Yes, the child safeguarding scandal engulfing the city came up. And yes, its mention was dismissed as ‘anti-trans rhetoric’.
The two by-elections in Brighton on May 2nd are an embarrassment to Labour. It was only one year ago that the city held its local elections resulting in an unpopular Green Party being swept aside by a tide of red rosettes. The reason for these by-elections is that two of their newly elected councillors (one in Queen’s Park, the other in Kemptown) were expelled by the party – allegedly for electoral fraud and for living in Leicester – and they later resigned.
Of course, the overwhelming vote in 2023 for a Labour majority council had a strong undercurrent of public discontent with the Tory government. In the days running up to the vote the clarion call for all the anger and disappointment in both local and national governance created a swing to Labour that took it by surprise. The ‘ladies from Leicester’ weren’t the only parachuted candidates who weren’t quite ready to become councillors.
One year on, voters in these two by-elections – if they vote at all – are faced with a very different political landscape. One more Green councillor won’t alter the fact that the Labour majority will steam on to at least 2027 (unless it hits an iceberg that is – more on that later). And of course the Tories in Westminster are, I’m happy to say, toast.
This was the backdrop for recent by-election Hustings events in the wards of Kemptown and Queen’s Park. Living just over the border I attended the Queen’s Park hustings on Monday night.
You won’t be getting an unbiased account of the hustings from me, though I’ll do my best. This is because I stood in the ward of Hanover & Elm Grove for Brighton & Hove Independents last year. My friend Adrian Hart, our candidate for the Queen’s Park by-election, forms one of 5 voting choices vying for the seat vacated by 20 year old Chandni Mistry.
Brighton & Hove Independents make three straightforward appeals to the electorate. First, we already have the remaining (not expelled) Labour councillor so in a 2-seat ward we don’t need another one. Far better to have an independent working alongside as its well known that a party duo becomes a job-share. Second, the Labour and Green councillors do not live in the ward (we think that matters). Despite their claims to be intimately involved in the life of Queen’s Park, we’d say that at best that’s a recent thing. Even the ‘ladies from Leicester’ had to establish a few choice one-liners like “befriending isolated residents” and “providing mindfulness training to schools and youth groups”. Third, Labour will steal this vote by hoping for a low turnout which they will populate by mobilising their lists of party-faithful urging them to get to the polling stations on Thursday.
To Queen’s Park voters we’d say – regardless of whether they voted last time – grab your right to have a say next week.
So this is my summary of the hustings event organised by the always impressive St Luke’s Residents Association (SLRA). The 5 minutes allotted to the opening remarks of each candidate saw each making their pitch one by one. Most offered a CV style summary. However, Adrian Hart’s was different in two ways. He begun by thanking the audience for coming (there was over 100 people with standing room only) and asking if they would put their hand up if they were a voter (just under half raised their hand). He put his hand up too and reminded Conservative Sunny Chowdhury (the only other candidate living in the ward) to raise his hand. That so many party activists had trooped in from across the city to clap and cheer for red and green was telling.
Adrian Hart’s opening remarks departed from the typical ‘I’m, an academic, I’m a magistrate, I’m a charity worker, school governor, NHS manager …. and so on) by raising what might’ve been the issue Labour and Green’s are in complete denial about. “As it turns out, there’s a grim upside to this by-election”, said Hart. He pointed to the revelations about our council exposed in the Observer a week earlier. Referring to a 70 page KC analysis (the ‘Monaghan Advice’) sent to council leaders by one of the families devastated the schools safeguarding breach, Hart disclosed something shocking to any resident who had yet to hear of it. He said, “Our council leaders are in a blind panic”. This is the iceberg I mentioned at the start. Post Cass Report some of them can see it looming large out of the mist now. In short, the family have given the council a deadline of April 26th to either concede that its ‘trans toolkit’ guidance for schools is unlawful or show why it thinks it is. “The guidance hasn’t been withdrawn”, said Hart, “…leaving schools legally exposed”. Adrian made mention of how he had disclosed what he knew of the unfolding scandal to his ward councillors at a surgery in June but Labour leaders told them to back away and do nothing (a Subject Access Request proves this). He said, “I think it illustrates why we need independents”.
Later in the hustings, when Adrian turned to Labour candidate Milla Gauge urging her to offer a Labour viewpoint on whether the Monaghan Advice will be accepted or rejected, the existing Labour ward councillor for Queen’s Park (sitting in the third row) loudly interrupted with an objection. I couldn’t quite decipher what it was because the Chair requested that he be quiet (especially because, as a non-resident, he isn’t even a voter!).
As the hustings meeting proceeded we heard questions put by residents ranging from the problem of cars speeding on Freshfield Road to the plight of St Lukes primary school who are fighting a proposed cut in the number of year forms from three to two. The vexed issue of how replacing the Palace Pier roundabout with traffic lights will, according to the council’s own consultants, cause unspecified years of “journey disbenefits” (that’s ‘severe congestion’ to you and me) seemed to baffle the Labour and especially Green candidates. On the utter wrong-headedness of ‘Valley Garden’s Phase 3’, Brighton & Hove Independent councillors and members joined residents, small traders, cab drivers and Buswatch way back in 2019 and been pushing to stop the madness ever since. Sadly Labour and Green are welded to realising this idea no matter what the evidence is of its sheer folly. Some Labour councillors have spoken off the record to our independent councillors to say they agree that VG3 is madness, but they are ‘whipped’ to support it.
For a completely unbiased stenographer-like set of notes about the hustings there is no better place to go than the numerous live tweets on twitter/X by Local Democracy Reporter Sarah Booker Lewis. For a 90 minute meeting of such intense discussion I would refer readers to Sarah’s record, and recommend the video of the event by Latest TV.
Let me return to my unashamedly partisan account of Adrian’s key message that night. I make no apologies for prioritising my report back from the hustings around Adrian Hart’s decision to raise the unfolding child safeguarding scandal wherever he could. He and I have been working on this for most of last year. Consistently our attempts to sound an alert have been met with a deeply troubling response. At council it is to dismiss the concerns as “baseless smears”. This is despite the fact that council leaders know full well what is going on. We will see what happens next with the council. My guess is that school governors will realise that their trust in this and successive councils was misplaced. The unlawful guidance authored by the council and a third party organisation, which the council has been recommending to schools since 2013, makes governors legally responsible. They wont tolerate being thrown under a bus like that.
Back at the hustings a question from the audience asked if, in the light of the Observer revelations, the Labour candidate Milla Gauge would apologise to Adrian Hart for Labour leader Bella Sankey’s public vilification of the extremely serious parent concerns he put to her (Hart’s statement was denounced as “baseless smears”). Milla swerved the question by stating that she felt it was not her place to apologise for her leader as she is not yet a councillor (eh? she represents Labour!). But it was Luke Walker for the Greens and Dominque Hall for the Lib Dems who made their objections to Hart’s child safeguarding alert explicit. In Walker’s case he seemed to inadvertently veer into debates over adults making their own decisions on social, medical and surgical gender transition. But a comment from the otherwise affable and sensible (on so many issues) Dominique Hall was stinging. By describing Hart’s concerns over child safeguarding as “anti trans rhetoric’ she exemplified, perhaps innocently, the extremist view that anyone raising a safeguarding alert about children (for whom it is far from clear that their ‘gender confusion’ means they are a ‘trans child’) is automatically transphobic. I could’ve given Hall the benefit of the doubt on that – Lib Dems dont read the news anymore – when she then alluded to how attitudes like Hart’s have been seen before (such as the objections to Section 28 in the1980s) but the recent actions to smear Hart by her local party make it seem as though the Lib Dems have planned their attack. On this I will simply defer to Adrian who has written about the bizarre Lib Dem decision to damage his election prospects by accusing him, without a shred of evidence, of transphobia.
To end – a brilliant Hustings in many ways. A hustings Chaired efficiently and fairly by Simon Charleton and which owes its existence to the good citizens that make up St Luke’s Resident’s Association.
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