Independent politician Theo Dennison beat the Labour Party in a local council election earlier this month. And he said one of the reasons he was able to beat his former party was that it seriously harmed its reputation by being so “obnoxious”.
Speaking to the Canary, he said Labour had essentially made the election a choice between them and him, which he called “an absolute gift”. This was partly the case because Labour was “so obnoxious to the local press and to local residents”. And campaigners “badmouthing” him on the doorstep did “irreparable harm” to their reputation.
Dennison’s team also tried to get “as many doors knocked as we could”. In fact, he stressed:
You cannot do enough knocking on doors.
While he noted the importance of getting out and speaking to voters, however, he highlighted Labour’s aversion to that.
Labour arrogance and rule breaking
In 2006, he said, Labour lost power locally:
because they just stopped listening to people, started thinking they were so big and so strong they didn’t really need to do that. They got quite arrogant and out of touch.
And this didn’t change much when they actually got back into power. As he explained:
increasingly, between 2010 and 22, I think it became apparent that if they could get away without listening to vote they would.
The party, he asserted, “started breaking the rules because they could rather because of an accident”. And in 2022, the candidate selection process “was riven with rule breaking, which was well supported by the regional office and by the party nationally”. In Hounslow, he stressed, “it was an absolute disaster”. And he explained that:
while it might have been intended at one time as to have been a purge of Momentum and the like, there were no Momentum councillors to purge, so people purged everybody they didn’t like or everybody who was a threat to them in the selection battle
He added:
There was no attempt to keep the selection process fair.
That’s when he left Labour and stood as an independent. And while he didn’t manage to defeat Labour in 2022 and 2024, the situation changed in 2025 as voters experienced how awful Keir Starmer’s Labour was in government.
Labour keeps hurting ordinary people
Dennison was highly critical of his former party, saying councillors in 2022 had been “committed to putting up the council tax, whether they needed to or not”, with a “£700m budget decided in seven minutes”. He added that there was:
no oversight of what the office is doing, no attempt to actually set priorities for the council. It was an absolute mess.
And at the same time, they were putting back on the council tax deduction scheme, which is the scheme that supports local households who are unable to pay their council tax. They took £7m out of the support for those poorer families in 2022, and they’ve done it again this year, taking another £4m out of their pockets.
And then, thirdly, on the same day they were raising their own councillors’ allowances, which was, I think, not just symbolic, but entirely the priority, as far as they were concerned. And they’re going to do exactly the same thing this year. So the same problems I had in 22 are still alive in 2025, and for as long as they’re on that direction, that lack of moral compass, that lack of political direction – that will define them
Labour has “lost track of all sense of value both nationally and locally”
Dennison criticised the “partial interpretation of the rule book” in Labour, where the party has increasingly allowed right-wingers to get away with things it would turf left-wingers out for. This takeover, he said:
helped, essentially, bury them as a progressive force.
And he stressed that:
to be successful in a democracy, a party also needs to be democratic and trust its members rather than treat them as simply fodder… They’ve lost track of all sense of value, both nationally and locally, and are seeking either a range of policy solutions which are generally untested or already failed Conservative ‘solutions’ or just stuff they’re making up as they’re going along. So I think it’s a bloody mess. And actually, I don’t really see a very positive future for the Labour Party.
He also saw the effects of Labour’s heartlessness on voters locally. As he described:
I didn’t have any great expectation that Keir Starmer’s leadership was going to be transformative or that progressive. And so… I don’t think I was as disappointed as many other people who had actually just believed that things could not get worse, and their experience over the first 6 to 9 months is that, oddly enough, the Labour Party seemed determined to make them worse than they had been, and the distress that actually you met on doors – people who just could not believe that that hope had been entirely false. It’s very, very palpable. And I’m not in the least bit surprised that people were just too desperate, too cheesed off, too bothered by other personal concerns to turn out and vote now.
“Representation for local residents rather than for parties”
The key argument of his campaign was that:
what we really needed was representation for local residents rather than for parties. So rather than being a plain party candidate who would represent all that was good about the council and all that was good about the Labour Party to the electorate, we were very much focused on trying to express the views and frustrations of residents back to the council, which is the way it’s meant to be.
And because the cost of living crisis was such a major issue in the ward and Hounslow in general, he said:
We had to focus on the fact that people couldn’t afford to have another Labour councillor who would simply nod through increases in [councillors’] allowances and increases in local taxation.
Giving tips on campaigning for others, meanwhile, he said his election agent suggested “don’t waste your time with keyboard worries”. And Dennison emphasised:
The virtual campaign is very, very different from the real door-to-door campaign. And actually, that would be a definite you must do – you cannot do enough knocking on doors.
The mission now? ‘To try and stop the misuse of taxpayers’ money to fund councillors’ self-serving machine’
In his role as a councillor, Dennison insisted that he will:
try and clean up the local Labour Party and the way the council is run, to try and stop the misuse of taxpayers’ money to fund this rather self-serving machine, to try and get a grip on the priorities of the council so that local services in Brentford and Isleworth are not just protected but also improved – at the moment, there’s quite a number of significant services under threat, try and do something about the attitude on dealing with people who frankly don’t have the household budget to actually manage at this particular time, and to stop them putting up the council tax again, or at least make it so bloody hard that they regret every single second.
And he asserted:
At every single meeting, I will be raising these concerns. And they can shout me down, hound me down, try and stop me speaking as much as they like, but that voice will be heard.
Featured image via the Canary
