A rebellion against Labour has broken out in Leicester. Sir Peter Soulsby, the City Mayor, has so infuriated a considerable number of his supporters that they have left the party and are campaigning for a Conservative victory in the local elections in just over three weeks’ time.
On Saturday I visited Leicester and talked to some of the Tory candidates, among them former Labour councillors, who are taking on Soulsby. There is no way of knowing how successful they will be, but the energy, ebullience and conviction they bring to the task of defeating him are striking.
One of them said it has stopped being “embarrassing” to admit in Leicester to being a Conservative. Rishi Sunak, the UK’s first Hindu Prime Minister, is regarded with pleasure in a city where almost half the inhabitants are of Asian descent.
With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the assumption at Westminster has been that the Conservatives are bound to lose some of the Red Wall seats they captured in December 2019, and the only question is how many.
Seen from Leicester, that assumption looks less certain. The city’s three parliamentary seats were all retained by Labour in 2019, but in Leicester East the party’s majority fell from 22,428 in 2017 to 6,019 in 2019, in Leicester West from 11,060 to 4,212, and only in Leicester South did the party maintain in 2019 a commanding lead of 22,675 votes, not much down from the 26,261 of 2017.
Claudia Webbe, who succeeded Keith Vaz in Leicester East, has since been expelled from the Labour Party, after being convicted of harassing a woman who was her rival in love, and sits as an Independent.
And Soulsby has fallen out with a substantial number of his Labour colleagues, who held all but a handful of the 54 seats on the council, but complained – see below – that he never consulted them.
Soulsby, who is 74 and has served as the directly elected City Mayor ever since the post was created in 2011, indicated to his colleagues that this May he intended to step down, but then changed his mind and said he would carry on, to the fury of those who could not wait to see the back of him, four or five of whom hoped they would win the battle to succeed him.
Last month an uprising ensued, in the form of a motion to abolish Soulsby’s office and revert to the election of the council leader by the councillors. This motion failed, but 19 Labour councillors who had voted for it were told by the National Executive Committee they could not stand again as Labour candidates this May.
Soulsby’s authoritarian behaviour in the city had been backed by authoritarian behaviour at national level: under Keir Starmer’s leadership, dissent is crushed.
Six Hindus, four Muslims and one Christian of Indian descent were among the 19 councillors barred from standing again. Many of the 19 expressed disgust at the way they had been treated.
Will the voters of Leicester yet again endorse Soulsby’s leadership, or will they too feel they have been taken for granted by Labour for too long?
Richard Tutt, Chair of Leicester Conservatives, picked me up from Leicester Station on Saturday morning and we set off on whirlwind tour of the city.
“Leicester has disintegrated under Soulsby,” Tutt said. “We have an opportunity to do something here, and personally I think we’ll make huge inroads.”
The Conservatives have said that if they win the election, within a year they will abolish the post of City Mayor. They blame Soulsby for bad rubbish collection, unmended potholes, selling or renting out council property for derisory sums, planning to build on green spaces which are dear to the hearts of existing residents, failing to attract investment, neglecting most of the city and concentrating on a few wasteful prestige projects in the centre.
Hemant Rae Bhatia, from Beaumont Leys ward, who last month defected to the Tories along with his fellow councillor Paul Westley, said with deep feeling that leaving Labour was “a load off my chest, a weight off my shoulders”.
He joined the party in 2005 and found, while serving from 2015 as a Labour councillor, that
“either you comply with the decisions of the City Mayor and his team – he runs the show – or you’re sidelined, you have no say.
“Even when Jeremy Corbyn was there, and I have zero liking for the man, he still did not do what Keir Starmer’s people have done, he did not deselect anyone.
“How can you trust someone who talks about democracy but then bulldozes through their own agenda? It’s all political opportunism. I don’t think people can trust Keir Starmer and his set-up at all.
“Your credibility is all about your integrity. I’m a Brexiteer – I was a loner in the Labour Party. Rishi’s doing a fantastic job and if he carries on like this it can lead to a general election victory.
“I’m on the Centre Right and I feel very much at home in the Conservatives now.”
Councillor Deepak Bajaj, who defected from Labour to the Conservatives last September, said he had served on the council for 16 years and had “never been appreciated”.
He complained that under Soulsby “it’s all a done deal, it gets done behind closed doors well before it comes to the members [of the council] and they are whipped, they’re told ‘it’s my way or the highway’.”
In Bajaj’s view, this is “not democratic at all, having one man running the show – it’s pointless having all the elected members when they have no input into what happens at the council”.
He added that when he left, his former colleagues in the Labour Party
“started to be very aggressive and rude towards me, in the corridors and the meetings, very abusive towards me.
“I worked with these guys for years. I have a thick skin. I have to wear a steel helmet on my head.
“It just shows the true colours of these people. They put their really nasty face towards you.”
Sanjay Modhwadia, the Conservative candidate running against Soulsby for Mayor, last October became the second Conservative on Leicester Council by winning an astonishing by-election victory in the ward of North Evington, hitherto regarded as a safe Labour seat.
He said lots of Labour supporters had called him and told him, “You shouldn’t stand for the Conservatives, Labour is very strong, you’re never going to win in this area.”
The turnout was 45 per cent and Labour came third with 1,563 votes, the Greens second with 1,790 and Modhwadia won with 3,441.
The picture which illustrates this article was taken on Saturday and shows Modhwadia, wearing a rosette, with some of his canvassers.
He said that during the by-election he and his team had gone out every day for 40 days and went “four times over to every single household”. Next weekend he intends to have an Action Day with “at least 300 to 400 people” out supporting him.
He used to employ 170 people in his textile factory, including many Muslims, but now has only ten staff, for his main customer was the Arcadia Group, which went into administration in 2020.
During the pandemic, Modhwadia helped organise deliveries of food to the elderly through the Hindu Temple.
And during the profoundly alarming riots last September in Leicester between Hindus and Muslims, he made common cause with Muslim Conservatives to tell the rioters, “Don’t believe what you see on social media,” and to help restore peace: “Yes, religion, faith, is there, but we are all human beings, and we should treat all human beings equally.”
Modhwadia observed that Leicester used to be doing well, but now has “no jobs and no investment”, so young people on finishing university “go outside to look for the jobs – here there is no big opportunity”. He hopes to revive the textile industry with a “Made in Leicester” label which will indicate garments of superior quality made in the city’s factories.
Romail Gulzar, standing for the Conservatives in the ward of Humberstone, Hamilton & Netherhall, said Rishi Sunak “really helps”, as had Sajid Javid, for their success shows “the party is for the future, it’s more inclusive, it’s had three different female Prime Ministers and the first Indian Prime Minister.”
Gulzar, a journalist and entrepreneur who was born and brought up as a Christian in Lahore, came into politics because “the city is coming into a sorry state”.
He made another point: “Back nine years I was a Conservative but I didn’t want to say it. I felt embarrassed.”
But now, standing as a Conservative candidate, he finds it has stopped being embarrassing to be a Conservative: “People are very happy. They’re proud. I would say our Prime Minister has made a massive difference.
“He shows that anybody and everybody regardless of faith and religion are welcome in the party.”
Shital Adatia, a financial adviser who is “Leicester born and bred” and President of the Shree Hindu Temple, said “Leicester needs a change”.
Adatia recalled that during the riots, “The devotees were scared, local residents were scared to come out to work, to send their kids to school.
“But as a local community we have to work together. Leicester has been a peaceful city for the past 50 years. Where was the City Mayor when all this happened?”
He is strongly in favour of the Conservative plan to “scrap the Mayor”.
Geeta Karavadra, standing in Rushey Mead ward, said that in 2019 she had come into politics in order to save the local library, which they had succeeded in doing: “It was my first step, a new field for me, a lot to learn.”
Her brother arrived with some delicious samosas to help keep the canvassers going, eaten as a picnic off the back of a car.
Karavadra and her fellow candidate Devi Singh have set up coffee mornings for many isolated older women: “The main aim is to get the ladies out of the house.”
Last of all I visited two young Somalis, Subane Abdi and Zak Ahmed, who are standing for the Conservatives in Wycliffe ward.
Ahmed, an IT technician at the university, said: “We are for the community. We are working-class and we are Conservative. We haven’t been brainwashed and they can’t throw labels at us. We are Muslim, Somali, African and Conservative. We’ve removed the lenses that Labour has put on us since birth.”
Abdi, who joined the Conservatives ten years ago when he was still at school, said in those days he went “canvassing with Nicky Morgan over in Loughborough” for “there was nothing here”, the Conservatives did not exist in Leicester.
The Conservatives do now exist in Leicester, have welcomed many former Labour supporters, and with these highly motivated reinforcements hope to overthrow the ancien régime led by Soulsby.