There was a spectacular result in Thursday’s by-election in the Shooters Hill ward of Greenwich Council, where the Greens gained the seat from Labour with a big swing after a campaign dominated by local issues.
There have been five by-elections in Greenwich in just over a year. That’s more than anywhere else in London recently, suggesting the maritime borough is not a happy ship. One of those by-elections, held last November, was also for a Shooters Hill seat. I describing the geography and demographics of the ward when writing about that contest. It is a half-way out piece of socially mixed suburban London, the sort of area for which the term “middle London” is sometimes used.
Labour won that previous Shooters Hill race, and until Thursday had prevailed in every election held there since the ward was created in 2002, although the Conservatives made it a close thing in 2006, their best year in borough elections since 1982.
The outcome in November was Labour’s third-best London by-election result since the general election, but Thurday’s was its second-worst in the same period. The party’s national popularity was already in steep decline by last autumn, and things are only somewhat worse for it now, so to understand why its defeat was so heavy it is necessary to examine local circumstances.
The by-election was triggered by the resignation of Labour councillor Ivis Williams, who was first elected for the ward in 2022, and before that had represented Woolwich Common ward from 2018 to 2022. Williams had previously been in good standing with the local Labour leadership – she was cabinet member for finance for a while – but then came a spectacular falling-out. Unlike previous councillors to resign, she did not go quietly. Instead, she left with all guns blazing, issuing public statements and endorsing the Green candidate.
The cause of the dispute between Williams and the Labour Group, and the voter discontent in Shooters Hill, was the council cabinet’s November 2024 decision to sell off two plots of land in the ward to help balance its books. One is occupied by the former Greenwich Equestrian Centre, which opened in 2013 as an Olympic legacy project but closed its doors last year. The other was a smaller site called Green Garth, located on the edge of the Shooters Hill residential area and green space.
Although the Equestrian Centre was not primarily an amenity for locals, ward residents regretted its loss and feared the consequences of private development of both sites. They felt that alternative uses had not been given proper consideration and that residents had not been adequately consulted. Petitions gathered steam and by the end of March had reached 2,000 signatures – more, as Williams pointed out, than had voted Labour in the ward in 2022.
Williams wanted to postpone the sale of the land to see if residents could put together bids for a community asset transfer, but this was regarded as being against Labour group policy and therefore a disciplinary matter. Williams disputed this and resigned from the council. Then, after being informed that the disciplinary process would would go up to the London regional level, she resigned from the party too.
The fall-out added another layer to Labour’s local problems. As well as taking an unpopular decision about the asset sales, the party in Greenwich now appeared to many Shooters Hill residents to have been unwilling to listen to them, and to have punished Williams for representing their views. They were sharply criticised in Greenwich’s lively local online media for their handling of the matter.
The depth of local feeling created a difficult situation for Labour’s new candidate, Jummy Dawodu. She went all-in on support for the council leadership, criticised the opposition campaigns, did not participate in hustings they organised and also denied there was much local discontent. Labour tried to portray the contest as being between them and Reform UK.
Unusual as it was, the Shooters Hill by-election illustrated wider issues in British politics. Greenwich did not want to sell its land in Shooters Hill, but like most of local government – and indeed national government – the borough is under terrible financial pressure. Asset sales are a way of keeping public services going for another year. Delaying or cancelling them makes cuts or other tough decisions more necessary.
There are no easy answers. Greenwich Labour made its case poorly and ran a wilfully misdirected campaign. They clearly mishandled Williams’s apparently sincere attempt to represent her residents. However, local government could not function if councillors saw their job solely as being ward representatives. There has to be a collective view of the common good.
Development needs to happen somewhere, and existing residents will sometimes have to be disappointed. Complaints about lack of consultation are often disguised protests at the substance of the decision, and therefore even the most time-consuming and painstaking community engagement will not really help. There is always more to these situations than a morality tale of bad machine politics against plucky local residents.
There were seven candidates for Shooters Hill – those of the usual five parties plus two Independents. The dynamic of the campaign was to give Labour a kicking and this feeling, helped by Williams’s endorsement, coalesced around Tamasin Rhymes, who had also run the Greens in the ward in November.
The local issues galvanised voters’ interest. Turnout was 32.6 per cent – almost as good as the 35.6 per cent for the full borough elections of 2022 and a marked increase on the 22.5 per cent in the autumn, with 707 more people casting votes. Rhymes was elected with 869 votes, Dawodu was second with 756, and Paul Banks of Reform UK was third with 402 votes – a respectable but not dramatic vote share of 16 per cent, up from 10 per cent in November. He pushed Conservative Tim Waters into fourth, on 288.
Relative to the ward’s electoral history, this was a much more impressive Green gain than the one in Lambeth last month: the swing from Labour to Green was 24.5 per cent compared with 10.5 per cent. In addition, the Greens lacked an organisational and voting base in Shooters Hill, but were gifted powerful campaign momentum by the situation that led to the poll and the endorsement of a popular outgoing councillor.
The distinctive local context means it would be foolhardy to regard the result as a harbinger of huge Green gains from Labour in middle London come the May 2026 borough elections – even Labour’s good result here in November didn’t predict what would happen in the same ward seven months later. But it does show the political pressures that councils face, caught between stringent finances and discontented residents.
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