Leader Cllr Kaya Comer-Schwartz and Cllr Nurullah Turan

TROUBLE may be brewing in the Islington Labour Party after the unveiling of a new-look cabinet team that is understood to have upset a number of councillors.

At their AGM in on May 13, it is thought just under half of Islington’s Labour councillors either abstained or voted against leader Councillor Kaya Comer-Schwartz’s decision to replace care chief Nurullah Turan and equalities chief Roulin Khondoker on the executive – the small group of councillors who take on full-time jobs at the council to run important briefs in the borough.

Last month they were replaced with councillors Flora Williamson and Sheila Chapman at a full council meeting.

Councillor Phil Graham – recently suspended from the Labour Party over his continued support of Islington North candidate Jeremy Corbyn – said Cllr Comer-Schwartz had “upset a lot of people” over the way she had handled the reshuffle.

“Nineteen people didn’t vote in favour of it because she made some errors in how she handled it,” he said. “She didn’t handle it very well.”

Her selection got through by a small margin after 19 out of 46 councillors refused to back it.

Cllr Roulin Khondoker and Cllr Flora Williamson

He said: “A lot of these councillors are very upset about the way it was done, not that she made the choices. The way people found out that they were being taken off the exec – it just wasn’t very good. So a lot of people were upset with that.”

Cllr Graham voted against the reshuffle and warned “Islington Labour group is not the happy band it was”.

Calling Cllr Turan’s treatment “disgusting”, he said: “He’s put his heart and soul into a really difficult brief; he’s worked his socks off, and then the way he was just dumped. He wasn’t even given an interview to reapply. Everyone’s supposed to reapply to go on the executive. So most of the other execs, they had interviews. He didn’t even have an interview. He was just told, ‘No, you’re not in it’. He’s a good man and he was treated very shabbily.”

He fired a warning shot that if Islington Labour follows the model set down by Sir Keir Starmer nationally – “when you’re out, you’re out” – it spells trouble locally.

“If they take on the Starmer approach, I just feel like it just makes life difficult,” he added. “Being in the party feels less democratic in general.”

Cllr Sheila Chapman and Cllr Phil Graham

Green leader Councillor Benali Hamdache said that to the “causal observer” it was clear there was a lot of “internal tension” in the Labour group.

“I think it’s a sign of perhaps the unhealthiness of the one-party state in Islington Labour,” he added, “whether that’s over Palestine, whether that’s over the Jeremy Corbyn candidacy and now also in the way the executive has been selected.”

Forty-six out of a total of 51 councillors in the borough are Labour.

“When one party has so much dominance, they tend to turn inwards and on themselves, rather than focused at the job at hand,” he added.

Cllr Comer-Schwartz said: “As a Labour group, we annually follow a democratic process, involving all Labour councilors, to decide on elected positions. All appointments of the executive positions, voted on by the Labour Group, were approved at annual council.

“I’m excited that the new council executive will take us forward towards the next local elections, providing the stability and experience we need to continue delivering for local people and deliver on the manifesto we stood on in 2022.”