Finchley and Golders Green: Can Labour win back Britain’s most Jewish seat?

Finchley and Golders Green, Sarah Sackman tells LabourList, is the “epitome of a battleground”. She should know: she fought it, and narrowly lost it, in 2015, and now she’s back for another go at turning the north London seat red.

Mike Freer, the Conservative who has represented the seat since 2010, when it flipped Tory after 13 years with a Labour MP – and who, if my day on the doorsteps in the constituency is anything to go by, is well liked locally –  is not standing again.

Sackman, an environmental lawyer who fell short by 5,662 votes in 2015, will this time face off against Alex Deane, a former Cameron aide and Brexit campaigner now frequently spotted on GB News.

Finchley and Golders Green is home to the largest Jewish population of any constituency in the country; data suggests 21% of voters in the seat are Jewish. In 2019 the former Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger, who left the Labour party over antisemitism, contested the seat as a Liberal Democrat, coming second with a very respectable 17,600 votes.

At this election, the Liberal Democrat vote is expected to go down significantly – one local member I canvas with tells me he has met only three people who’ve said they plan to vote Lib Dem in this election. Sackman highlights the fact that plenty of her volunteers supported Berger in 2019 – but antisemitism remains a very live issue in the seat.

READ MORE: Lee Harpin: ‘How Starmer repaired Labour’s relationship with Jewish voters’

Sackman, who is Jewish, did not contest the seat under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership (in 2017, then-Jewish Labour Movement chair Jeremy Newmark shrank Freer’s majority to 1,657 votes; in 2019 the party placed third behind Freer and Berger).

David, a JLM member and local resident I canvas with, tells me that things have definitively improved since 2019. “Even though people know the country is in a bad way and desperately need change, the existential fear of Labour has been replaced by the more regular political debate about people’s hopes for the future that a potential labour win will bring.”

However, he notes that “the situation in the Middle East has definitely been on people’s minds from all directions”, a point that’s very much underlined by our experience out campaigning. At one point a passing car slows and the driver shouts “no ceasefire, no votes”.

Overall, the reception on the doors is friendly, but more mixed than some other marginal seats I’ve visited: one member of my group spends some time in conversation with a resident for whom Labour’s private school VAT policy means they will likely take their vote elsewhere. As well as people happy to take posters and knowledgeable about Sackman, I find several firm againsts in my day’s campaigning.

Committed campaigning on the ground

One notable feature of the sessions I do in the sweltering heat the week before polling day is how many people who were out knocking doors for Sackman in 2015 are back at it now: she clearly inspires real loyalty, and is often tipped for big things should she become the MP for her north London home seat.

One current Labour staffer on the evening session with me tells me that in 2015, he was a student doing his first proper polling day: “After a really long, really positive day on the doors, I have the memory of the exit poll dropping – hearing it via a friend’s girlfriend on the phone – as a group of us went into Cricklewood station to head home etched on my brain. Terrible adrenaline crash, everybody sad, everybody tired…

“As a young idealistic Labour member, experiencing the magic of the dawn drop and the frantic post-8pm scramble for the first time, that moment with the exit poll ranks among the worst experiences of my life.”

READ MORE: UK general election poll tracker: Daily roundup on how polls look for Labour

Returning to Cricklewood to campaign for Sackman this cycle, he says he had “a really sharp flashback” to that moment.

Although there may be some reasons to think that Sackman, as in 2015, may be unsuccessful once again (Yougov’s second MRP predicts a narrow Tory hold), I’d be surprised if that were the case.

There isn’t the nervous tang in the air that you find when campaigns think they’re really on the ropes. In the sun at Finchley Central Station as people gather for a canvas – we’re joined by Enfield North MP Feryal Clark, and South Yorkshire Metro Mayor Oliver Coppard – the atmosphere borders on buoyant.

“The mood both behind the scenes and on the doors has been great”, Sackman tells LabourList, adding: “Over the last 14 years we have had our ups and downs – but the mood in 2024 is the best I’ve ever seen.

“This is not to say it’s a done deal… But we are cautiously optimistic and ready for polling day.”

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