Not even London is a Labour stronghold anymore

Some forecasts predict that the Labour Party could lose as many as 1,800 councillors in this week’s English local elections. It is also on the verge of suffering its worst result in London for decades.

According to a poll published in April by YouGov, Labour stands to lose control of six councils across the capital. Four of these – Hackney, Waltham Forest, Lambeth and Lewisham – are likely to be lost to the Greens. Labour is also predicted to lose Barking and Dagenham to Reform UK and Barnet to the Conservatives.

While polling is never conclusive, there is one thing we can say for certain: London politics is about to become more fragmented at the Labour Party’s expense. Having held the capital in an iron grip after the last council elections in 2022, Labour will count itself fortunate if it has 15 of the city’s 32 boroughs under its control after 7 May. London’s image of being a ‘Labour city’ is on course to be blown to smithereens.

Labour has all but given up on retrieving the ‘red wall’ region in the Midlands and the north that it lost to the Conservatives in 2019. That support has now shifted once again to Reform, as evidenced last year when Nigel Farage’s party pried Doncaster council out of Labour’s hands. Reform is widely predicted to do the same in Sunderland on Sunday. But of far more concern for Labour will be its collapsing support in south London.

The 2024 General Election reinforced Labour’s dominance here. In Lewisham East, Labour’s Janet Daby was re-elected with 58 per cent of the vote and a majority of over 18,000 votes. In Erith and Thamesmead, Daby’s colleague, Abena Oppong-Asare, was re-elected with 55 per cent of the vote and a majority of over 16,000. This pattern was reflected in other seats such as Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, as well as in Peckham.

Now, Zack Polanski’s Green Party is expected to win the highest share of the vote across south London – including, quite remarkably, Lewisham and Lambeth. Currently, 49 out of 54 of Lewisham’s councillors belong to Labour, with the remaining four being Greens. For the Greens to potentially gain control of the council would be a truly historic result – and a disastrous one for Labour. Similar can be said of Lambeth, where Labour has 54 of the 63 council seats (with the Green Party and Liberal Democrats having four each, and the only other councillor being an independent).

While what could broadly be described as the ‘left’ may hold the majority of London councils after the local elections, these elections ought to remind us that London is anything but a ‘progressive’ city. As well as being predicted to gain well over 1,000 new councillors across England (with some estimates being as high as 1,600), Reform UK is on course to park its teal tanks in parts of the capital as well. The party is projected to make its highest vote-share gains in outer-east London boroughs such as Havering, Bexley and Bromley. To gain a number of London councils would be a major feather in Farage’s cap – demonstrating that the party can well and truly broaden its reach by finding success in the major cities.

Labour is also facing the threat of independent candidates in the east London borough of Newham – especially in areas such as Manor Park, where, according to the 2021 Census, nearly three in five residents identified as Muslim, and one in three are of Bangladeshi heritage. The Newham Independents, a self-described socialist outfit in the borough, could enjoy considerable electoral success at Labour’s expense in one of London’s most deprived boroughs.

The Green Party, Reform UK and a batch of left-wing independent candidates are on course to fundamentally reshape the political map of London. It could prove to be the final nail in Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.