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How Newham Labour Lost the Campaign

Newham Labour’s 2026 campaign was not simply unsuccessful. It was strategically self-destructive.

At the centre of the campaign sat an extraordinary political decision: to make parking, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and opposition to active travel one of the defining themes of the election.

The flagship proposal — free first parking permits for every household alongside one hour of free parking borough-wide — amounted to a tax cut for motorists unprecedented in London local politics. No other borough currently offers such a policy. Nor does any major London political party advocate something similar.

The policy was introduced without meaningful consultation with sitting councillors or candidates, despite the campaign simultaneously criticising the Fiaz administration for failing to consult residents. More importantly, it fundamentally misread both the borough’s politics and Labour’s own electoral coalition.

Rather than neutralising anti-LTN sentiment, Labour instead gave salience and legitimacy to exactly the political terrain on which the Newham Independents wanted the election fought. Parking and LTNs became central campaign issues because Labour itself elevated them into central campaign issues.

This was politically disastrous.

As one now ex-councillor put it on X “Imitating the [Newham Independents] was such a bad move. We needed to stand out as different – and we didn’t.”

Grievance politics around LTNs and motorists tends to work best for insurgent outsider movements positioning themselves against “the voice of people” and “the establishment”. It is far harder for the incumbent party to wage that kind of campaign without simultaneously undermining its own credibility and record in office. 

Labour ended up in the absurd position of validating anti-council narratives while being the council.

At the same time, the campaign alienated a significant part of Labour’s own progressive and environmentally conscious voter base, particularly in the north and west of the borough. Stratford, Maryland, Forest Gate and parts of the Royal Docks contain large numbers of younger, graduate and environmentally minded voters who are generally supportive of active travel, clean air measures and safer streets.

Instead of consolidating those voters, Labour antagonised them.

The campaign repeatedly signalled hostility toward active travel schemes. LTNs and Healthy School Streets were discussed with open contempt. A Labour Group motion reportedly sought to halt new schemes. Candidates were discouraged from publicly defending them. Even support for clean air and cycling infrastructure became politically sensitive within the campaign.

The rhetoric often descended into culture war politics. “Middle-class elites”, lattes and Waitrose deliveries became recurring themes despite the obvious absurdity of deploying anti-metropolitan populism in one of London’s fastest-changing inner-city boroughs.

Meanwhile, the Greens understood precisely where Newham’s political trajectory was heading.

Rather than attempting to fight every seat, they focused on carefully selected target wards and expanded cautiously only as momentum grew. Their campaign was disciplined, strategically coherent and aligned with the demographics of the areas they were contesting.

Crucially, they openly defended active travel policies, including the Woodgrange and Capel Road LTN, while advancing policies such as weight-based parking permits that reflected a coherent environmental and urban policy framework.

The electoral results demonstrated the consequences of Labour’s strategic failure.

The Greens comprehensively held Stratford Olympic Park and then won Maryland, Stratford and Forest Gate South from Labour. In Forest Gate North, they topped the poll and secured one of the ward’s two seats.

These were not random losses. They reflect a political realignment already underway within parts of Newham. 

Labour had convinced itself it could tack sharply right on environmental issues because eco-conscious, socially liberal and younger voters had nowhere else to go. The campaign proved otherwise. The fact that the Greens won the two wards that include both the (allegedly controversial) West Ham Park LTN and the much-consulted-on-but-as-yet-undelivered Woodgrange /Capel LTN should give the new administration a clue as to what voters actually care about. 

The Newham 65 blog captured it perfectly: Forhad elected, but LTNs win

Operationally, matters were no better. The campaign was highly centralised and overwhelmingly focused on the mayoral candidate himself. Much of the literature delivered across the borough concentrated almost entirely on his personal story and profile rather than on local candidates or ward-level campaigns. Perhaps that focus explains why Labour retained the mayoralty while losing control of much of the council chamber. The campaign appeared structured around a presidential-style contest rather than the realities of fighting multiple hyper-local elections simultaneously.

The organisational culture reflected this centralisation. On polling day itself, candidates were reportedly instructed not to organise their own leaflets or canvassing operations locally, but instead to travel to a small number of central campaign hubs to collect literature and information about which polling districts to target. They were only given enough material for a limited number of rounds before having to return later to collect more. In practice, some candidates wasted significant time travelling back and forth during the most important day of the election campaign — time that could have been spent getting the vote out.

Basic campaign discipline also appeared absent. One Labour member remarked after the election that he had been canvassed four separate times by the same candidate despite already displaying a large Labour poster in his window. As he put it, the “basic tradecraft” of campaigning seemed to have disappeared.

Despite significant social media activity, much of Labour’s online output also appeared amateurish and unfocused. Campaign training around data collection and targeting quickly gave way to optimism bias and poor strategic discipline. Labour behaved as though nearly every ward remained competitive, with little meaningful prioritisation of resources despite clear warning signs that substantial losses were likely.

The Greens, by contrast, understood exactly which voters they were speaking to and exactly where victory was achievable.

Ultimately, Newham Labour fought a campaign rooted in nostalgia for an older political coalition that no longer exists. By centring parking and anti-LTN politics, it simultaneously strengthened its opponents’ narrative while fracturing its own support base.

It was not simply a poor campaign. It was a campaign that fundamentally misunderstood the borough, the electorate and the political moment.

Tags: Labour, Local Elections 2026

A Manifesto for a Borough That No Longer Exists

Newham Labour’s 2026 campaign revealed a party struggling to understand the borough it governs.

The problem was not simply individual policies, but a deeper strategic failure: Labour fought the election as though Newham were still the borough of the 2000s and early 2010s — politically homogeneous, socially static and electorally secure. As the results on Friday demonstrated, modern Newham is none of those things.

Over the past fifteen years, the borough has changed dramatically. Tens of thousands of new residents have arrived through large-scale development in Stratford, Canning Town, the Royal Docks and beyond. Entire new neighbourhoods have emerged around Hallsville Quarter, Stratford Waterfront and Silvertown Way. Population churn is high. Residents are younger, more transient and more politically fragmented than in previous decades.

This matters electorally. In the past, Newham Labour operated within what was effectively a one-party system. Political competition existed only at the margins. Practices such as “householding” — assuming everyone within a household supports the same party and recording them as such in canvassing returns — reflected both complacency and confidence in Labour’s electoral dominance.

But those assumptions no longer hold. New residents bring different political traditions, expectations and priorities. Voters are less tribal, less predictable and less loyal to political parties than previous generations. Socio-economic class is no longer the principal determinant of party allegiance (it’s education). Newham is now a genuinely competitive political environment.

Yet much of Labour’s political culture is trapped in the old reality.

The manifesto itself reflected this disconnect. Rather than offering a coherent vision for a modern, rapidly changing inner-London borough, it read like a collection of grievances about existing council policy combined with political nostalgia. It’s like the party wished the last eight years hadn’t happened.

Some proposals were poorly thought through or disconnected from policy reality. One pledge suggested seeking “local democratic control” over Newham General Hospital and community health facilities, raising obvious questions about whether the author understood how the NHS actually works. Another called for “culturally appropriate” approaches to diet and exercise without explaining what that meant in practice.

Most striking, however, was the manifesto’s approach to planning and housing policy. Proposals to reduce tall buildings, reshape density policy and significantly increase social housing requirements were fundamentally disconnected from both the London Plan and the economic realities of development viability.

Modern planning policy is not simply an expression of political will. Councils operate within legal, financial and strategic frameworks established through the National Planning Policy Framework and the Mayor of London’s London Plan. Attempting to dramatically increase social housing requirements without regard for viability – while politically desirable – risks stalling development altogether. Restricting density near highly accessible transport hubs directly contradicts London-wide growth policy.

The manifesto seemed unaware of these constraints.

More importantly, it demonstrated little understanding of the political geography of modern Newham itself. The borough now contains substantial populations of younger professionals, renters, graduates and environmentally conscious voters, particularly in Stratford, Forest Gate and parts of the Royal Docks. These groups are not naturally hostile to development, density or active travel. Indeed, many actively support them.

Yet Labour communicated as though these voters either did not exist or did not matter. It discovered on Friday that they very much did.

This reflected a broader institutional complacency. As discussed in the previous post, internal status and factional positioning were seen as more important than engaging seriously with the borough’s changing electorate. Winning Labour selection remained more important than winning public arguments.

The result was a campaign and manifesto that felt strangely detached from modern Newham: politically nostalgic, strategically outdated and intellectually shallow. Perhaps it’s for the best that the party never formally published the manifesto on its own website, which continues even now to display the 2022 platform alongside pictures Rokhsana Fiaz and her cabinet members.

The tragedy for Labour is that this decline was not inevitable. Newham remains a borough with enormous potential for progressive politics: ambitious housing policy, public transport, climate adaptation, clean air, active travel and economic inclusion. But that requires political imagination and strategic seriousness.

Instead, Labour offered a vision rooted increasingly in the past — to an electorate that has already moved on.

Tags: Labour, Local Elections 2026

The votes have been counted and the results are in. Labour has retained the mayoralty and remains the largest party on the council, but beneath that headline lies a starker truth: the party has endured its worst ever result in Newham. Forhad Hussain’s victory was achieved with just 30.4% of the vote – a huge drop from the 56.2% achieved by Rokhsana Fiaz four years ago. And the 26 seats on the council is less than half the number they were defending. 

What went wrong?

According to people I have spoken to, the first warning signs appeared long before polling day. They emerged during candidate selections, where factional manoeuvring and internal patronage appeared to matter more than competence, experience or public credibility.

Several deselections left sitting councillors deeply uneasy. A Black female councillor was removed amid a mixture of factional politics and personal hostility, while another was the subject of a strategically time complaint. In both cases, replacements were selected despite appearing less qualified or experienced.

At the same time, councillors who had previously broken the Labour whip — once treated within the party as a serious offence — remained in favour. Even more remarkably, Hanif Abdulmuhit who had expressed climate scepticism, congratulated an independent victory against Labour and campaigned for the Conservatives only two years earlier was re-selected as a Labour candidate. His wife – another former councillor – was also selected, despite a ‘rule’ applied to several others that married couples should not be both selected. ‘Standards’  became flexible when politically convenient.

The result was a perception of hypocrisy and stitch-ups. Increasingly, advancement appeared less dependent on merit than on factional usefulness, loyalty and personal connections. One councillor told me it resembled a patronage system rather than a modern political party.

This is not solely a local problem. Across London local government, experienced councillors are being sidelined while weaker but better-connected candidates advance. But Newham demonstrated the problem in particularly stark form.

At the centre of this culture was a small number of individuals outside of Labour Group exercising influence far beyond any democratic legitimacy. In the absence of a functioning local party – due to the five year-long suspension of the CLPs – London Region presided over selections. Environmentally-minded and left-leaning members were marginalised, while ideological flexibility was rewarded when politically expedient.

And then there’s the extraordinary influence granted to individuals with little meaningful modern local government experience. Despite the complexity of contemporary urban governance — housing delivery, transport planning, climate adaptation and regeneration — major strategic influence, including writing the 2026 manifesto, rested with people whose political instincts are rooted in an earlier political era. 

The consequences extended beyond the selections themselves. A broader climate of intimidation and ideological management emerged during the campaign. Candidates were reportedly discouraged from publicly supporting active travel policies or defending Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and Healthy School Streets. Some feared that even mild dissent from the mayoral campaign’s political direction could jeopardise future opportunities within the party.

This reflected a deeper and long-standing institutional problem. With the local parties suspended there is no space for ordinary members to discuss or debate policy. Detached from any sense of what the membership wants or thinks, internal Labour Group politicking became more important than policy or governance. Influence flowed not from expertise, delivery or public persuasion, but from factional positioning inside the party machine. Internal manoeuvring displaced serious political debate.

That culture may once have been survivable in a borough where Labour dominance was virtually guaranteed. But, as this election has demonstrated, Newham is no longer politically monolithic. It is more fragmented, more competitive and more politically diverse than at any point in its history. A party that selects candidates primarily through internal factional logic rather than electoral credibility is ultimately selecting for decline.

What emerged during these selections was therefore not merely a series of isolated controversies, but evidence of an internal political culture that had become insular, complacent and detached from the borough it seeks to govern.

Part 2 – Manifesto for a borough that no longer exists

Part 3 – How Newham Labour lost the campaign

Disclosure: I applied to be a Labour candidate at this election and was unsuccessful. The panel declined to pass me on the basis of two social media posts in which I criticised Keir Starmer (here and here). Feel free to judge the above accordingly.

Tags: Labour, Local Elections 2026