London Labour Party members in the Greater London Authority (GLA) City & East constituency have chosen Newham councillor Unmesh Desai as their candidate in next May’s elections. The decision was greeted with speculation about how many candidates will now come forward to challenge Labour at the polls.
Unmesh Desai was well known as a radical in London in the 1980s. A leading light of the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP) – at a time when questioning the Metropolitan police, especially on race issues, was not on the mainstream agenda – he was at the forefront of the capital’s anti-racist campaigning. He subsequently became a Labour councillor in Newham, in which role he quickly became a great supporter of Newham’s unpopular Mayor Sir Robin Wales. He also embraced the Government’s “Prevent” strategy of fighting radicalisation, leading its implementation – and fell out with the NMP, backing moves to cut Council funding to the organisation.
Unmesh is a surprise winner, as he did not appear to be well known outside his home borough of Newham – which is thought to be home to less than one third of the Labour Party members in the GLA constituency area. However, he led from the start – by a margin which suggests he managed to pick up votes from other constituencies despite his lack of an obvious team carrying out visible campaigning.
Desai won 666 first preferences (that’s an omen for you); Rocky Gill, a Barking & Dagenham councillor, won 550; and former Tower Hamlets councillors Abdal Ullah (262) and Motin Uz-Zaman (415) won 677 between them. In other words, each borough produced a similarly sized vote (split between the two candidates in Tower Hamlets).
The two candidates not from the City & East constituency had similar results: Hackney councillor Feryal Demerci on 139 first preferences, and Murad Qureshi, a Labour GLA councillor from the “top up” party list which operates in the proportional representation system, won 142. As these two were eliminated, one after the other, their second preference votes were distributed fairly evenly between the other candidates, a process which continued as the two Tower Hamlets councillors were eliminate in subsequent rounds.
The final result was that Unmesh Desai won 973 votes (53.3%) and Rocky Gill won 851 votes (46.7%): a ratio very similar to the first preference vote. It was Desai’s first round lead which won it for him – that and the absence of a popular candidate who could dominate across the second preferences.
Now Desai and his supporters in the London Region of the Labour Party will have to work out how to retain the GLA seat: it is one thing to marshall the votes of party members; but another thing to convince a more sceptical electorate. Much will depend on whether any independent candidates or other left of centre parties decide to stand – although it has to be said that the Corbyn victory and the boost it has given to Sadiq Khan’s mayoral campaign are good news for Labour’s GLA candidates.
One of the first decisions Desai will have to make about the campaign – if he hasn’t taken the decision already – is when (or whether) to resign his seat on Newham council. If he resigns just before next May’s election, the by-election for his seat could be held on the same day as the GLA elections. If he resigns it now, to free himself for GLA campaigning, he suffers a loss of income for the next few months and risks having to wait two years to try to get back on the Council if he loses the GLA seat. If he waits to see if he wins the GLA seat before resigning the Council seat, or if he just hangs on to the Council seat until the next scheduled elections in May 2018, he risks being dubbed a “two jobs”. Still, that strategy never did John Biggs or Steven Timms any harm.
•The full results can be seen on: http://www.labourinlondon.org.uk/london_assembly_seat_results
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