Reform expels London candidates over BNP links
Plus: When you'll know the election results, where Labour is playing defence, the Extinction Rebellion founder backing candidates in Lambeth, and the Reform MP still urging people to vote Tory.
We don’t often bother your inbox this many times in a single week. But it’s the eve of London’s local elections, the results could bring about the most seismic shift in the capital’s politics in a generation, and we’ve got a bunch of news to bring you.
At the end of this edition is your guide to when the results will come in.
As for voting, all you need to know is that you can vote at any time between 7am and 10pm on Thursday at your local polling station, which you can find here. While you do need a form of photo ID, you don’t need to take the paper polling card that came through your letterbox – so you can pop by on your way home from work.
Exclusive: Reform UK expels two BNP-linked candidates after London Centric investigation
Reform UK has expelled two candidates standing in Thursday’s local elections after London Centric discovered they appeared on a leaked British National Party membership list.
Membership of the BNP is explicitly banned by Reform, with all the party’s candidates having to sign a declaration saying they have never been part of the far-right organisation, which was at the peak of its popularity under the leadership of Nick Griffin in the mid-2000s.
Despite this, London Centric was able to link two Reform UK candidates standing in Thursday’s local council elections to a BNP membership list, which was published online by WikiLeaks in 2008.
Richard Law, who is standing for Reform UK in the Cricket Green ward of Merton, south west London, confirmed to us that he was the same Richard Law who appeared on the BNP membership list while living at a different address.
Darren Manning, who is standing for Reform UK in the nearby ward of Raynes Park, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He was also ejected from the party after we raised questions about his appearance on the BNP membership list.
A Reform UK spokesperson said the party had acted swiftly after being made aware of the connection by London Centric: “Mr Law and Mr Manning have been expelled from Reform UK after failing to declare their previous memberships of an organisation proscribed by the party.”
It is too late for their names to be removed from ballot papers. But Reform UK made clear they would not be welcome in the party, even if they are successful in winning a council seat in Thursday’s elections.
Nigel Farage, who has faced accusations of using racist language in his school days, has made a point of expelling anyone publicly associated with the BNP from parties he has led.
He said last year: “I do not allow former BNP activists into this party. That’s a golden rule. We want no links with extremism of any kind at all. It’s not going to happen under my leadership.”
Manning’s Facebook page features jokes about boosting the airline industry by sending illegal immigrants back home. The Chelsea fan interspersed pictures of him posing with former England captain John Terry alongside complaints about “two-tier policing” and a petition to “stop all immigration” until ISIS is defeated.
Our story raises questions about the thoroughness of Reform’s vetting procedures and whether any other candidates may have also slipped through the net. Reform UK faced a rush to get enough candidates to stand for the party after it surged in the polls.
Earlier this week, London Centric outlined how Reform could win big in the capital by focusing on London’s outer boroughs – in case you missed it, you can catch up here.
Thanks to all the London Centric subscribers who pay for our original investigative journalism about the capital – you make it all possible.
Where’s Labour playing defence?
One way to see which areas the party of government feels exposed in is to track where Labour has been sending its leading politicians. With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at the campaign diaries of three Labour big-hitters, who’ve been making flying visits to boroughs that only a few years ago the party would have been shocked to lose.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who outpolls his own party, has hit the campaign trail in Merton, Greenwich, Waltham Forest, Newham, Hackney, and on the Henry Prince Estate in Wandsworth, where he grew up.
While prime minister Keir Starmer has had limited involvement in the campaign, with visits to Southwark, his internal party rivals have been making trips from their northern constituencies to help out in the capital – where there are many party members who will decide the next leader.
Angela Rayner has taken trips to Lambeth, Dagenham, Haringey, and Newham. She released two separate videos of her trip to Southwark with the MP for Peckham, Miatta Fahnbulleh.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has turned up in Haringey, Islington, and Lewisham, three councils where there’s a genuine fear that Labour might lose control.
Correction: An early version of this post erroneously implied Keir Starmer had been sent out on the campaign trail more than he actually had. We apologise for the error.
But can they get out the vote on a sunny Thursday night in Hackney?
If there’s one thing that will decide the future of Labour in London, and how badly they are hit by a Green surge, it’s whether they can actually get their supporters to the polls. With expectations managed down to rock bottom, Labour will be attempting to spin anything other than a wipeout in inner London councils as a victory.
One Green politician told London Centric the challenge for Zack Polanski’s party is “winning the streets but not the estates”.
They said a lot of older Labour voters were reluctant to switch away from the party – but the Greens hope many will simply choose to stay at home and not vote at all, due to lack of enthusiasm. That said, many people will have already voted by post, with Labour having well-established operations for securing postal votes ahead of time. The Greens, who have seen a surge of enthusiastic new members following Zack Polanski’s election as leader, are playing catch-up on building the campaign infrastructure.
On Monday, as the rest of the city enjoyed the bank holiday, London Centric took a trip to one of the key electoral battlegrounds between Labour and the Greens: Hackney.
A Labour stronghold with an administration that’s never once lost the local mayoral elections, the borough is now a key target for the Green Party. And the fight is a personal one for Polanski, who calls the borough home and is eyeing up a run for a parliamentary seat in the area.
Online, Hackney Labour is attacking the Green Party hard, both on its record of running Bristol Council and on its national stances. It’s also focusing on local issues such as phone theft and street cleanliness. Both parties are claiming to be the only party that can stop Reform – even though Nigel Farage’s party isn’t actively campaigning in the borough.
Yet in terms of visible support, there’s one clear winner. When London Centric walked the length of Hackney, we saw only three Vote Labour posters in windows, but over 40 posters in support of the Greens.
The Reform MP still urging people to vote Conservative
A former Tory MP who defected to Reform UK is locked in a bizarre row with his old party in Romford.
Andrew Rosindell, who has represented the area since 2001, jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s party in January. He’s now facing a formal complaint from his former colleagues in the Romford Conservative Association for the “wilful deception of voters” over “misleading election communications”.
The complaint, made to the Electoral Commission, is over Rosindell’s refusal to remove 8ft signage of himself next to the words “Vote Conservative” from his former constituency office, known as Margaret Thatcher House.
Back in March, Rosindell lost a High Court effort to get back into his old office, after the Romford Conservative Association locked him out following his defection.
The Conservatives say they’ve instructed Rosindell to remove the misleading signs, but that he’s refused to do so, while threatening legal action against anyone attempting to remove them.
Dominic Swan, the chairman of the Romford Conservative Association, said: “We’re just sick of this farce.”
Tower Hamlets council spends £141,000 fighting LTNs
Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman and his Aspire Party are returning to the ballots with a continued promise to stand against low traffic neighbourhoods, or LTNs.
Back in January, the council lost a Court of Appeal ruling on the basis it had breached its duty to make its plans clear to the public. Rahman said he was “disappointed” in the ruling, adding that “once again it appears that local democracy doesn’t matter”.
A freedom of information request filed by London Centric has found that, as of 19th March, Tower Hamlets council had spent £141,822.50 on legal fees fighting the case. With Rahman announcing in February that the council had submitted its case for appeal at the Supreme Court, the legal bill could continue to increase.
Extinction Rebellion founder hoping to shake up Lambeth
It’s not just Reform and the Green Party looking to pick up discontented voters shifting their political allegiances this Thursday – the founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil might also make a difference.
In the south London borough of Lambeth, a group of independents called Shake It Up is contesting six wards, with candidates standing in Brixton, Clapham, and Stockwell. What’s not been widely reported is that they’re doing so with the help of Roger Hallam, a pioneer of direct action who founded both Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, and was imprisoned in 2024 for conspiring to disrupt traffic on the M25.
Brixton resident and Shake It Up candidate Ruby Bukhari told London Centric that the group began last December as a way to try and “get local people to go into politics and get people from the communities that don’t vote to go vote.”
She said that Hallam is an “expert in the strategy of mobilisation”, including on basic questions about how many flyers the group needs to put up, or how many times candidates need to knock on doors. Plus, he’s got a “love and enthusiasm for Brixton”.
While Labour is playing defence in Lambeth against the Greens and Liberal Democrats, Hallam has mobilised lots of people to come out door-knocking for Shake It Up. It’s hard to tell how many votes the group of independents will pick up, and which party they’ll be taking them off, all of which makes control of the borough even harder to call.
“The same issues and worries that we all share”: Reform’s pitch to ethnic minority voters
During last year’s local elections, Reform insiders argued that fielding candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds would be “pivotal” for the party to grow its voter base, particularly in big cities like London.
This Thursday, hundreds of the candidates Reform is fielding in London are from ethnic minority backgrounds. One of those is Paul Dhesi, 21, standing in the Plaistow ward of Bromley, where Reform UK hopes to take control.
In the 1960s, his grandparents moved to the UK from Sang Dhesian, a small farming village in India’s Punjab region. Indian on his father’s side and English on his mother’s, Dhesi considers himself mixed race.
Growing up in south London, he told London Centric he was drawn to Reform by the “illegal immigration problem”.
Asked whether Reform’s selection of candidates who have previously made racist statements was an issue for him, Dhesi said: “It doesn’t bother me at all. People need to stop listening to the mainstream media and start getting to know their Reform representative in person.”
“We’re the party that gets scrutinised the most. We’ve all said things in jest before, things that maybe we didn’t mean, or things we were joking about. We really need to bring back some sort of free speech.”
He said the assumption that black and Asian voters were naturally left-wing voters was “really not the case.”
“Minorities in this country, the ones that have come here legally and put roots down, made families, contributed to the economy, they share the same issues and worries that we all share, that even English people share.”
When asked if migrants like his grandparents would still be able to move to the UK under a Reform government’s policies, he said yes: “My grandparents are Sikhs. The Sikh community is the most integrated ethnic minority in the country. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you’ve got a lot of the time illegal immigrants that are of the Muslim faith that don’t integrate. That’s why you’ve got entire parts of the UK that have just been completely and utterly taken over by Muslims and Islam, and they’re not integrating.”
When will the election results come through?
Council seats in the capital’s 32 local boroughs are all up for election on Thursday. By the time you wake up on Friday morning, will you find out which party has dominated? Not quite.
Here’s the London Centric guide to timings, with the caveat that things are liable to change, given the possibility of recounts and delays.
Early hours of Friday morning
Some boroughs will immediately count the votes overnight after the polls close on Thursday, meaning that we’ll know the winners of Westminster, Wandsworth, Ealing, Sutton, Bexley, Kensington & Chelsea, Merton, Richmond upon Thames, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Havering by the time most of the city is getting up for work.
Friday afternoon
Winners of the mayoral elections in Hackney, Newham, Lewisham, and Croydon will be announced Friday afternoon, with the Tower Hamlets mayor declared in the evening.
Friday evening
The next set of results will start to come out over Friday afternoon and continue into the evening, covering Islington, Waltham Forest, Greenwich, Hillingdon, Harrow, Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Enfield, Hackney, Redbridge, Haringey, Hounslow, Camden, Kingston upon Thames, Lambeth, Newham, Southwark and Bromley.
Into the weekend
The final set of councils – Croydon, Lewisham, and Tower Hamlets – will declare on Saturday afternoon.
A lot of people seem reluctant to put up posters nowadays. I've seen one Labour poster in my area and that's it. Though on leaflets, the Lib Dems are winning on 19 different ones, compared to a late surge from Labour on 11 and the Greens on 1, in Streatham South. The LDs have put a lot of effort in locally since Keith Hill MP announced his retirement.
I was a bit worried to see your report that Starmer had visited Hammersmith and Fulham - where the Labour council are doing a terrific job, and don’t need a visit from that unprincipled chancer to taint them with his deservedly poor reputation.
Fortunately the link you supplied:
https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/starmer-visits-lyric-hammersmith-campaign-trail?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
refers to him visiting the borough in *2024*. Whew!