Many recent London local election outcomes were close, but none were closer than Barnet’s. Labour, which had been in control since 2022, ended up with 31 seats. The Conservatives, who had previously been in control of Barnet throughout its entire history, ended up with 31 seats too. Barnet has 63 council seats in total. A single Green completed the Town Hall line-up. Who would end up being in charge? How would that be determined?
Decision day was Tuesday 19 May, when councillors would gather at Hendon Town Hall for the council’s Annual Meeting at which its next leader would be appointed. All concerned pondered and projected.
Both Labour and Conservative sides had candidates ready to be nominated for the leadership role: the former wanted Barry Rawlings, leader of the previous, majority administration, to continue at the head of a new, minority one; the latter wanted their group leader, Peter Zinkin to take the helm.
Barnet Council leaders are, as is usual, elected by a simple majority vote. However, it can take more than one round of voting to find a winner. That is because at the Annual Meeting each nominee is voted on individually, one at a time. If a majority of councillors vote in favour the first nominee for their consideration, that nominee becomes the leader and that is that. But if a majority votes against that first contender, the next nominated person is voted on.
Plainly, much would depend on what the sole Green councillor chose to do. Charli Thompson, Barnet’s first ever Green councillor, held the balance of power between the two large party groups.
If all 63 councillors turned up, with the 62 who were Labour or Conservative guaranteed to vote in favour of their respective party nominees for the leadership, Thompson would be in a position to use her single vote to get either Rawlings or Zinkin across the finish line by 32 votes to 31, or thwart either, or thwart both. That last possibility would, if it occurred, leave the council unable to elect a leader on the night and an impasse ensuing.
Thompson also a had further option – to abstain from voting on the leadership. Doing that would bring about a 31-all draw. In such situation, a different tie-break scenario would come into play. Full meetings of the council are chaired by the borough’s civic mayor, a councillor elected by his or her peers. The mayor’s duty is to chair impartially. However, if a voting deadlock occurs, they can use their casting vote – effectively, a second personal vote – to break it. The incumbent mayor was Labour councillor Danny Rich.
You do the maths. Barnet’s councillors certainly did. And here is how the events of Tuesday evening’s Annual Meeting unfolded.
Nominations were made and seconded from the floor, with Rich presiding (pictured, centre). The first nominee to be voted on was Zinkin, the Conservative. All 31 Conservative councillors voted for him. All 31 Labour councillors voted against him. The Green councillor did the same. And so, Zinkin was rejected by 32 votes to 31. The mayor’s casting vote was therefore not required.
Then came the vote for Labour’s Rawlings. All 31 Labour councillors voted for him. The Green councillor Thompson voted against him. And the 31 Conservative councillors? All of them abstained, leaving Rawlings the clear winner by 31 votes to one and appointed leader of Barnet Council again.
What had happened behind the scenes?
Two ways of looking at it have been offered. One way, articulated and held in common by Tory and Labour councillors, is that they had an obligation to minimise the risk of instability and disruption created by the exceptionally close result of the recent council elections.
At the meeting, Labour’s Ross Houston, proposing Rawlings, said he had “always supported collaborative working when it’s possible” while also maintaining that a principle behind mayors’ use of casting votes is maintaining continuity. For the Conservatives, Richard Cornelius referred to “collaborative working, which will be very new for Barnet” and described as “quite something” an “administrative agreement in order to deal with what has happened”.
That agreement, already hammered out, included the unsuccessful party group leader (who would turn out to be Zinkin) being allowed to attend the leader’s cabinet meetings and have input into discussions, and the opposition group (which would turn out to be the Tories) having better opportunities to scrutinise decisions before they were taken.
Unsaid at the meeting but understood to be the case was a keen awareness of the power the Green councillor possessed to bring about instability and disruption if so minded, not only in the matter of the leadership appointment, but also thereafter for as long as she held the balance of power.
Barnet Conservatives said as much in a statement they released after the Annual Meeting: “We were not prepared to enter any arrangement that would hand the single Green councillor disproportionate influence over the borough’s future and leave the administration of the borough in complete chaos.”
The order in which the leadership votes took place can perhaps best be understood in the context of the agreement the Tory and Labour groups arrived at.
The Conservatives had been very keen for the Zinkin vote to take place before the Rawlings vote, believing this was the only way they could be certain they could make the case for Zinkin at the meeting. Their calculation was that had the Rawlings vote happened first, he would probably have secured a majority, either because Thompson voted in his favour, judging him the lesser of two evils, or because Rich’s casting vote would have got Rawlings over the line if Thompson abstained.
There was also the possibility of Thompson voting against Rawlings, leading to his rejection and a vote on Zinkin then taking place anyway. Far better, though, from the Tories’ point of view, to pre-empt all vicissitudes by getting the Zinkin vote at the front of the queue of two. Victory would only be secured in the unlikely event of Thompson voting in Zinkin’s favour, but at least the argument for a Conservative leader would get a hearing.
I’m told the order of voting was settled on not by Rich, but by officers and party group negotiators, including Labour’s, for which it represented a degree of risk. What if Thompson did indeed voted for Zinkin, thereby handing the leadership to him?
As it turned out, the way Thompson actually voted on Zinkin reinforced the Conservatives’ rationale for facilitating the appointment of Rawlings if and when Zinkin was unsuccessful. It was not a guarantee that she would also vote against Rawlings, potentially creating a no-leader impasse. But it made no difference that she did so, because the Tory bloc abstention pre-empted such a void being opened up.
This brings us to the other way of looking at what transpired on Tuesday evening – Thompson’s way. In a speech from the floor she argued that “across Barnet residents feel deeply disconnected from how decisions are made and increasingly frustrated by a political culture that too often manages the status quo rather than confronting the scale of the challenges we face”.
She referred to “constitutional changes” being made in Barnet that, in her view, would exclude the public and her from participating in democratic processes and scrutiny, and she claimed to have approached, without success, both party groups “constructively and in good faith to discuss how we might work differently in a council with no overall control”. She described Labour and the Tories as “teaming up” to maintain the status quo.
There is, though, a deeper backdrop to Labour and Tory Barnet’s reluctance to engage with Thompson and her party. Thompson was, until quite recently, a Labour party member in Barnet. Jewish News has reported her acknowledging being an admirer of Jeremy Corbyn, whose leadership of Labour caused a fall in support for that party in much of Barnet due to his views about Israel and his, in some eyes, poor attitude to Jews.
Barnet has more Jewish residents than any other local authority area in England and many of its councillors are Jews. The Annual Meeting’s opening prayers were delivered by a rabbi. Mayor Rich, himself a rabbi, spoke about the recent spate of antisemitic attacks that have taken place in the borough, noting also that Barnet has the largest Iranian community in the country and that it has come under attack too. Houston, in his speech, mentioned that an antisemitic attack had taken place in his ward. Zinkin represents Golders Green, where some of the most shocking have taken place. “All of us need to maintain our vigilance against hate in all its forms,” Rich said.
Green politicians in other parts of London have been accused of expressing, endorsing and spreading antisemitic attitudes. Prior to the 7 May elections, two Green candidates in Lambeth were arrested on suspicion of doing so. Both were eventually suspended by the party. But if Thompson wants to persuade her Barnet colleagues to engage with her ideas for changing how the council operates, she might have a bit of work to do.
As for the Labour and Tory groups, they regard themselves as having acknowledged the implications of the exceptional closeness of the election result, in which the Tories got a larger share of the popular vote than Labour and missed out on a seat in one ward by just eight votes. There seems to be a healthy amount of goodwill and trust behind the Labour-Tory agreement. “We have to make it work,” said Cornelius, before quipping: “Until the first by-election.”
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