We congratulate the Labour leader Councillor Perry for leading his group to victory despite a series of setbacks.

We also congratulate Cllr Hall for leading her group to defeat once again, which this time looks more miserable considering the Tory heavyweight visits to Harrow in a show of support to her and the Independent Labour Group (ILG) doing whatever they could do to divide the Labour vote.

Like misjudging her support at the council and bringing her budget to the council early this year and having it defeated, Cllr Hall failed to sense that Harrow residents have no desire for an elected-mayor-style council administration.

During its short-lived administration, the Tory group showed an environment-specific ego to rule Harrow at the cost of education, health, social care, housing and communication services, which are already not good enough compared with other similar London councils in many respects.

Added to this is the managerial instability at the council, marked by the resignation of the chief executive, which was followed by some other key senior managers leaving.

The wiped out Independent Labour Group totally underestimated the maturity of the voters and failed to sense the backlash against its political vindictiveness in a democratic system. Labour was seen as a victim and won despite comparatively low turnout.

We would like to remind readers that like what was done to the miners, Labour in Harrow was divided by supporting the formation of the breakaway ILG, which not only controversially voted in the minority Tory administration last September but tried hard to divide the Labour votes to benefit the Tory group at the May election by using the personalised votes of its candidates. It was good that this didn’t work.

Husain Akhtar

Harrow Monitoring Group