A local Labour activist is blaming the party leadership for their by-election loss in Uxbridge last week, saying they ran a bad campaign. Labour had wanted to win Boris Johnson’s west London seat, sending in Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to help candidate Danny Beales, above, but fell short. They have blamed the Ulez expansion, which aims to make air cleaner by taxing polluting cars.
Now Norrette Moore, a veteran member of the local constituency Labour Party, has written a piece for Labour List attacking the party for shutting out residents, saying they were “not given the full opportunity to be proactively involved and provide the local insight we had to offer”. Moore says that flip-flopping on Ulez was a major factor. “What almost always has a detrimental impact is to appear to change your mind mid-campaign,” she writes. During a hustings, Beales came out against Sadiq Khan’s Ulez expansion.
