General Election 2017: Conservatives yet to select candidates for Hackney seats

Hackney Town Hall

At the time of writing, the Conservative party had yet to announce their General Election candidates in Hackney’s two constituencies.

While the Tories are expected to clean up seats in Westminster on 8 June, Hackney has long bucked the national electoral trend.

Standing with a blue rosette in 2015, Amy Gray won 14.7 per cent of the vote in Hackney North and Stoke Newington and her counterpart in Hackney South and Shoreditch, Jack Tinley, won 13.5 per cent. Both placed second but came in approximately 50 percentage points behind the Labour victors.

The party has hinted that Conservative Campaign Headquarters will impose single candidates on seats it considers unwinnable, but it is yet to explicitly name those constituencies. Whether or not Hackney is included in the list, whoever is selected in the borough faces an uphill battle. Their main objective may well be to prevent a haemorrhaging of votes to the Liberal Democrats, given that the Hackney pro-EU Remain vote in last year’s referendum was the second highest in mainland Britain.