Author Archives: Mark Pack

Pardes Weekly is turning out to be the most lively local newspaper during the Ealing Southall by-election. You might be hard-pressed though to work out their view of the Labour campaign from the latest edition:

Now that the lists of candidates are in and finalised in the Sedgefield and Ealing Southall by-elections, the extent of the Conservative splits in Ealing is clear. For one of the independent candidates is Gulbash Singh, a former Conservative member and – as recently as May 2006 – Conservative candidate in Ealing. In fact, he polled the highest number of votes of any Conservative council candidate in the Southall end of the constituency in 2006.

With all these troubles, it’s no wonder one of their activists has called for the Tories to run a campaign of lies.

After all the infighting in the Labour Party over their Ealing Southall candidate selection, it’s perhaps no surprise that the Ealing Labour Party’s official website – www.ealinglabour.com – isn’t saying anything about their candidate:

As the screenshot above shows, there’s no story about his selection, whilst doing a search on his name rather nicely simply gives the message “Insert content here”:

Who knows, perhaps the website is run by …

This from the latest edition of Pardes Weekly, one of the local papers in Ealing, talking about the Labour candidate Virendra Sharma’s activities just before he was selected:

With both Labour and Conservative infighting over their candidate selections, the prospects for Nigel Bakhai are looking better and better.

After all Labour’s Ealing Southall selection problems, it’s Virendra Sharma.

From (presumably) a Labour party member:

I was at the meeting last night and it was a disgrace to local democracy. As you say, as soon as the two candidate shortlist was announced, the regional director was subjected to continuous heckling, to the point that ‘heavies’ were brought in to threaten protestors with ejection from the room.

Happy days if you’re a Labour member clearly.

Hot on the heals of the Conservative Party’s trouble over the imposition of Tony Lit as their candidate in Ealing Southall, we have fun and games in the Labour Party too.

Ealing Southall was originally going to have an All Women Shortlist for Labour, something strongly backed by Piara Khabra before his death who had wanted to be followed by a female Labour MP when he retired.

But that was scrapped when he died and the by-election was called. Amongst those campaigning for the Labour selection was Sonika Nirwal, who was clearly taking the selection seriously given how glossy her selection leaflet …

The betting books are open and the verdict of the punters so far? The Liberal Democrats are the best bet to take the seat from Labour.

These odds are aided no doubt by today’s news of the switch of a key Conservative activist to the Liberal Democrats, unhappy with David Cameron’s leadership and the way their candidate, Tony Lit – described as “controversial and high risk” by an Ealing Tory councillor – was foisted on them.

Doubtless …