Tim Donovan: How Green will London be after 7 May?

Never mind Reform UK, in London the Green Party is also making the political weather. Membership has surged among disaffected Labour supporters in particular. The upcoming local elections in London’s 32 boroughs are assuming considerable importance, not least for the future of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. With leader and Hackney resident Zack Polanski transforming the party’s image and appeal, can the Greens turn their rapidly-expanding grassroots movement into electoral gold?

DOORSTEP LAMBETH

Above the counter at the Brown and Green café in Crystal Palace Park is a message on heart-shaped yellow paper. “You are loved whoever you are and wherever you are from,” it says. “We are all brothers and sisters born on the same earth. You are welcome here. Love, not hate.” On a crisp Saturday morning in December, there is little chance of that not being heeded. Gathered on the outside terrace, drinking tea, are dozens of activists and volunteers for the Green Party, London’s in-form political team. Taking hold of their clipboards and badges, they are preparing for a Big Day Out South London.

Many are new to the project and this is their first direct experience of political campaigning. They are about to be deployed to knock on doors and gather information that could help the Greens shape their campaign in the up-coming London borough elections. It is to be an “introductory conversation” with potential voters, nothing too heavy. Local candidates and teams will be back in the spring to press home the case. There’s no need to be up-to-speed on every issue in the Green policy book. “The main thing is that you are polite and friendly,” says an organiser.

Over the past few months the Greens have seen a huge surge in membership. In Lambeth alone it has tripled to nearly 2,500. The challenge now is to harness that injection of energy and turn it into electoral gold.

In a brief pep talk, Green London Assembly member Caroline Russell, also a councillor in Islington, says the increase in support has put the party in an unprecedented position, enabling it to do much more than ever before. “How ever well we are doing in the polls, on social media, the thing that gets people elected is doors knocked, conversations held and making sure you get really good data on who’s planning to vote Green,” she says.

The volunteers are divided into groups according to borough, and I am accompanying the Lambeth contingent, stewarded and shepherded by Scott Ainslie, a garrulous Scot and former actor who was the Green’s MEP for London in the year preceding Brexit. Scott leads the Green opposition to Labour on Lambeth Council. There are four Green councillors there, including one who defected from Labour over its stance on the Middle East and another who won a by-election last May – the first such contest lost by Labour in the borough since 2008.

Scott insists there’s something stirring on the ground and that the flamboyant leadership of Zack Polanski is helping widen the party’s appeal well beyond saving the planet. He says it is enabling cut-through of his core belief that social justice goes hand in hand with environmental justice. He dares to believe that the Greens could deliver the sizeable electoral shock of defeating Labour and taking control of Lambeth Town Hall next May.

The level of disaffection with Labour nationally and locally makes this far from impossible, especially as the disarray of Your Party has reduced its potential for competing for the same type of voter.

In our south London canvassing group are Andy and Matt who have just joined the Greens. Andy has once before delivered leaflets for Labour, but was not a party member. Matt joined Labour briefly after Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide election victory, believing in change, before disillusionment rapidly set in over the approach to poverty, equality and immigration. Both say Polanski’s style and rapid route to recognition, while not the clinching factor, helped persuade them to sign up.

The target of today’s mission is the Central Hill estate, a 1970s development of houses and flats linked by a maze of walkways and stairways. For well over a decade it has been earmarked for demolition by the council, but workable plans and necessary investment have remained elusive, and many of the tenants have resisted, wanting it refurbished instead. Around 90 of the 450 homes are boarded up. It’s a prime target for the Greens, not least because one of their candidates, a former resident and tenants rep of the estate, is trying to win back the council seat he narrowly lost here in Gypsy Hill ward at the last local elections in 2022.

Huddled under a tree, next to the area’s closed-down police station, Scott delivers a crash course in canvassing to the newbies. He is “running the board”, poring over sheets of the electoral register and allocating addresses to each of his foot soldiers. Following a now familiar model of modern campaigning, he wants some solid bits of intelligence brought back. Does the resident have any issues or gripes they want addressing? How did they vote last time and are they open to supporting the Greens? Contact details are sought and a score given as to the likelihood of a Green vote next time. This is laying the foundation for a follow up contact from the local candidates.

THE TASK AHEAD

Across London, in the flush of their expanding membership, the Greens think they can turn this brand of grassroots, hyper-local, responsive politics into dozens of seats in council chambers. They currently have 41 councillors out of the more than 1,800 in the capital, holding at least one seat on 15 of London’s 32 local councils. However, most of these were not elected as Greens and are former Labour councillors who have defected, sometimes after being deselected. Despite the Zack-hype and expectation, the Greens are pinning their hopes on eye-catching results in a handful of boroughs.

The scale of the task ahead is soon apparent from this one exercise in one Lambeth neighbourhood. Many Central Hill tenants either aren’t in or aren’t really bothered. But council elections can be won on small margins and there is widespread concern in Labour ranks that, such is the current mood, many of their voters won’t turn out. We soon get an idea of how high the stakes are when the local Labour MP and two Labour councillors are seen canvassing in a nearby street. We are in a prime local battleground.

Andy gets into his stride quickly and is soon engaging people in conversation with the zeal of the newly converted, telling one tenant that the Greens want to remove power from the elite and fat cats. She tells him she voted Labour last time and is clearly in the market for change. But her prime concerns are a million miles from a wealth tax or Gaza, let alone tackling climate change. Like several other tenants she is angry about the mould from damp in her home.

Some residents say they are broadly content. Others talk about plumbing and rubbish problems and the condition of the pathways. In one block, a man invites Andy in from the cold. Later, Andy tells Scott the man is a definite convert from Labour. “It’s all about taking time to talk and listen,” he says. When he admits he forgot to push a leaflet through another door he is mock-scolded by the boss: “I asked you to do one thing!”

There will be a need for plenty of humour over the campaign days ahead. The Greens are facing a nice problem to have. But can they get sufficiently organised in a short space of time to seize this moment and marshal all these new members to make headway across London. Or will the logistics become overwhelming?  You get a hint of frustration from Matt that he did not have the local knowledge – particularly around the condition of housing – to be persuasive on the doorstep. But that will come, he hopes. “I am a results-focused kind of person. This today was about introducing ourselves. It is not the only time we will visit these voters.”

Scott insists that top-notch organisers are being recruited, including one who has come over after helping Labour gain a previously Conservative council at the last election. There is more money for leaflets from new member subscriptions and plenty of time until May, he says. And then there’s the Zack factor. “Before, you needed to deliver six leaflets before people knew who you are or what you stood for. Now it only needs one.” What about the changing identity and broadening appeal? Did anybody raise environmental issues with him on the doorstep in areas like this? “Never,” he said.

In the week Polanski won his landslide victory to become leader, I was asked to contribute to an assessment of him on the BBC Radio 4 programme Profile, having watched him up close as a member of the London Assembly when he was also the Greens’ deputy leader. I offered up some very mild scepticism about a figure who had joined the party less than a decade ago, was previously a Liberal Democrat and had a colourful past in various previous occupations.

A message afterwards from one veteran environmentalist said I was right to be cautious – they did not like the new eco-modernism. However, there has been little internal party dissent. Hundreds of thousands of people have been engaging with Polanski’s social media and the polls have improved for the Greens. Suddenly grassroots activists are finding they have won the right to be heard.

DOORSTEP HACKNEY

It is a chilly January Saturday in Dalston, east London, and the focus of the Hackney Green party is on volume and reach. Dozens of first-time volunteers are helping deliver New Year greetings cards to the 120,000 homes in the borough. It is a clear response to Labour’s mayor sending round a mass Christmas card last month – a tussle of festive sentiments.

Cynthia, a software engineer, says she has joined the party primarily to counter the rise of Reform UK and because of issues like the Greens’ positive stance on trans rights. Flick, who’s a theatre stage manager, says she has been drawn by the “intersectionality” of issues of environmental and social justice.  Jack, a chef, signed up in the Barnet but has answered an appeal by London organisers to come and help in Hackney.

That’s because Hackney is by far and away the Greens’ number one target in the capital, a place where they hope to crown the country’s first Green Mayor.

Membership here has risen from 650 to nearly 3,000 in a year, the energy of newcomers needing to be harnessed to the experience of activists embedded in their communities for years. It is an expansion with logistical challenges. The group of leafleters I am accompanying discovers their target street already has Green New Year cards protruding from letterboxes – duplication that Caroline Russell, present again, brushes off as an inevitable hiccup given the overnight scaling-up of operations: “It’s like a start-up which suddenly grows fivefold and you need different systems of governance and processes.”

Alex is another recent recruit, attracted to the Greens by their “faith in democracy” where policy-making resides firmly with members. He was impressed that within days of becoming a Green he was invited to join a local policy forum, and soon after given training in canvassing and other campaign techniques. Today, he’s organising a group of leafleters on the King’s Park estate in Hackney Wick, where he also happens to live. “Until recently the party was regarded as not having much hope. All of a sudden that has changed,” he says.

That even five months away from council elections this is a battle being fought on Hackney estates – balcony by balcony – becomes evident when the Greens find themselves just metres away from one of the existing Labour councillors for the area, who talking to a tenant just moments after a Green leaflet hit her doormat. She is explaining Labour’s headline policies such as this year’s rail fare freeze and lifting the two-child benefit cap, and stressing eligibility under Labour locally for a reduction of 90 percent in Council Tax. The Greens, she’s saying, support closing more roads and higher taxes.

Even before experiencing the Starmer Labour government, voters’ interest in the Greens in Hackney had been stirring. At the 2024 general election, their candidate finished second to Labour in Hackney South & Shoreditch, one of the safest Labour seats in the country. Labour’s winning incumbent, Meg Hillier, secured over 59 per cent of the vote. But the nearly 10,000 votes won by Green runner-up, Laura-Louise Fairley, was the largest number achieved by a Green candidate in London, representing a nearly 24 per cent share – an increase of 17.5 per cent compared with 2019.

Fairley is now standing in the council elections, excited by the Green popularity surge but keen to stress how hard it will be to shift Labour, embedded in Hackney for decades: “Labour being the established party, there are so many people here who will vote how they always voted, so we have to work 10 times harder to get our message across.”

The Greens’ chances appear to have been bolstered by an alliance with – and agreement not to stand against – candidates from the Hackney Independent Socialist Collective, three former Labour councillors who resigned over Gaza. They even appear together in some leaflets.

The hopes of the Greens’ first mayoralty rest with Zoë Garbett (above), one of borough’s three Green councillors and, like Russell and Polanski, a member of the London Assembly. Garbett has stood twice before for Hackney Mayor and contested the London mayoralty in 2024. The stars, she feels, are aligning. “The moment of Zack getting a much bigger platform and being bolder in what we stand for, combined with accelerating our local campaigns, has become a perfect blend.”

Few can dispute the impact of Polanksi, a leader who had the rare distinction recently of being asked to appear on two of the BBC’s flagship programmes, Have I Got News for You and Question Time, in the same week. There is talk of him standing for Mayor of London in 2028 if he has not managed by then to win a parliamentary seat. There local speculation that if, as is rumoured, Diane Abbott, Labour’s veteran MP for Hackney North & Stoke Newington stands down before completing her current term, a resulting by-election in Polanski’s own backyard could provide that route to Westminster.

Tim Donovan is the former political editor of BBC London and a trustee of Centre for London. Follow him at LinkedIn. Top photo and Zoë Garbett photo by Matt Payne for the Green Party. Rival greetings cards photo by Dave Hill. Other photos by Tim Donovan.

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