Meet the cranks, crossdressers and Islamists now running your local council

Two things seem certain after last week’s local elections in England and parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. The first is that the historically incompetent and unpopular prime ministership of Keir Starmer is beyond salvation. The second is that, if the quality of the candidates elected locally and nationally is anything to go by, so too is Britain.

For proof that nothing you say or do in modern times can get in the way of your political dreams, we need look no further than Eden Hills. ‘Cock is one of my favourite tastes’, the newly elected Green councillor said in a social-media post last year. ‘Not only that, but balls smell amazing.’ In a separate post, he said: ‘OKAY [I’m] bored of being woke now, [I] should get back to talking about COCK.’

Hills was one of many trans or nonbinary candidates successfully fielded by the Green Party of England and Wales. The Scottish Greens managed to get two transgender candidates elected to the Scottish parliament, both of whom have some rather questionable views.

Q Manivannan – a self-described ‘queer Tamil immigrant’ – was elected to the Scottish parliament as a member for Edinburgh and Lothians, despite only having lived in Scotland since 2021, the year he arrived in Edinburgh from India on a student visa. It is by no means certain that Manivannan will be able to remain in the country long enough to complete his five-year term.

‘I cannot wait [until] big lizard Lizzie kicks the bucket’, Iris Duane, another of the Greens’ new trans MSPs, said in a social-media post in 2022, referring to the late Queen Elizabeth II. ‘Not because she’s dead but because of the absolute meltdown it will cause [in] the British consciousness.’

Heading south, the interests of Greens’ politicians undergo something of a transformation. The London borough of Lambeth elected Saiqa Ali, who was arrested last month on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred against Jews. Ali is alleged to have posted pictures on social media of a blue-and-white serpent with a Star of David on its skin coiled around the Earth and to have said that ‘England has a government that is overrepresented with Zionist Jews’. Ifhat Shaheen, who was elected to the Hackney council, came under the spotlight for wondering if ‘Zionists’ might be ‘harvesting’ the organs of dead Palestinians.

Not that the Green Party had any kind of monopoly on dodgy candidates. Glenn Gibbins, who was elected as a Reform councillor in Sunderland, seems to be the incarnation of every fear that the liberal establishment has projected on to the populist right-wing party. His novel suggestion for, er, dealing with the ‘amount of Nigerians in town’ was to ‘melt them all down and fill in the potholes’.

There is much more that can be said about the quality of England’s local councillors. Abdul Monsur, elected to Tower Hamlets, publicly denied the Holocaust in a Facebook post in 2025. The mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, was returned to serve yet another term at the helm of the east London borough, despite a well-documented history) of vote-rigging and religious intimidation.

Once, there might have been a darkly funny side to this local-elections freakshow. But with the seriousness of the problems Britain is facing, from economic stagnation to societal Balkanisation, we surely have to ask: is this really the calibre of candidate we deserve?

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.