Barnet Conservative leader Peter Zinkin talks to Joe Ives, Local Democracy Reporter

Barnet Conservatives are not particularly used to being out of power – and won’t want to grow any more familiar with the feeling after the election on Thursday, 7th May.

Before the last election Barnet Council had only ever had one Labour leader, Alan Williams, who steered a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition between 1994 and 2002. During this eight-year stint the Conservatives still had the most seats of any party, but not enough to form a majority.

Dan Thomas, who led council between 2019 and 2022, oversaw a disastrous campaign for the local Tories four years ago. His party lost 16 seats, which cleared the way for the first Labour majority administration in the council’s history.

Thomas stood down late last year shortly before switching allegiences to lead right-wing rivals Reform UK in Wales. His replacement in Barnet is long-serving councillor Peter Zinkin, who was elected as opposition leader in 2024.

Recent polling from YouGov shows around a quarter of voters nationally would pick Reform if there was a general election. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are currently polling at 19% across the country.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) recently sat down with Cllr Zinkin to discuss the upcoming local election. Asked about the potential threat posed by Reform UK, Cllr Zinkin argued that Tory success in Barnet Council by-elections last year demonstrated that the Conservatives are much more popular locally.

The borough’s only Reform councillor currently is Mark Shooter, who represents Hendon but is standing in West Hendon at the election. For Cllr Zinkin, this is a clear sign that the former Conservative councillor, who defected in 2024, is concerned he might lose his seat.

Regarding the Conservatives’ own campaign, Cllr Zinkin says there is “an overarching theme”. This, he says, is the need to face the spiralling financial difficulties at the local authority. The current Labour administration, he argues, is guilty of avoiding full and transparent debate about the council’s growing deficit because it presents a reality “too painful” for many to accept.

Cllr Zinkin believes this is “utterly, utterly financially irresponsible” and risks the local authority failing to reach its legal obligation to balance its budget. He and Labour leader Barry Rawlings have very different views about how to fix this problem.

Cllr Rawlings argues things are on track now and will be better in the long run. Cllr Zinkin, meanwhile, is highly concerned about the overall long-term impact of borrowing a total of £135million in ‘exceptional financial support’ (EFS) from the government over back-to-back financial years.

“What this administration has done is publish a financial suicide note to the residents of Barnet,” Cllr Zinkin warns. The £135m in EFS borrowing must be paid back to the government over time and with interest. Labour, he says, are “self-deluded” about the long-term impacts of their decision.

Labour argue that austerity measures, carried out by coalition and Conservative governments, have put immense strain on local authorities across the country and left some councils with their core spending power cut in half. The LDRS asked Cllr Zinkin if  Barnet Council’s financial issues can, in part, be attributed to this. His answer: “No, absolutely not.”

“What has caused the problem,” Cllr Zinkin argues, “is the spending on looking after the residents of Barnet: the homeless, the children and the adults”.

Local government, Cllr Zinkin says, “was massively inefficient”, adding: “What austerity did was drag local authorities into the 21st Century.”

This was through “huge strides in productivity” which came, he believes, “as a result of the pressures that were put on them”.

Cllr Zinkin continued: “What we are seeing today is an entirely legislatively driven set of obligations which have been put on local authorities to spend money by law on behalf of their residents, which central government says we have to do.”

For the Conservative leader, the problem lies in the fact the government is placing legal obligations on councils without proper thought on what is needed to fulfill them.

Councils are mainly funded through two major avenues; council tax and funding from Westminster. The government’s financial settlement for local councils is, as Cllr Zinkin describes it, “based on an insanely complex formula” with considerations of factors such as deprivation and population demographics.

He argues that the government has essentially benchmarked the council tax incomes of London boroughs against local authorities outside the capital. Right now,  £510.51 of a Band D resident’s annual council tax in any London borough effectively bypasses their local authority and goes straight to the Mayor of London. This money is then used for spending on services such as London Fire Brigade, Transport for London (TfL) and policing.

This fact is being overlooked by the government, Cllr Zinkin argues. For him, it means London councils do not get the amount of funding from the local government settlement that they actually need. 

The Conservative leader certainly doesn’t hide from explaining what he believes the problems facing the council are. But the LDRS asked him about the other side of his campaign: what he plans to do about it, if elected.

“It’s not a question of what we plan on doing,” Cllr Zinkin responded. “It’s a question of what the government are telling councils to do.”

He argues that various Barnet Conservative administrations had, for decades, “kept finances under control” as a means of reducing council tax increases on residents. But as a result, the Tory leader says that the borough is being hit harder by a government that is moving its council funding away from London.

This is all at the same time as Barnet’s Labour administration “have allowed costs completely to spin out of control”.

If elected, Cllr Zinkin argues that the Conservatives would attempt to tackle what he regards as issues stemming from financial mismanagement by the current Labour administration. In addition he says he would work with other London councils to lobby the government “to seek proper, logical joined-up thinking” and to “point the finger at the policy makers” who, he believes, are taking funding from the capital without reducing the obligations London’s councils have to provide by law. 

Of course, elections aren’t about one issue and councilors are more than just their jobs. Like many others in Barnet, Cllr Zinkin has had more immediate concerns than budgets lately.  In March four Hatzola ambulances, vehicles used by Jewish medical volunteers, were destroyed in an arson attack in Golders Green, which is Cllr Zinkin’s ward. 

The Conservative leader described visiting a group of friends during Passover not long after the incident: “Most of the discussion,” he said, “was around the Holocaust and their parents’ experience of Kristallnacht”.

He added: “I think that the burning of the ambulances has triggered memories which have disturbed people – and to be honest with you I came away from a really nice evening event really thoughtful about what on earth is going on.”

With this and an election campaign ahead it would be understandable if the Tory leader needed some escapism. Many find this in music – not Cllr Zinkin: “I’m not tone deaf but music doesn’t do anything for me and it never has,” he said. Books, on the other hand, are a different matter.

“I read science fiction and fantasy because I find that is a way of dealing with some of the pressures of the world,” Cllr Zinkin said. The Conservative leader recently donated more than 100 boxes of books to Jewish charity Langdon. Even this, he thinks, was only around 40% of his collection. A product, explains Cllr Zinkin, of “reading science fiction for more than 65 years”.

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