Over the week to come, journalists will repeat three things until they, and you, are sick: that local elections fall next Thursday; that the results will decide the fate of Keir Starmer; and that he is set to do badly. But just how badly, and where? Last week, Starmer’s own party dropped a big clue.
The most popular politician in Britain came down from Manchester to spend the whole day campaigning in London. As Andy Burnham went from Haringey to Brixton, he rallied Labour’s footsoldiers: “Don’t go into the last two weeks with your shoulders down,” he told them. “Get your shoulders up.” Lobby reporters spun this as the King of the North making incursions down south, but his visit is more telling than that. London usually exports its Labour activists, loading them into people carriers to take the good news of Fabianism to those heathens outside the M25. Now the capital is sending for outside reinforcement. Burnham’s itinerary - Lambeth, Haringey, Southwark - ranks among the reddest patches of the UK’s electoral map. The country’s last bastion of Labour support, London, is starting to collapse.
Even as they knock on doors and post leaflets, Labour people have already written off whole swathes of the country: Scotland and Wales, where the governing party will battle simply not to lose too badly. But London is a different story; even in the wipeout of 2019 it remained deep red. In every set of council elections over the past two decades, Labour has gained seats. Now the party faces what pollsters project will be its worst results there in 50 years. One council leader considers Thursday “the biggest fight of my political life.” The Greens may well win the mayoralities of Lewisham and Hackney and are optimistic about dislodging a number of inner-city councils from Labour control. Since London makes up more than a third of the council seats being contested, Labour’s retreat on its home turf will be one of the biggest stories of next weekend.
The impact on a party already in sharp decline is hard to overstate. London is where Keir Starmer, David Lammy and Wes Streeting have seats - cue endless graphics showing how bad the humiliation each man faces in any general election. But a council position in the capital also studs the CVs of vast numbers of the parliamentary Labour party. As Margaret Hodge said, “Inner London attracts sad politicos who want to become MPs,” and she should know: she led Islington council for most of the 1980s. The Greens look set to bloody Labour Southwark and Lambeth: the training ground of Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reed, Ali McGovern and much of the rest of the faction that runs the Westminster party.
The press will probably write this up as the work of Magic Zack Polanski, doing to the Greens’ vote share what he promised years ago to do to women’s boobs. But this misses a much more interesting truth: as one senior Labour councillor put it, “All our chickens are coming home to roost.” When I went out canvassing with the Greens in Lewisham a few weeks ago, voters said they couldn’t vote for a party complicit in the destruction of Gaza, or that spouted Faragisms about immigration. In a city where almost half the people are from ethnic minorities, holding such policies is fatal, because they show the contempt Starmer and his team have for the very voters who they expect to turn out for them. The geniuses in No 10 may have thought they were playing good politics, chasing “hero voters.” But in the eyes of a significant chunk of the electorate they have shown rotten morals, and it’s not clear how any leader recovers from that.
There is one more bruise the Greens keep punching, especially intriguing because it is about policy: housing. Front and centre of their campaign is the need for a fair housing system. The great irony is that Labour literally built its London voter base through council housing. Across Islington, Southwark, Camden, it threw up housing estates. The deal it offered working-class Londoners was simple: back us and we’ll house you. And Labour came through on its side - by the early 1980s, London had more public housing than half the entire total in the US. What happened next? Margaret Thatcher and right to buy, you might say. But the story is more complex: from 1980 to 1990, London still built nearly 52,000 council homes; from 1997 to 2007, under Tony Blair, only 280 went up. The handing of estates from council to housing associations was far larger under Blair than under the Tories. The gentrification battles of the 2010s were about inner-London Labour authorities passing council houses to private developers, claiming they had no other option. The Greens are using precisely those stories about Woodberry Down and the Heygate as reasons not to vote Labour.
How the party enacts these pledges from its new position as London’s main opposition is a big question, but its support is undeniable: the Greens now have about 225,000 members, and its youth wing alone is almost as big as Ed Davey’s entire Liberal Democrats. It has an easy target in a Labour party that has the triple lock of bossing London local authorities, City Hall and Westminster, and still claims it can’t do much about the housing crisis, apart from wait for the market. The renters’ rights that come into effect on Friday are a great example: tenants can no longer be summarily evicted, but they can still be priced out at the next rent increase. The weekend after next, senior Labour figures will ask themselves why they have done so badly in London. They can start by taking a look in the mirror, because the answer is: them.