The Dark Arts of Camden Labour: Part II

On 20 of May 2026, Sagaal Abdi-Wali was elected the leader of Camden Council. Yet she retained her council seat earlier this year by a mere sixty votes, having initially won it by more than a thousand. The dropoff in support exemplified the grim recent trajectory of Camden Labour: a project which reflects much wider national trends over the last half-decade of British politics, and which is now back in the spotlight thanks to this Thursday’s byelection. 

The local party’s fortunes were related to tensions over the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Abdi-Wali was formally nominated to the leadership position in the chamber by Izzy Lenga, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) vice-chair installed in South Hampstead after the 2022 purge. Lenga, who previously did basic training with the IDF and was pictured in Israeli military uniform, gave a speech extolling Abdi-Wali’s virtues, and concluded on a personal note: 

As [a] Jewish woman, it means a great deal to me to stand here and nominate my Muslim colleague and friend to do this role. Because in a world that too often seeks to divide us, Camden shows us something different. We show that solidarity is our greatest strength, and our diversity is not a weakness but the most powerful tool we have.

Abdi-Wali responded with a stirring speech about Camden’s multi-faith diversity, emphasising the need for so-called community cohesion. ‘Diversity is a strength but cohesion also requires a lot of effort’, she explained. ‘At a time when division and fear are growing, we must bring people together to ensure every community feels safe, heard and valued. The dignity and safety of one community can never be separated from the dignity and safety of another.’

Those unfamiliar with Labour-right doublespeak might see in this a rebuke to the far-right and rising Islamophobia. But this has long been the stultifying language handed down by the fanatically pro-Israel Board of Deputies, typified by the ‘Jewish Manifesto for Local Government’, published the previous month. 

The Board’s local government manifesto pressed candidates to consider six pledges, including to ‘promote community cohesion’. Another was to ‘avoid importing conflict’ by, in effect, limiting the ability of residents to mobilise on Palestine. The former supposedly flows from the latter: community cohesion can prevail only if people are silent — or silenced — on Israel’s atrocities. 

‘Community cohesion depends on local differences not being inflamed by international events’, the manifesto informed prospective candidates, lamenting that local harmony was now at risk from ‘polarising decisions about symbolic displays, pension investment and divestment, town twinning; the raising of foreign flags, procurement, or use of council property.’ 

It is also the language of JLM, the explicitly Zionist organisation with whom Abdi-Wali is closely connected, and in whose promotional literature she has repeatedly appeared. In November 2023, JLM issued an open letter with Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) aimed at Labour councillors, in which they offered ‘wholehearted support’ for Keir Starmer’s refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza in favour of a ‘humanitarian pause.’ The following day, the death toll in Gaza topped 10,000, including 4,000 children. 

‘Irrespective of views on foreign policy,’ JLM and LFI wrote, ‘as Labour councillors, your words and actions have a direct impact on community cohesion. . . .  It is essential that you continue to counter the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and unbalanced posturing that seeks only to divide the communities your represent and those that thrive on discord.’ 

Two weeks earlier, 250 Muslim Labour councillors had written to Starmer asking him to demand an ‘immediate ceasefire. . . .  No nation, no people or community should have to endure collective punishment and the same should be the case for Palestinian people.’ 

As it transpired, the Board of Deputies did not need to remind the Camden Labour group of these strictures. For the last two years, they had been assiduous in preventing residents from exercising democratic dissent on Gaza, frustrating residents’ demands that Camden Council’s Pension Fund divest from companies complicit in Israel’s atrocities. Now that the local party is hoping to send Abdi-Wali to parliament, as we wrote in part one of this investigation, it is trying to channel the feel-good atmosphere of Burnhamism. But its record, especially on the issues of Israel and housing, will not be easily forgotten. 

Silencing Residents, Blocking Divestment

Camden Council’s Pension Fund invests over £2.4bn for its employees. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has calculated that the fund held shares worth £104m in companies it determined were complicit in Israel’s genocide and occupation, including Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, weapons giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop, and Palantir. PSC pushed a campaign asking local governments to divest from complicity, which was backed by the biggest Labour-affiliated trade unions including Unite, GMB and UNISON.

The Labour leadership on the council did all they could to thwart a debate. Lorna Russell — then the lone Green councillor — put forward a motion in 2024 to force the issue of divestment onto the agenda in the council chamber. To be heard, the motion needed seconding. Russell approached Sue Vincent, who had served as a Labour councillor for over a decade. She agreed to be seconder. But half an hour before the deadline for submission, Vincent pulled out. Her Labour colleagues had called her at the last minute and warned her not to support the motion.

Vincent announced in 2025 that she would not seek re-election as a Labour councillor and eventually backed the Greens in local elections this year. 

Awale Olad, a Labour councillor of fifteen years (who, like Abdi-Wali, is from a Somali background) similarly decided not to stand again. He was the first and arguably only Labour councillor to properly call-out Israeli war crimes in an impassioned speech in the Council Chamber in November 2024. Olad rebuked the Party in a letter he released announcing his decision to stand down: ‘In the face of the tragic events unfolding in Gaza, I alone stood up and spoke out against the horrifying situation’, he wrote. 

Despite the Camden Labour leadership’s strenuous efforts to block debate on divestment, the council’s constitution included a work-around. Any cause with the support of 4,000 locals had to be debated. Camden Friends of Palestine got the necessary signatures and submitted them to the council. The petition was delivered to the Town Hall by the Palestinian-born Camden resident Lubaba Khalid and Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust-survivor who had left the Labour Party two years prior. 

The motion was debated in the council chamber in January 2025. Numerous Labour councillors spoke against it. One, Anna Burrage, said that ‘blanket divestment risk[ed] being seen as one-sided.’ Burrage highlighted ‘Rachel Reeves’ prioritisation of economic growth as a cornerstone of Labour’s agenda’ and warned of how divestment might ‘undermine investor confidence.’ 

Councillor Nanouche Umeadi took the unusual approach of chastising protestors in the chamber, some of whom shouted that the council had blood on their hands. ‘People are dying in my country [the Congo], based on phones we have in all our hands. So based on that notion, everyone here who owns a Samsung or an iPhone has blood on their hands.’

Umeadi’s intervention was striking considering how she became a councillor in 2022, while Labour’s bureaucracy was blocking long-time and popular left-wing councillors. Umeadi became a councillor after meeting Starmer on a school-run, and then council leader Georgia Gould at a party in Kentish Town, she told the excellent local paper of record, Camden New Journal. ‘I met her for the first time and six months later, he I am. They set me up. It’s pretty surreal as this was not on my to-do list.’ 

In the end, the petition was referred to the Council’s Pension Committee, which many criticised as ‘dither and delay’. Minutes show that the Pension Committee then took close to a year to produce an outsourced audit of Camden’s shareholding — as if it were necessary to hire an outside company to search a spreadsheet. 

A delegation from the PSC was told in March 2026 that everything was in hand. But three months later, the national Labour government passed new laws controlling the handling of pension investments. Camden Council explained last week by email that the new legislation and guidance meant ‘there are currently no plans to consider a standalone divestment motion of the type requested by the petitioners.’

The legislation and attendant regulation had been shepherded by Steve Reed, then-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. One of Starmer and McSweeney’s closest allies, Reed served as a director at Labour Together alongside McSweeney. He had promised Jewish community organisations in a 2020 meeting that he would fight any boycott campaigns related to Israel. ‘Steve will never accept attempts to exceptionalise and delegitimise Israel’, the minutes recorded. 

In January 2026, Reed warned local councils they might violate the law if they acted on popular motions for divestment. ‘Councils should stay out of foreign conflicts and get on with the job of delivering local services’, he declared. 

As Labour obstructed divestment, Camden Council continued to heavily invest in complicit companies, with the value of its shares in Palantir, for instance, increasing 1,200 percent between October 2023 and December 2025. In that same period, the total value of Camden’s investment in complicit companies increased by more than £28m. 

Labour councillors did eventually take a stand — against protestors. After a protest in which residents had sat silently in the gallery holding up signs that read ‘End genocide’, the council successfully rewrote its constitution to give officeholders the power to curtail protest and deputations in the Chamber. Holding banners and signs in the public gallery is now impermissible. 

The Ming Vase

Abdi-Wali absented herself from public controversy, with no comments in the Chamber during the divestment debate in January. A search of public sources and social media suggests that she has not uttered a word on Gaza at any stage between October 7 2023 and her selection as Labour’s MP candidate. Repeated emails asking her to share letters or comments she has made have gone unanswered. 

Her first comment on Gaza came in a puff-piece interview with the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee — a Camden Labour member who attended her selection meeting — in September 2026, where she returned to a familiar theme. ‘If Greens stir up community antagonisms over Gaza that would be disgraceful’, Abdi-Wali warned, echoing the guidelines on ‘community cohesion’ pushed by the Board of Deputies and JLM.

In 2025, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign launched a Candidate Pledge, asking candidates for local government to work to end complicity in genocide. The pledge was signed by over 1,600 councillors, including 30 Labour Party councillors in the neighbouring borough of Islington. Needless to say, Sagal Abdi-Wali did not sign — nor did any of her fellow Labour candidates in Camden. 

We have asked multiple former colleagues to explain why they thought she kept quiet on Gaza. ‘That is what she always does’, one explained. ‘She is personally warm, but has always stepped back when controversial matters are up for discussion.’ 

On this telling, Abdi-Wali has been ‘Ming vase-ing’ her career, choosing to step away from public battles lest they define her as having some definite commitments. In a Starmerite Party that has abhorred difference and quashed dissent — while handsomely rewarding loyalty — one can see the incentive to conform. 

But there is also something unique about the tale of Camden Labour. Its transformation into a melting pot of the worst tendencies and personalities of the party’s right has been especially extreme. It is worth reiterating that in Islington thirty Labour candidates signed the Palestine Solidarity Campaign pledge earlier this year, while not one did in Camden. 

North Sea Oil

Camden Labour’s abdication on Gaza is of a piece with its horrendous record on housing. There is no question that the latter is the most salient issue in the borough. In 2011, the Council launched the Community Investment Plan (CIP), its flagship programme to redevelop Camden, with the aim of boosting housing stock across the borough. It was conceived, in essence, as a giant public-private partnership scheme. Housing developments would not be directly provided or built by Camden.

Instead, the council would work with large private developers, who would be given planning permission for vast redevelopment schemes on the many plots of peri-industrial land dotted around the borough. Camden would further assist developments by selling pieces of land or warehousing to developers. Camden would negotiate with developers to build affordable housing and plug other delivery gaps. It would also put up its own capital — £1bn in total — to facilitate development. This figure was increased by a further £1.3bn in 2022.

The strategy was nicknamed the ‘North Sea oil’ plan, in a nod to the immense value of Camden’s land. The comparison was more apt than intended. In the 1980s, Britain’s oil windfall was spent plugging the holes Thatcherism blew in public budgets, while Norway banked its own in a sovereign wealth fund that still pays out today. Camden has done much the same with its land: a finite public asset, sold off, with little permanent council housing to show for it. The new buildings are often easy on the eye, but for residents stuck on the council’s housing waiting list, that adds insult to injury: these are homes they will never live in. 

Camden’s bragging about the returns of the Community Investment Plan rings hollow. In 2024, the year Abdi-Wali became cabinet member for housing, Camden celebrated the building of 1,500 homes via the CIP over the previous thirteen years, of which 628 were ‘social rent’ homes owned by the Council. A Freedom of Information request in 2025 revealed that a further fifty had been built, bringing the total to 678 social-rent homes built between 2010 and 2025. 

The catch? Camden had approved and overseen the demolition of 492 Council-rented homes in the same period. Over fifteen years, and despite huge capital outlays and massive redevelopments, Camden had added just 182 council homes for rent to its housing stock — fewer than ten a year. Martin Plaut, Starmer’s former parliamentary researcher, has praised the ‘tough’ decisions Abdi-Wali made as cabinet member for housing. Her constituents languishing on the waiting list might wonder what exactly they were. 

In 2026, Camden confirmed that there were 8,380 households on the social housing waiting list in the borough, with most of those on the list living in severely overcrowded conditions. The numbers on the waiting list had increased by 9 percent in just one year between 2025 and 2026, while Abdi-Wali held the housing brief. 

Not So Affordable

Camden’s current aim under the extant Community Investment Plan is to build 3,150 houses over and above the 1,700 already built. Of all the 4,850 new homes built under the scheme, 1,800 are council homes for social rent, with more destined to be ‘affordable housing’ charged at about 60 percent of market rent. 

Even so, it would be astonishing if these optimistic projections came to pass. On Abdi-Wali’s watch, a paltry 84 affordable houses were started in the whole of the 2025-26 financial year. The average for London boroughs over the same period was 290. Tower Hamlets, run by Aspire and its steadfast ex-Labour Party mayor, Lutfur Rahman, started 1,050. 

Again and again, Camden Labour appears to be played like a fiddle by developers, who promise the moon on affordable housing, before the council then approves significant reductions in how many affordable houses developers must build for already-approved developments. 

In August, Camden’s planning committee (dominated by Labour councillors from the fresh 2022 intake, including Lenga, who replaced the purged councillors), approved a request from the developer Landsec to reduce the number of affordable houses being built on the site of the O2 centre on Finchley Road. Landsec had originally promised that 570 of the 1,800 new homes would be affordable; it is now obliged, with Camden’s approval, to build just 330, on the basis that prevailing economic headwinds made the original plan unprofitable. Landsec declared £346m in pre-tax profits for the year ending March 2026. 

Normally, the decision to approve such a reduction would have required a full, independent review (a ‘financial viability assessment’) to establish if the developer’s economic case made sense. But in October 2025, Mayor Sadiq Khan and Housing Secretary Steve Reed formally reduced the London target for affordable housing in new developments from 35 percent to 20 percent; those offering 20 percent could now secure ‘fast-track’ approval. The upshot of this change was that local authorities would no longer be required to independently audit whether developers’ claims of financial hardship were justified. 

And so Camden Labour’s coterie of young Starmerites approved the request, merely noting the reduction in affordable housing with regret. They ignored the appeals of the Fortune Green & West Hampstead Neighbourhood Development Forum and more than 1,000 written complaints the scheme had received. A member of the public in the gallery shouted betrayal. The Labour Chair of the Planning Committee, Liam Martin-Lane — one of the youngest new councillors in the 2022 intake — told the protesters they were welcome to air their views outside. ‘This is a meeting held in public, not a public meeting. . . .  We do not invite contributions from members of the gallery.’ 

Starmerites Against the Community

The councillors purged by Camden Labour in 2021 had seen this coming. Paul Tomlinson had opposed the council’s approval of Grand Central, a 22-storey tower of luxury flats on one of the few patches of green open space in his Somers Town ward. Individual units now sell for as much as £2.75m; no affordable housing was included. Tomlinson called these failures ‘a form of social cleansing.’

Tomlinson, Leo Cassarani and Ranjit Singh (whose seat went to Abdi-Wali) would clearly not have so rolled over for developers while silencing protest from the public. In June 2019, Tomlinson and Cassarani — alongside Maryam Eslamdoust — had signed a call-in against Labour cabinet member Danny Beales’ decision to approve a ‘masterplan’ for Camley Street. 

In early 2026, Camden gave final approval for the redevelopment of Camley Street. Tomlinson and others had warned the development would negatively impact local businesses, and they have since been vindicated. A 2026 BBC investigation spoke to multiple business owners, including a family-run garage that had operated for decades, facing significant financial losses from being forced out of the shops that had served the local community for generations. The businesses dismissed Camden’s claim that each business would benefit from a ‘bespoke’ transition solution. 

Two weeks before the Landsec vote, Abdi-Wali sat down with the Camden New Journal to discuss her priorities as leader. The CNJ probed Abdi-Wali on the imminent approval of a new mega-masterplan to build a ‘film quarter’ on a massive tract of land between Kentish Town and Hampstead Heath, currently the site of an always-busy community recycling centre, a Royal Mail warehouse and sundry other businesses. 

Current proposals have proven controversial, but people might be more forgiving of the scheme if it were to deliver a substantial quantity of genuinely affordable housing. Abdi-Wali was pressed on this point, asked to respond to concerns that the Film Quarter would suffer the same fate as other over-promised and under-delivered sites. ‘I don’t want to talk like that,’ Abdi-Wali responded. ‘We’re in a place now where it’s 50 per cent affordable housing — secured. . . .  Having conversations about “what if they do this or that isn’t helpful.”’ A fortnight later, her party’s councillors on the planning committee waved through Landsec’s retreat on affordable housing at the O2 Centre.

Beyond the Grave

‘I don’t want to talk like that’ has been the watchword of Sagal Abdi-Wali’s political career so far. All but silent on the Gaza genocide in the name of community cohesion, she also said nothing about her council’s pension fund growing its holdings in Israel’s crimes. As cabinet member for housing, she held the brief while the waiting list grew and council house building stalled. As council leader, she fails to address questions about what might go wrong with the biggest development in the borough, just as the planning committee has rubber-stamped yet another affordable housing retreat. 

As a candidate in the Holborn & St Pancras byelection, Abdi-Wali now offers ‘hope’. From the Prime Minister, the slogan may carry some significance, attached as it is to an ambition to break with a decades-long political and economic settlement. Camden Labour’s borrowing of the same talk is as empty as it is cynical. Its record is clear as day: putting the interests of private developers over those of residents, purging councillors who demanded the opposite, and silencing constituents who oppose the genocide in Gaza. 

It is precisely this toxic combination — of genuflection to the wealthy and powerful with authoritarian disdain for anyone who fails to fall in line — that did for Starmerism in the end. In Camden, anger crystalised into the insurgent campaign of Andrew Feinstein in the 2024 election, which massively depleted Starmer’s majority, and into a Green surge which contributed to a major decline in Labour’s seat share, winning 30 seats out of 55 this year, a drop of 17 from its position of near total-dominance last time round. 

It seems possible that the Burnham bounce will carry Abdi-Wali over the line this week. But if the Prime Minister is to avoid crashing down — if he is to succeed in rebuilding Labour’s shattered progressive coalition — he would do well to consign all Camden Labour has come to represent to the past.