Following the catastrophic local election results back in May, there were naturally many post-mortems being conducted from every conceivable perspective on the future of the Labour Party (including, as it turned out, a leadership election). Many of these will attempt to generalise from a very local experience the challenges facing our party and movement everywhere, and make correspondingly certain prescriptions. I only want to attempt something more modest, which is to share some reflections on the state of affairs in the London Borough of Hackney, and what this might mean for the metropolitan areas that are a key part of Labour’s traditional heartland.
As long-term incumbents, we knew that we were in for a challenging election. Labour has held power in Hackney almost continuously since the early 1970s and provided all the borough’s executive mayors since the post was established in 2002. We emerged from the last local elections in 2022 holding 50 of the 57 seats on the council, with that super-majority eroded only slightly over the following years via defections and by-elections. We were certainly expecting headwinds due to the unpopularity of the national government and the recent surge in support for the Green Party under Zack Polanski, but nothing on the scale of what finally transpired. As of 8th May, the Labour group on the council has been reduced to nine people, barely more than the Tories’ six, and those nine are now the official opposition to a Green group of 42. Former councillor Zoë Garbett at the same time succeeded Caroline Woodley as Mayor for the Green Party.
So what went so disastrously wrong? Perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe that the explanation is one of local Labour success rather than failure. Coupled with the dramatic collapse in public confidence in Keir Starmer, a pathway was created for the Greens to supersede Labour in Hackney to an extent that even our opponents could not have predicted until very recently.
Socialism, Hackney-style
Part of the story is, of course, the shifting socio-economic constitution of the borough. We are the classic case of a troubled inner-city district that has seen a huge turnaround over the last few decades, facilitated by the London-centred boom in property values and the eastward expansion of the city’s zone of prosperity. Younger creatives and graduates have made Hackney their home, in turn spurring the development of a fashionable local culture which draws in yet more people. In this context, a Labour council is faced with the perennial social-democratic challenge: finding ways to canalise the wealth and dynamism of the market into initiatives that will improve lives, both of long-standing residents and of newcomers. Those initiatives can range from moderate regulatory nudges (achieving the highest number of Green Flag certifications for our parks of any London borough) to more radical forms of municipal socialism (establishing Hackney Light and Power to decarbonise our local energy supply, improve efficiency and reduce bills).
Hackney Labour went into these elections with an extraordinary, progressive record of delivery in local government. Our manifesto is worth reviewing even now for this alone. Despite the challenges of austerity for over 15 years, we built thousands of new council homes, provided a 90% discount on council tax for low-income households and delivered major investment upgrades to our cultural and public spaces. We introduced landlord licensing to protect private renters, created a targeted scheme to support care-leavers at the age of 18, and installed over 1,000 bike hangers and 1,500 charging points for electric vehicles. Our education system has been turned around to the extent that our schools, once among the worst-rated in the country, now rank joint first in England for SATS results. Of course, there have been errors too. The maintenance of our housing stock has been too slow and haphazard, and our introduction of low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) should have been more sensitive to the needs of residents currently under-served by public transport links. But these are areas for improvement, not failures terminal for the fortunes of a governing party.
Our administration also provided important cultural leadership at an especially fraught time in our politics. We are a borough with large Jewish and Muslim populations and very visible support for Palestine, and so the 7 October massacre and subsequent genocide in Gaza had the potential to create acute challenges for community relations here - challenges which Mayor Woodley navigated with an admirable degree of empathy and discernment. Beyond this, we established a flagship programme to combat violence against women and girls and introduced an anti-racist screening process for new council policies. Crucially, Woodley has also been working with the Labour leaders of neighbouring Haringey and Islington councils to confront the government’s swerve to the Right on immigration. Whatever gains the “island of strangers” speech might yield in Reform-leaning areas (so far, it seems, none at all) this form of politics is absolutely toxic in multicultural places like ours. More or less the council’s final act before the election was to become accredited as a Borough of Sanctuary.
There is, naturally, plenty of work left to do. But within the financial and devolution constraints of local government in this country, it is hard to see how any council could have achieved much more.
Have the Greens captured the future?
So, given this track record, why did so many of our fellow citizens decide to desert Labour and vote Green instead? Clearly, national factors played a big role, but our campaign messaging was at pains to differentiate life in Hackney from issues beyond the purview of these local elections. My experience on the doorstep was that, when prompted, residents were perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two, and overwhelmingly agreed that Hackney is a good place to live and that the Labour council was generally doing a good job.
The Greens were nevertheless more effective at capturing the political mood of the borough and providing the cultural signals that resonate with places like ours. Whether we like it or not, Labour is part of a political establishment that has manifestly failed the British people. Yes, we have a strong record in local government, but in so many areas this frankly amounts to applying the brakes on more fundamental forms of deterioration: stagnant growth, underinvestment in public services, the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, the mounting pressures of an unravelling multilateral system. Faced with the choice between an incumbent party defending its record in local and national government and an insurgent alternative promising to take on the system, thousands of our residents switched to the Greens for the first time. (I suspect we'll also discover that turnout skewed more towards younger graduates, while a higher proportion of our older working-class residents stayed at home on polling day.)
There is a clue in the way in which the Hackney Greens, despite their ultimate success, struggled during the campaign to differentiate themselves from Hackney Labour in any meaningful way. Their campaign messaging focussed (very effectively) on the scandals and failures in national government, but was singularly lacking in concrete policy detail for the local area. (We were certainly not outflanked on environmental issues, with the Greens even promising to review the implementation of unpopular LTNs.) Garbett and her slate of candidates certainly ‘felt very Hackney’, which suggests that, ironically, they are defined by the very local political environment which they claim to challenge and reject. If that is the case, then it is tempting to conclude that the hard-won successes of Labour local government have effectively created the luxury of a Green mayoralty and majority on the council.
Unlike some of my fellow party members, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the Greens in wanting to see a better world locally, nationally and globally. The fact is that, as progressives, we share many of the same instincts about the injustices that need to be overcome, even if we choose different political vehicles to realise our respective visions. My genuine hope is that the new Green council will build on our years of work while correcting for where Labour is nationally now most disappointing, such as on trans rights and the rhetoric around immigration. Conversely, my fear is that a combination of vague populism, carelessness with community relations (especially the treatment of antisemitism) and a lack of rigour in public administration will leave Hackney worse off than it was before.
As one of our long-standing (now former) councillors remarked in the pub on the night of the results, we were at least present to witness history in the making. Having been trounced by all of the Greens, Reform, Plaid Cymru and the SNP in different places, the fundamental question now is whether Labour can once again reach across the divisions in our society and win as a party of unity. If not, then in Hackney as in many other metropolitan areas, we may have to get used to life under Green rule.
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James Bartholomeusz is a branch secretary in Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP and was a candidate in the 2026 local elections. He writes here in a personal capacity, and also on Substack.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
