Hundreds turned out to the Green Party rally in St. George on Monday evening, with tickets reportedly selling out in under four hours of its announcement last month.
Bristol Central MP Carla Denyer kicked off proceedings. Denyer, who was party co-lead from 2021, handed a green baton to successor, Zack Polanski as he bounded onto the stage – a symbolic transfer of power.
In the audience sat the local Green party’s newest signing, former Labour councillor Alsayed Al-Magrabi, who defected to the Greens last Thursday. Al-Magrabi’s defection brings the party’s councillors to 35 in Bristol, one shy of a majority.
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Reacting to the move, Cllr Emma Edwards, leader of the Green group said: “It is brave to leave a party that no longer aligns with you and to stand up for what you believe in. Al will be a huge asset to our group.”
Al-Magrabi’s defection is part of a broader shake up in UK politics, and the decline of the traditional two party rule.
The Greens are surging. Bolstered by Polanski’s eco-socialist platform, membership has exploded to over 150,000 in the space of a few months, overtaking the Conservatives and making the party the third-largest in the UK. Amongst 18-14 year olds, the Greens are topping the polls.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the political spectrum: Reform, riding on a right-wing anti-immigration agenda, are currently polling at just below 30%.
Before heading to the rally on Monday, Al-Magrabi joined us at the Cable office for his first in-depth interview since defecting, opening up about how his upbringing shaped his politics, why he went Green – and what that means for local politics in Bristol.
‘They left us in the dirt’
Al-Magrabi grew up in a low-income household in Leytonstone, east London, with a Palestinian father and a white English mother. From an early age, he was acutely aware of the social problems around him.
“Growing up, I was always quite poor, and as a disabled kid, I faced lots of challenges,” says Al-Magrabi, who has a speech impediment.
“I always wondered — why aren’t our politicians helping people who need it? They have the power to change things. Instead, they just left us in the dirt.
“Leytonstone has a lot of poverty, violence, knife crime, gangs. I thought — someone has to step in, because the main reason young people turn to gangs and knife crime is poverty and lack of opportunity.”
He moved to Bristol in 2017 to study politics and international studies at UWE, joining the Labour Party a year later. He threw himself into campaigning, volunteering tirelessly. “I gave it a hundred percent. I gave up so much time because they were the party that could bring down the Conservatives.”
In 2024, he was elected Labour councillor for Frome Vale, a northeastern Bristol ward covering Fishponds, Staple Hill, and UWE’s Glenside campus. The area mixes leafy streets with more deprived neighbourhoods, but many constituent concerns were the same as those he’d seen in London.
“The problems range from potholes to arson, drug dealing, shoplifting, even issues in the parks,” he says, speaking proudly of his work to improve trust between local communities and the police and his efforts to clean up local green spaces.
Palestine was a breaking point
Just months into his new role as a councillor, Al-Magrabi found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his commitment to social justice with a Labour Party moving ever further to the right in an attempt to outflank Reform.
“I’d point to their anti-immigration stance, their refusal to introduce a wealth tax,” he says, citing the factors that deepened his disillusionment.
But it was Labour’s stance on Palestine that finally pushed him to leave the party that had been his political home for six years. Following two years of near-daily bombings in Gaza and a surge in settler attacks and home demolitions across the West Bank, Al-Magrabi could no longer work for a party that refused to criticise Israel in any meaningful way.
Alsayed Al-Magrabi (second from left) with members of the Young Greens. Credit: Bristol Green Party.
His family is from Jerusalem, and he frequently fears for their safety. “There are times I don’t hear from them for five or six days. I think—have they been shot? Arrested? Blown up? It’s extremely hard. It hurts,” he says.
Though UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy suspended 30 arms export licences to Israel in September, this represents less than 10% of the UK’s total arms exports.
Al-Magrabi believes Labour’s continued support for Israel—including sharing intelligence from UK spy planes flying over Gaza—amounts to complicity in Israel’s genocide.
“Our country flew spy planes over Gaza. The data they collected from those flights, I’d like it sent to the International Court of Justice so they can help track the crimes that happened there,” he says.
Starmer ‘ignored everything we said‘
Another factor in Al-Magrabi’s decision to defect to the Greens was his perception of a lack of internal democracy within Labour.
“The local Labour group would talk to Starmer and say, ‘Hey, these things have to change.’ But he ignored everything we said,” he explains. “I started to lose hope that things would change.”
A Bristol Labour spokesperson expressed disappointment at the defection and criticised the Greens for cancelling projects to create new council housing, while backing the government’s record, including efforts to deliver aid to Gaza.
Al-Magrabi stresses he feels no ill will toward his former colleagues. “They’re great individuals. They have Bristol’s best interests at heart, and they want things to change… They’ve always supported me.”
He began getting to know Green councillors at City Hall. “After full council or committee meetings, they’d come outside, have a smoke, and talk. That’s how you learn how to communicate with them and understand their perspectives,” he says.
Since switching to the Greens, Al-Magrabi has regained some of the optimism he felt during his early days with Labour. “For such a long time, our country has cried out for radical change, and Starmer just hasn’t delivered. [Zack Polanski is] ready to do the right thing—supporting Palestine, implementing a wealth tax, and taking serious action on climate change.”
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