New council leader Una O’Halloran in the council leader’s office

CHURCH, trade unions, Labour: Islington Council’s new leader says these are the three things that define her – in that order.

In her first interview since taking over at the top, Una O’Halloran said she had no time for political spats and won’t get drawn into the internal tension in her party apparent at the general election.

Instead, she said she would be focusing on getting new homes built, improving life chances for young people and caring for the elderly.

“I’d say I am open, transparent, I want to work with people,” she said. “It’s about our labour movement, it’s about collective responsibility and whoever gets elected to this council should be putting residents first.”

Cllr O’Halloran is succeeding Kaya Comer-Schwartz, who has left for a job with London mayor Sadiq Khan. A leadership contest followed but she was a clear winner, securing victory after just one round of voting in a field of four contenders.

She was officially confirmed as the new leader of Islington Council in the Town Hall chamber at a special meeting on Tuesday night. Her colleagues said she was supported because of her selflessness, integrity, and commitment to accountability.

The change will come, she said, from her “being who I am”, adding: “You can have those political spats and all that, that’s just drama. I’ve got no time for that, I want to do the work.”

Her time as leader will be different from her predecessor with Labour now in power nationally, and no Tory government to blame if something goes wrong.

She opposes the Right to Buy scheme for council housing, and uses this as one example of where the political alignment of council and government will be helpful.

She said: “Already I’ve put to government: can we stop anything we build new [from Right to Buy]. We’re a small borough and we want to build as much as we can but the prices are concrete, we can’t, and then someone is in a home and they buy it, then it’s gone. We’ve put all that money in.

“To me, already relationships are better because you’re sitting down, because they understand. You’ve got Angela Rayner who understands. Lisa Nandy who understands.”

With her new deputy Santiago Bell-Bradford at Tuesday’s special meeting where she was confirmed in the role

Colleagues have labelled Cllr O’Halloran as on the “left” of the party, even suggesting that her pick for deputy leader Santiago Bell-Bradford signalled a desire to move away from any perception of the council as centrist.

Cllr O’Halloran told the Tribune: “I just don’t get this ‘left’ and ‘right’. Growing up I heard that phrase a lot as ‘loony left’ about councillors. I’m like, what is a ‘loony left’? I don’t like that phrase.”

She added: “I am about fairness. I do think if you’re rich you need to share your wealth, yes I do. If people are earning money, pay higher taxes.

“I’m one of eight children. My mum had six children in one room, so I probably did have poverty. I would say I’m going to be there for those who have least, and those marginalised groups – so if that makes me more to the left, then I’m to the left.”

The daughter of an Irish immigrant, Cllr O’Halloran recalls her father being branded with the ‘loony left’ label when he argued that people should not be allowed to smoke in offices.

The Islington in which Cllr O’Halloran was raised in the 1960s and 1970s – with factories, coal fires and, yes, people smoking in offices – feels a world away from its image today.

But she said there’s a clear thread running through the community, with activism, protests and marches linking one period to the next and shaping her own political identity.

“I always admired people on Hyde Park Corner who just stood up and spoke out,” Cllr O’Halloran said.

“People used to stand on crates, and speak out. You know sometimes you go to those things and you’ve got someone saying ‘God is coming’. It wasn’t that, it was more political. When the miners were on strike, I thought everybody just went down to support the miners. Because that’s what you did.”

It was during the protests against Boris Johnson’s plans in 2013 to close fire stations across London that Cllr O’Halloran became a talked-about figure in political circles before she had even thought about standing for an election.

“It really worried me,” she said. “I live on the fourth floor. I thought: I’m going to get involved in this. And I did. I came to a meeting in the assembly hall and then I remember it was James Cleverly sitting there, because Boris Johnson didn’t turn up.

“And I’d just had enough of the nonsense going on. I walked up and I gave him a pound and I said: ‘That’s for me and my mum, make sure you declare it – we’d like our fire station’. Gary Heather [Islington councillor] said he was thinking: ‘Who is this person?’”

It was this experience of “good activism” that drove Cllr O’Halloran to then run to be a councillor, and she was elected in the Caledonian ward in 2014.

She was Islington’s mayor in 2017 and became a cabinet member in 2019. She was later given the housing brief in 2022.

“You don’t just get up and think ‘I want to be a councillor’, you want to give it a go because you really want to try and make a difference,” she said. “You don’t become a councillor for the money, trust me.”

While housing chief, Cllr O’Halloran said she suffered “abuse” over her decision to limit the hours council tenants could have their heating on, and came under intense scrutiny when the housing ombudsman found the council responsible for “severe maladministration” of some of its housing stock.

“I’m not saying we don’t get things wrong. I’m never going to sit here and say we didn’t get things wrong with the damp and mould,” she said.

The new leader is taking over at a time of profound change in the Islington’s political scene. Four Labour councillors quit the party and have become the official opposition in the Town Hall as a group of independents.

Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn is backing the candidate vying to join them in next week’s Junction by-election. The Greens, meanwhile, are selecting candidates, preparing to campaign hard in the 2026 local authority elections. All the opposition in the chamber is now to the “left” of a council adminstration which already considers itself firmly left-wing.

“I can’t work this out,” said Cllr O’Halloran. “The Greens have always been the Greens. The independents got elected as Labour, and I canvassed with them all. They got elected on a Labour manifesto and I expect them [to stick to that], and I think it’s really disingenuous when the two of them, when there was just two, didn’t vote for the budget.”

She called on them to stand down and trigger by-elections in their wards. “You should put your money where your mouth is,” she said.

When the new Labour government is mentioned in the Town Hall, councillors whoop and cheer. They say: “Now is the time to deliver.” But they also say it is too early to judge whether they are delivering.

“I’ll be honest, because we’ve never had it [a Labour government, Labour mayor, and Labour council, I think it’s going to take 18 months, two years to judge,” said Cllr O’Halloran.

“I couldn’t call the next election. There have been a lot of people who are just fed up. Turnout is not great. Like I said, things take time.

“But that’s democracy. If people get up tomorrow, and think ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ that’s democracy but they need to remember who was running it before, and what happened before.”