Julian Gallant: Fighting for the Conservative cause in Ealing

Cllr Julian Gallant is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Ealing Council.

I represent Ealing Broadway Ward. That includes the key shopping streets, the station, Haven Green, and enough Conservative voters to have kept the ward blue for as long as anyone can remember.

The picture for us across the Borough is rather different. We used to have Hanger Hill (you’ll have sworn at traffic on the gyratory) but have lost two out of three seats to the Lib Dems. So that’s four Tories left, 20 years since we took control of the Council under the firm hand of one Jason Stacey. Today Labour holds 59 out of 70 seats, but we fight hard and we maximise our influence. Occasionally, we have little successes like preventing new controlled parking zones in Greenford. But we simply must win more seats and never lose the ambition to retake control.

Ealing is big and diverse. Labour has promoted the idea of seven towns, namely Ealing, Hanwell, Southall, Greenford, Northolt, Perivale and Acton. They are attempting to turn these into a de facto tier of local government, with officially recognised community forums (aka “Your Voice Your Town”) which control small budgets of £80,000-£150,000 by demographic proportion. The problem with this is that the town leaderships aren’t democratically elected, or even officially chaired. Neither do residents think in “towns”; people living in Chiswick W4 don’t relate to issues affecting residents in NW10, but they are all part of “Acton”.

The Borough is astonishingly diverse, which is the bit I love. I’ve got a bunch of Hong Kong residents who march through Ealing every autumn with a lit dragon. St. James’ Church is a big old barn in West Ealing, empty and derelict for years and earmarked for demolition. It’s recently been completely renovated and reconsecrated as St. Marys’ Cathedral, Assyrian Church of the East. What a result!

Development is happening apace in certain areas like the old South Acton Estate, now Acton Gardens, and The Green Quarter in Southall, but it is hampered in other places. You have buildings left unfinished by Henry Construction, chosen by several London boroughs on price alone but which went spectacularly bust in 2023. Demolition is the only option now. Building costs are a major problem everywhere, as is the much-reduced demand for office space. That’s a shame, because office workers must eat lunch and patronise shops, and Ealing is exceptionally well served by public transport.

Labour’s national policy of hiking Employer NI and reducing the business rate discount has seriously harmed small businesses in the Borough. (Mel, can we really offer to completely cut business rates for shops and clubs? Wow!) Labour locally runs a fairly tight ship, avoiding some of the wilder commercial risks taken by other authorities. There are some extravagances like the Lido project, which has cost £250,000 just to scope, and I’ve seen fanciful projects mooted like garden bridges over the M40. Balancing that, the Cabinet recently closed a number of Childrens’ Centres, and the Council is permanently trying to extract more money from residents in the form of PCNs, FPNs and chargeable services. You can get a £1000 littering fine for putting your rubbish out on the wrong day!

The real weakness of the Labour-run Council is its planning regime. Get off the Elizabeth Line at West Ealing and you see a 21-storey tower going up like a sore finger. The Planning Committee voted that down in 2021 but the Planning Inspector approved it on appeal. The John Lewis Partnership submitted plans for a huge development on the other side of the tracks, but negotiations with the Council broke down over the insufficient amount of affordable housing on offer and the case moved up to the Planning Inspector again. Ealing declined to contest on the grounds of actual and potential cost and the building was approved. Thousands of Ealing residents are going to be overlooked and overshadowed by a monolithic apartment building with three towers taller than Big Ben.

There’s a permanent war on drivers, a mark of a Labour council. They recently have rolled out an irritating little policy called Stop and Shop+; drivers can park free for 30 minutes on shopping parades, but they have to register on a mobile phone. It’s unnecessary and finicky, especially for elderly residents.

Our Conservative councillors and activists are fully aware of the national picture. We’re already campaigning hard in next year’s council elections hard, with emphasis on keeping the seats we have and advancing in very targeted areas. We’ve got some brilliant new and younger candidates working hard in places like Greenford, where little effort has been made for years. There are plenty of voters out there who feel ignored by Labour, are suspicious of Reform, haven’t heard of the Lib Dems, and are delighted by the very practical and personalised attention that the Conservatives offer.

The Lib Dems are aggressively targeting new seats with dirty smear politics against incumbents and very few genuine ideas. For a Lib Dem the most important thing is simply to secure the voter, and they are right! Conservatives should think “voter” and not “voting intention”.

Reform is planning to field a full slate of candidates. We saw them pushing quite hard in last year’s by-elections. There’s to be no complacency about this. Anyone who’s met Nigel Farage knows how genuinely personable he is, even if you whole-heartedly disagree with him like I do. In my ward, a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour, who may win through the middle without even campaigning. If Reform hadn’t interfered in the London Elections 2024, we’d have won the Ealing-Hillingdon London Assembly seat.

Conservatives aren’t doing too badly in London, and we in Ealing are hugely inspired by the results in next door Harrow. There is no better example than Bob Blackman, of an MP who really values his local Conservative councillors.

Our fight is on. Come and help!