Labour-To-Reform Defector Is a ‘Bully’ Who Forced Young Mums Out of London

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Reform’s new local government tsar is a “bully” who went on an angry rant at a young mum campaigning against homelessness, and told others who faced being displaced from east London where they had lived all their lives: “If you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham.”

Video footage from 2014 shows a red-faced Sir Robin Wales shouting, waving his hands and wagging his finger at a young woman from Focus E15 – a campaign group formed by young mothers who faced eviction from a temporary social housing block called the Focus E15 foyer, following council cuts.

Wales, who served as Labour mayor for the London borough of Newham from 2002 to 2018 and joined Reform UK in March, was sanctioned by the council’s standard’s advisory committee after his “disrespectful” behaviour towards the campaigners at the family event. (Council sources said it was a “cheek” for the “aggressive” campaigners to complain.)

He lost his rag after the Focus E15 mums loudly criticised his housing policy at the mayor of Newham’s show in 2014 – a family summer fair with food, balloons and bunting. Video footage shows that Wales had to be physically restrained before he angrily told a campaigner that the event is “a family day”. “What about some housing for families?” one of the campaigners replied.

The grainy video of the incident is a piece of London history that the rightwing media won’t show you. Before far-right myths about a “fallen” city took hold, when real issues of the housing crisis and poverty were still discussed without the need for a spurious “culture war” framing, here was a young mother, Jasmin Stone, standing up to a politician who would kick her out of her home in order to welcome a higher calibre of resident.

Stone told Novara Media that the campaign started after she and some other young mothers who were being forced to move felt dismissed when they tried to speak to Wales at a local surgery. “We were quite hopeful, actually when we first went in, and he completely dismissed us from the moment we went there as young women. He said, ‘If you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham.’

“There were three mums that went, and all three of us were in absolute tears, and we just felt terrified, insecure, unsupported, and we knew where the issue lay with housing problems in Newham – with the mayor.”

Following the protest at the mayor’s show, Stone was thrown out by private security. “That day I was also dragged out by four security guards. I had two of them on my legs, two of them on my arms. My boobs came out because of how roughly they handled us. When we got to the exit, they discussed throwing me on the floor and did, and really hurt my back. Me and my friends – a lot of us were covered in bruises.”

Kevin Blowe, a local campaigner who made the complaint to the council’s standard’s committee, told Novara Media: “The Focus E15 mums wanted to complain about Wales’ behaviour but were genuinely worried that a bullying, imperious politician would find a way to take revenge on them, so I stepped in.”

Wales joined Reform in March following months of breathless speculation in the rightwing media and Reform briefings that it would announce a major Labour defection, to go with the several ex-Tories who have joined the party. Wales’s defection was heralded by a press conference with Nigel Farage and he became the party’s London director for local government.

Writing about his defection on rightwing website Spiked!, Wales claimed to still be politically on the left and said, “the current Labour government has demonstrated, at best, ineptitude, and at worst, an outright disdain for working people.” However, his own apparent disdain for working-class people has a well-documented history.

The incident at the family day was part of a lengthy dispute with the Focus E15 mums – who the council tried to rehome outside the borough, some as far away as Manchester, Birmingham and Hastings.

The feud took place in the wake of the 2012 London Olympics with its promise to develop east London and its slogan “inspire a generation” – caught the public imagination and made national media headlines. In an era when blaming migrants for housing problems was common but less mainstream, a local government encouraging gentrification became the story. Wales was its cartoon villain, dubbed “The Sheriff of Newham Robin the Poor” in one campaign banner. “£9bn on the Olympics and they’re telling us and our babies we have to go live in Hastings,” one of the mothers, Adora Chilaisha, who was then 19 told a reporter at the time.

The mums’ dispossession seemed to some campaigners to be an inevitable consequence of council policy. Wales had spelled out his “vision” for Newham back in 1997, saying: “Our aim will be to increase Newham’s property values and raise the income profile of all our residents.”

Wales eventually apologised to the mums, and said: “We should have engaged with them from the start, planned how we would support their next steps and worked with them individually.”

Stone reluctantly moved to Colchester, Essex. “I would do anything to live in the borough where my family is but it’s unaffordable,” she said. “Once you leave London, there’s no going back.”

As the controversy swirled, Wales saw no problem heading to Cannes for MIPIM, a massive champagne and canapes-fueled trade fair for property speculators. At the time, Wales played down concerns about attending such an event saying: “It’s not costing the public purse a penny… It’s all paid for by our development partners.”

Now in his new guise as a Reform politician, Wales has accused London mayor Sadiq Khan of prioritising “the wealthy elite over the working class it was built to represent”. Blowe said: “It’s ironic… He used to jet off to Cannes for all expenses paid trips to meet property developers.”

“It’s the most hypocritical thing ever”, said Stone.

Wales developed a ruthless streak early in his political career. He was a passenger on the “Ice Pick Express” – named after the weapon used to kill Leon Trotsky – a coach-load of rightwing Labour students who travelled to a Labour conference in 1976 to defeat the Trotskyite group the Militant Tendency.

Bryn Griffiths worked closely with Wales at Newham council as a local government officer between 1998 and 2000, and again between 2002 and 2003, and saw Wales’s factionalism close up. Writing on the Labour Hub blog, he said: “When Tariq Ali coined the term ‘Stabian’ – to describe the factional nastiness of a Stalinist and the political timidity of a right-wing Labour Fabian – he could have been thinking of Robin Wales.”

Griffiths recalled that in 1998 he found himself “on the receiving end” of this “nastiness” when Wales attacked him in a public committee of the council, over an article he had written about the peace process in the north of Ireland.

“He knew as a politically neutral officer I could not respond. What he was saying was untrue and damaging to my reputation but he just got stuck in,” Griffiths wrote. “I feared for my job”, he added, saying it was only the intervention of the council’s chief executive which “saved my skin”.

Novara Media understands that Wales denies that the version of events in Griffith’s account ever took place.

Wales’s history didn’t do him any favours during the Corbyn era. Despite being Britain’s longest-serving mayor and claiming to run “one of the most radical councils in the country”, in 2018 he was deselected by members. He had won a 2016 trigger ballot but this was rescinded after a legal challenge and amid claims of irregularities. Under Wales, opponents said that the way Newham was governed had become an undemocratic “gravy train”.

On the news of his deselection, the Focus E15 campaign hired an open-top bus and drove around Newham in celebration. After Wales’s deselection, he went on to work for rightwing think-tank Policy Exchange as a senior advisor on local government, skills and housing. Caller said that Wales joining Reform showed “his true colours”.

Wales claims his record in office is one of “delivery” of services. “The old parties can’t deliver services and the result of not delivering services is cynicism in the electorate,” he told the media when announcing his defection.

Last weekend, as Reform launched its London election campaign in Croydon, Wales did not make an appearance on stage, suggesting that despite his much vaunted defection, the party doesn’t want to make a big show of its new asset.

This is perhaps unsurprising. When his defection was announced, Wales didn’t satisfy the media hype machine. On GB News, Andrew Pierce was deflated, saying: “If that is the major Labour defection that’s been flagged for some weeks, that doesn’t quite cut it… it’s not quite up there with a former Tory home secretary and a former chancellor.”

The London Labour party said Reform was “scraping the barrel” and that Wales had not been part of the labour movement “for some time”. But Labour will be reluctant to use Wales’s chequered history as an attack-line in the coming local elections for obvious reasons.

While Wales wasn’t the coup that the rightwing media wanted, his past does bear a closer look for anyone interested in Reform’s claims to be an anti-establishment party of the people – and in the record of the Labour right in power.

“London Labour’s regional party is massively downplaying Wales’s historic role,” wrote Griffiths, describing him as “the local government poster boy of New Labour”. Wales’s defection “is the responsibility of the Labour right and they must own it”.

A Reform UK spokesperson said: “These comments from Robin’s longstanding political opponents are as unsurprising as they are false. If Novara Media are coming after us we must be doing something right.”