about the future of the places we live. From Carlisle to Chelsea, we have a chance on 3 May to vote Labour to send a message to a failing national government while taking back control of our own communities.