Dave Hill: Why I will be voting Labour in the 2026 London borough elections

Yes, I’ve noticed. I have spotted what a disappointment the Labour government has been. Clumsy, over-cautious and confused, it has squandered a fortune in political capital trying to please or appease groups of voters, especially in the Midlands and the North, who will never be pleased or appeased because they simply aren’t that way inclined.

In the process, it has alienated far larger numbers of other types of voters who had hoped Sir Keir Starmer would lead a focused, capable and shrewdly radical administration with goals aligned with their desires, only to be left fed up and let down.

London is a place with high levels of poverty while at the same time being the mighty engine of the UK economy, without which everywhere else, from Redruth to Redcar, would be worse off. Yet too often in its words and sometimes in its deeds, the Labour government has slighted and sidelined the capital despite its being very much a Labour city since 2010.

Why, then, have I decided that, despite all of the above, I will be voting for Labour on Thursday 7 May rather than “sending a message” that I am displeased with the PM and co so far? I have a few reasons. Hear me out.

One: My local Labour councillors are good.

Back in March, walking past the historic ornamental pond near where I live, I bumped into one of my ward councillors “doing his rounds” as he described it. Phone in hand, he was following up issues raised by local residents, mostly the latest outbreaks of fly-tipping.

At that moment though, he was noting with frustration that some people insisted on throwing bread to the ducks that live on the pond, even though it’s bad for them, and even though there was a sign up listing the sorts of food that do not do ducks harm. Something needed to be done. And by the middle of April, the local neighbourhood action group was reporting that it had.

This is the stuff good local councillors do. It’s not the only thing they do, but it’s the basic business of the job. This particular councillor has served the ward in Hackney where I live in since 2002, engaging with local campaigns, attending school ceremonies, making sure neighbourhood voices are heard and action taken over neighbourhood concerns. One of his ward colleagues, who has been doing the job since 2010, is a lawyer who sits on important council committees with responsibilities that include children’s safety. Both have excellent attendance records. Both are Labour councillors.

Back in January, I attending a ward community meeting at which residents who often get around by car protested about a local road traffic reduction scheme. They filled the Salvation Army meeting space down the road to capacity. Almost as many couldn’t get in, so they squeezed into the reception area. The two Labour councillors were there, taking questions, noting complaints, promising to look into points raised. The Labour Mayor of Hackney, Caroline Woodley, attended too. She stayed late, getting it in the neck from displeased people, not losing her cool. That is part of the job too.

Labour is in some danger of losing control of Hackney to the Greens (no other party stands a chance). Those two Labour candidates are seeking re-election (a third Labour councillor for the ward is standing down this time). Would the Green candidates hoping to unseat them be better at the job?

I’m not claiming they’d be negligent or useless – Greens take pride in being community-minded, after all. But I did see one of them on television a while back saying things about Hackney that were remarkably naive for someone aspiring to public office in the borough. By contrast, the two Labour councillors seeking re-election have tremendous experience and knowledge, all of which they can share with the new third Labour candidate for my ward. Why would I want to get rid of them?

Two: I don’t believe a different party would run my borough better 

Labour politicians have run Hackney for most its existence. They haven’t always done it well. But throughout this century, they have stewarded the borough through some very difficult times and made or enabled many improvements. I’ve lived in the borough since the early 1980s and raised my six children here. I’ve seen a lot things get better.

The past four years have been bumpy at times, and not everything has been perfect: the Care Quality Commission said in February that the council’s adult social care services, while not wholly bad, require improvement; in August 2024, the Regulator of Social Housing found “serious failings” in the council’s service to its tenants, and in May 2025 the Housing Ombudsman produced a report that criticised its “structures and systems” and its culture.

On the other hand, also in August 2024, the council’s children’s services, another core responsibility, were judged “good” and “greatly improved” by Ofsted and a January 2025 Local Government Association review of the council’s performance as a whole was largely positive, recognising that it has a vast array of duties and pressures to cope with. Would having the Greens – or any other political party – in charge at Hackney Town Hall make the council’s delivery of such absolutely fundamental services better? What about bin collections or street-cleaning?

I have my doubts. I say that as someone who knows and has interviewed Zoë Garbett, the Greens’ mayoral candidate for Hackney. I found her likeable, purposeful and, in the best Green traditions, eager to understand how everyday lives are led and to harness creative grassroots energy.

But the problem with the Greens is that in the past few years they have become a completely different party. Zack Polanski’s election as their national leader was just the culmination of an embrace of the worst elements of the Left that was already underway.

In 2024, I privately warned another senior London Green about the general election candidate the party had selected for a seat in east London, a lieutenant of an ally of Jeremy Corbyn who the Greens should have had nothing to do with. Today, the Greens are indistinguishable from Momentum, the Corbnyite activist network that had many good intentions but couldn’t run a bath and tolerated people with intolerable opinions and ideas. In Hackney, Greens have made electoral pacts with such individuals. In Lambeth, Green candidates have expressed such opinions and ideas themselves.

More broadly, Greens across the capital have hitched their wagon to a range of what I call Protest Left narratives, notably about housing and development, that are at best misleading and at worst, dishonest. They’ve also placed a foreign policy issue, Gaza, front and centre of their campaigning. Forgive the statement of the obvious, but no London local authority, no matter what adjustments it might make to its pension funds, is in any position to end the horrors of the Middle East.

Three: Populism is no solution

Populist politics are risky. They speak to emotions, not realities, to fantasies, not facts. Feeding off disillusion, they offer solutions that would be difficult to put into practice and could have unforeseen, harmful effects.

Reform UK is a nationalist, populist far-Right party. Its leaders don’t like being called far-Right and, fair enough, they are different from other British far-Right parties, such as the National Front and the British National Party. It is their nationalist populism that defines them. That is why Nigel Farage and his home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put about the falsehood that foreigners are hogging London’s social housing. That’s why their candidate for Mayor of London is obsessed with flags.

Otherwise, Reform’s approach to London local government is hard to differentiate from that of the Conservatives, certainly in the outer boroughs to which its London popularity is confined. Even so, it isn’t hard to imagine Reform administrations in London boroughs wasting time on stunts and gestures, taking far too long to face hard financial truths, and making nasty remarks in public. If I lived in Havering, Bexley or Hillingdon, I would be voting for whichever candidates stood the best chance of thwarting Reform, including if they were Tories.

The Greens are now a populist party. Their leader defines them as “eco-populist” but the “eco” bit has been forgotten. Rather, as we have seen, the Greens have become populists of the hard or far-Left (we can discuss terminology another day). Their goal is to hammer Labour, and Thursday’s elections could see them win control of Labour boroughs: Hackney, Lambeth and Lewisham look their best bets.

It’s easy to understand the Greens’ appeal. They have energy, optimism and youth. Leaving aside some of their more niche or outré national policies, their calls for private sector rent controls will strike a chord with many private renters in London, a city where such rents are punishingly high (this, it should be said, is something Sir Sadiq Khan has long recognised too).

There are, though, two big problems with this: one, local authorities do not have the power to introduce such rent controls and are vanishingly unlikely to be given it by national government; two, independent studies going back many years, not to mention the experiences of cities elsewhere in the world, have found that such measures can make matters worse rather than better, perhaps especially for those in the most acute housing need.

The Greens either do not know this or do not care to recognise it. Populists often place what sounds good to its supporters above what they could or would do if placed in positions of responsibility and power. Which brings me to…

Four: London has a housing emergency

It’s an emergency of many dimensions and it threatens London’s future, economically, socially and culturally. Part of the solution is to build new homes, including as many as possible that are affordable to Londoners on low and middle incomes. National Labour’s housing targets for London are, shall we say, ambitious and nowhere near being hit. But at least it has policies designed to maximise supply. All the others don’t.

Let’s look at the Greens again. In recent years, 40 per cent or so of the new affordable homes built in London have been supplied by private developers thanks to agreements reached with London councils. Nobody thinks this model is ideal, and the recent collapse in overall supply has shattered it, at least for the time being. Even so, it remains vital to maintaining affordable supply where possible. Polanski describes councillors he opposes as being “in the pockets of property developers”. That is shallow, unfair and immature.

In March, Labour-run Lambeth approved a planning application to build 288 new homes in Brixton, of which 98 would be for social rent – a rare result in the capital these days. The Greens, though, have vowed to overturn the decision if they take power in the borough. Leaving aside the small matter of how that would be achieved, what would they have to say to the nearly 100 Brixton households who would have to go without a social rented home as a result?

Similar fighting talk is coming from the Green mayoral candidate in Lewisham, who says that if elected he would “stand up to” developers. If that means he would tell them to push off if they won’t do what he wants, that’s what they’ll do. Only yesterday, the Labour candidate for Mayor of Croydon told me that if future Green inner London council leaders want to antagonise developers, they would be welcome to give her a call.

Liberal Democrats too are talking about getting more “affordable” homes built, as are local parties in Ealing, Redbridge and elsewhere that are essentially proxies for Your Party. At the same time, the latter can be found protesting about schemes they say don’t supply enough of it and represent “overdevelopment”. Everyone committed to increasing the supply of the types of homes London most needs wishes they had more public money to spend. But they still have a duty to do the best they can with the situation as things stand. Placard policies don’t put roofs over heads.

Meanwhile, the right-wing parties are just as obdurate in their own ways. In Bexley, where Reform hopes to defeat the Tories, its campaign is peddling scare stories about the Green Belt – ironically, one of those local government postures Nigel Farage’s party has in common with the one it aspires to replacing. Like the Tories, too, Reform opposes housing intensification in the outer boroughs, railing against tall buildings, warning of threats to local built environment character and so on.

London has a housing emergency. Yet parties in London across the ideological spectrum seem determined to make it worse. Labour is the sole exception.

Five: Chaos imperils change for the better 

Labour in London needs much better opposition. The massive majorities it has come to expect in some parts of the capital are not conducive to lively, responsive and productive local government democracy and debate. Let’s look on the bright side. If, say, Labour keeps hold of Hackney but has to face a stronger but also competent, knowledgeable and constructive Green opposition for the next four years, that could be a good outcome for the borough. The same might be true if, for example, Reform becomes a substantial opposition in a Labour-retained Barking & Dagenham and ends up behaving like reasonable Tories.

Sadly, there seems to be a bigger chance that several boroughs will end up in the hands of inexperienced and sometimes incompetent, fractious and foolish councillors who’ve risen to elected office on bubbles of hubris that will be very quickly burst. A third or more of the 32 boroughs could end up under No Overall Control. That doesn’t have to be a recipe for chaos and disaster, but a lot can go wrong, and the bad feeling between the parties that have some objectives in common – the Greens and stronger local groups and Labour, the Conservatives and Reform – could make coalitions unworkable.

Those are not clinching arguments for no change, because parties that stay in power for too long can and do become stale, complacent and tainted. But the troubling thing about the London borough elections of 2026 is that the parties most likely to bring about changes in council control do not appear well-equipped for taking on the difficult and important tasks they will have to perform – or to have what I think are the right priorities.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. And whichever candidates you favour, don’t forget to vote!

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky and at LinkedIn. Dave and elections expert Lewis Baston have compiled the definitive guide to the 2026 borough elections in partnership with public affairs specialist Lowick Hedry. Read it here.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack. Thanks.