The last Communist Councillor in London

A footnote to London Borough history ends tomorrow with a memorial meeting for former Tower Hamlets Cllr Solly Kaye. Kaye was the last Communist elected to a London Borough … representing St Mary’s ward from 1964 until losing to Labour in 1971. He even survived the Tory landslide of 1968 … when the Tories won control of all but three London Boroughs.

He’d sat on Stepney Council for the same Whitechapel area from 1956 to 1965 … carrying on a tradition that in 1945 had seen twelve Communists elected to Stepney and two from there to the LCC. Kaye shared the St Mary’s seat at various times with three other Communist Party Councillors … Peter Roche, Monty Borman and Max Levitas (who lost with Kaye in 1971).

Appropriately, Kaye died on May Day 2005, at the age of 91. The memorial event tomorrow is at the Marx Memorial Library from 2pm.

The nearest another member of the Communist Party came to election to a London Borough was probably Vishnu Sharma in Ealing … who lost to Labour by just 23 votes in 1974 in the Northcote ward of Southall. Sharma was a leading light in the Indian Workers Association … whose other prominent figure was Piara Khabra, now Labour MP for Ealing Southall. Khabra is the only MP to have stood for election as a London Cllr under three different labels … Independent (1971), Labour (1974 and 1978), and SDP (1982).