Neil Wilby Media

Shockwaves likened to the crumbling of the Roman Empire are reverberating around a famous old East Lancashire mill town.

Shortly before candidates’ nominations for the 2024 local elections closed this afternoon, two sitting Labour councillors quit the Party. One of them, Cllr Nyla Ibrahim will stand as an independent as she seeks re-election in the key Werneth ward next month.

The other, long-serving former Cabinet Member, Cllr Shoab Akhtar, who has previously held a number of key portfolios, will sit as an independent councillor in the coming municipal year.

Speculation is rife that they have joined, or will join, The Oldham Group (TOG), led by popular local businessman, Cllr Kamran Ghafoor, an emerging force in the Borough whose Party will field eight election candidates this year.

Cllr Ghafoor is pictured above centre with left to right, former Oldham Council Leader, Sean Fielding, Cllr Ibrahim, Cllr Akhtar and Cllr Pete Davis who represents Labour in the Failsworth West ward.

Such an alliance between TOG and the two breakaway councillors has not been confirmed yet – and is unlikely to be so, at least until votes have been counted after the elections on 2nd May and the revised political composition of the Council is settled.

Werneth will not have a Labour candidate standing in the ward following Cllr Ibrahim’s late switch of allegiance. That has never happened before in living memory in what has long been regarded as a Party stronghold. 

A number of Labour councillors (and councillors of other political persuasions) knew from Neil Wilby, the author of this article, before an Oldham Group text went out bearing the news of the defections.

There is a growing rumble of discontent within the Oldham Labour Group regarding its leadership, in the form of Cllr Arooj Shah. much criticised and with ample hard evidence, over a wide variety of failings, in the past ten months on this Neil Wilby Media website. 

With the Council facing several years, at least, of no overall control, a continuing exodus of senior paid officers and with at least two more Labour councillors set to defect after the elections, she is widely predicted to lose the top job at the Oldham Labour Party Annual General Meeting on 7th May, 2024.

The reasons for the two councillors leaving the Party today are directly attributable to their objections to Cllr Shah’s various contortions over the vexed Gaza issue: maintaining her ambitions for national political office, or a seat in the House of Lords, by not criticising Keir Starmer’s immovable Zionist posture, rather than her own stance reflecting what Oldham’s Muslim voters crave. Which is an immediate ceasefire, free passage for humanitarian aid and sanctions against Israel. 

Meanwhile, across in Bolton, where Cllr Fielding, who lost his seat and the Leadership in Oldham in 2021 after a grotesque smear campaign against him, now sits in the Council’s Cabinet, and a remarkable renaissance is set to be completed if, as expected, he is elected as Leader within the next thirteen months or so (read more here).

The Returning Officer for the Oldham Council elections, Tameside-based Harry Catherall, has, just a short time ago, posted the full list of candidates who will contest one seat in each of the 20 wards in the Borough (read here).

A Neil Wilby Media analysis of who is standing where in the Oldham elections, and with what prospects, will appear over the weekend. We predicted last year that Labour would end up with 32 seats and the lottery wheel fell right on that number.

Watch this space. Not least, as doubts have been raised by a sitting Oldham councillor as to the eligibility of one of the Labour candidates in a ward where they have a fair chance of a precious gain.

At present, the overarching prediction is that the ruling party will end up with 27 seats out of 60 after the election. Four short of the vital majority that would keep Labour in power but, of course, hanging by the slimmest of threads.

Those calculations are, for the moment, made without factoring in any influence of George Galloway, Member of Parliament for Rochdale, who has publicly vowed that he will work towards ending Labour’s grip in neighbouring Oldham (read more here).

Page last updated: Saturday 6th April, 2024 at 0625 hours

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Picture credit: Oldham Labour

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