Over the week to come, journalists will repeat three things until they, and you, are sick: that local elections fall next Thursday; that the results will decide the fate of Keir Starmer; and that he is set to do badly. But just how badly, and where? Last week, Starmer’s own party dropped a big clue.
The most popular politician in Britain came down from Manchester to spend the whole day campaigning in London. As Andy Burnham went from Haringey to Brixton, he rallied Labour’s footsoldiers. “Don’t go into the last two weeks with your shoulders down,” he told them. “Get your shoulders up.”
“Ah,” wrote lobby reporters, “now the King of the North is making incursions down south, such is his ambition.” But his visit is more telling than that, and more profound in its implications.
First, London usually exports its Labour activists, loading them in to people carriers to take the good news of Fabianism to those heathens outside the M25. Now it is the capital sending for outside reinforcement. Second, consider Burnham’s itinerary. Lambeth, Haringey, Southwark: these rank among the reddest patches of the UK’s entire electoral map. The country’s last bastion of Labour support, London, is starting to collapse.
Even as they knock on doors and post leaflets ahead of next Thursday, Labour people have already written off whole swathes of the country. They know they’ll get smashed in Scotland and Wales, where in the assembly elections the governing party will be battling simply not to lose too badly. In truth, the death of Labour Wales and Scotland began many years ago, however late Westminster was in waking up. But London is a different story; even in the wipeout of 2019 it remained deep red.
In every set of council elections over the past two decades, Labour has gained seats. Now the party faces what pollsters project will be its worst results there in 50 years. One council leader considers Thursday to be “the biggest fight of my political life”. The Greens may well win the mayoralities of Lewisham and Hackney and are optimistic about dislodging a number of inner-city councils from Labour control. Since London makes up more than a third of the council seats being contested, Labour’s retreat on its home turf will be one of the biggest stories of next weekend.
The impact of this on a party already in sharp decline is hard to overstate. London is where Keir Starmer, David Lammy and Wes Streeting have seats; cue endless graphics showing how bad the humiliation each man faces in any general election. But a council position in the capital also studs the CVs of vast numbers of the parliamentary Labour party. As Margaret Hodge said, “Inner London attracts sad politicos who want to become MPs,” and she should know: she led Islington council for most of the 1980s.
The Greens look set to bloody Labour Southwark and Lambeth: the training ground of Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reed, Ali McGovern and much of the rest of the faction that runs the Westminster party.
The press will probably write this up as the work of Magic Zack Polanski, doing to the Greens’ vote share what he promised years ago to do to women’s boobs. But this is to miss a much more interesting truth about the politics of Red London. Because as one senior Labour councillor put it to me: “All our chickens are coming home to roost.”
When I went out canvassing with the Greens in Lewisham a few weeks ago, I saw how voters would say they couldn’t vote for a party complicit in the destruction of Gaza, or that spouted Faragisms about immigration. In a city in which almost half the people are from ethnic minorities, holding such policies is fatal, because they show the contempt Starmer and his team have for the very voters who they expect to turn out for them. The geniuses in No 10 may have thought they were playing good politics, and chasing “hero voters”. But in the eyes of a significant chunk of the electorate they have shown themselves to have rotten morals, and it is not clear to me, at least, how any leader recovers from that.
There is one more bruise the Greens in London keep punching, especially intriguing because it is about policy. Front and centre of their campaign is the need for a fair housing system. The great irony here is that it is through the provision of council housing that Labour literally built its London voter base. Across Islington, Southwark, Camden, it threw up housing estates. The deal it offered working-class Londoners was simple: back us and we’ll house you. And Labour came through on its side of the bargain. As Paul Watt shows in Estate Regeneration and its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London, by the early 1980s the capital had more public housing than half the entire total in the US.
What happened next? Margaret Thatcher and right to buy, you might say. But the story is a little more complex, because that narrative doesn’t take into account the suicidal complicity of Labour. In the decade of Thatcher from 1980 to 1990, Watt shows, London still built nearly 52,000 council homes. In the decade of Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007, only 280 went up. The wholesale handing of estates from council to housing associations was far larger under Blair than it ever was under the Tories. The gentrification battles of the 2010s were about inner-London Labour authorities passing council houses to private developers, claiming they had no other option. Again, the Greens are using precisely those stories about Woodberry Down and the Heygate as reasons not to vote Labour.
How the party enacts these pledges from its new position as London’s main opposition is a big question, but what’s undeniable is the support it is drawing. The Greens now have about 225,000 members, and its youth wing alone is almost as big as Ed Davey’s entire Liberal Democrats. But it has an easy target in a Labour party that has the triple lock of bossing London local authorities, City Hall and Westminster, and still claims it can’t do all that much about the housing crisis, apart from wait for the market to provide more homes. The renters’ rights that come into effect on Friday are a great example: tenants can no longer be summarily evicted from their homes, but they can still be priced out at the next rent increase.
The weekend after next, senior Labour figures will ask themselves why they have done so badly in London. They can start by taking a look in the mirror, because the answer is: them.
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Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist