Labour faces a potentially bruising set of elections in London next May (Alamy)
7 min read1 hr
Labour is steeling itself for bruising results nationwide at the May local elections. However, there’s one part of the country where party sources believe the scale of the electoral threat is going underappreciated: London.
While poor showings in Wales and Scotland are expected, and may already be ‘baked in’ to Labour thinking, losses in Keir Starmer’s backyard – where many ministers also hold their constituencies – could be a real blow to the Prime Minister’s authority.
This nervousness extends across the board, from City Hall to London Labour MPs and councillors on the ground.
London has traditionally been seen as safe for Labour. The party currently controls around 65 per cent of the capital, with 21 of 32 councils. Yet this dominance is now threatened as the party slumps in national opinion polls and a multi-party system emerges.
“We are bracing ourselves for a really bad set of results nationally,” said one Labour source, who said London is being “taken for granted” by the party high command.
For many in Labour, maintaining control in councils across the capital will be about taking the spotlight off the national picture and refocusing the public’s attention on local issues.
Speaking to PoliticsHome, the leader of Labour-led Camden council Richard Olszewski said it was “obvious” that the council is “not immune to what’s happening nationally”.
“Some of the things that are in the area of national politics do get played back to us on the doorstep… What we try to do is to stress that the elections we’re talking about… are for Camden council.”
Councillor Adam Hug, Labour leader of Westminster council, admitted there was a “febrile atmosphere nationally”.
“In every local election, there is always an element of the local and the national. There’s no getting away from that. It’s our job as local politicians to make people clear of the choice locally,” said Hug.
“We’ve got a tough fight, but we’re up for it, and we have got a good story to tell,” Hug later added.
Since London’s boroughs were last contested in 2022, the growth of smaller parties has led to a fragmentation of voting patterns.
“It’s a really unpredictable moment because of the different factions and groups that have arisen,” Hackney Labour mayor Caroline Woodley told PoliticsHome.
Olszewski added: “We don’t have a single opposition party that’s a major threat. It’s a variety of different political parties challenging us in different parts of this borough.”
Labour is set to face threats on several fronts: the Greens, Reform, Lib Dems, Conservatives, independents and potentially candidates standing for the newly-formed Your Party.
The same Labour source mentioned above told PoliticsHome that a “Green belt” is emerging across the city’s north-east, starting in Shoreditch, and stretching along the northern boundary of Tower Hamlets into Bow, through the Olympic Park, Forest Gate, and further out into Redbridge.
Since London Assembly member Zack Polanski was elected leader in September, the Greens’ average national poll rating has risen sharply, but the party had already made gains at the last set of borough elections.
In 2022, the Greens broke through on Newham council by winning both seats in Stratford Olympic Park ward, where they appear to have consolidated their support.
“The whole of the Olympic Park belongs to the Greens,” the Labour source said.
“There’s just one Labour party member [organising there], who gets rid of all our leaflets. There is no Labour party presence in one of the most sizeable developments in the whole of London… It’s all Green, Green, Green.”
Professor Tony Travers, an expert on local government at the London School of Economics, said there has been “a significant shift from Labour to the Greens” in the polling, and there is “no doubt that the Greens are moving towards average London poll ratings in the early twenties, and Labour are moving down accordingly.”
Travers also pointed to December’s local government funding settlement that saw a rebalancing of funding around the country, which he said was “particularly bad for a number of inner London authorities”.
Recent months have seen a significant number of Labour councillors defecting to the Greens. While Labour argues that many of these councillors defected only after being deselected ahead of May’s election, political discontent has also been rising within the party’s ranks.
This played out dramatically earlier this year at Southwark council, where senior Labour figures were accused of a stitch-up after the election for borough leader was re-run.
Liam Shrivastava, who defected from Labour and now leads the Green opposition on Lewisham council, said councillors were leaving Labour “because the party no longer reflects their values”.
“In a few cases, they may have been deselected and blocked, but on very spurious, often factional grounds or due to a particular political stance. The Labour party is quite happy to reselect favoured councillors who do little casework or have brought the party into disrepute.”
Zack Polanski won a landslide victory in the Green Party leadership contest in 2025 (Alamy)
It remains uncertain to what extent Your Party will be competing with the Greens for left-wing votes, or whether the parties will collaborate in any way.
Shrivastava says of Your Party: “It’s very unclear what they’re going to do in London. I think they’re going to be quite limited in what they can achieve with elections happening so soon.”
Your Party has been beset by infighting since it was launched by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana earlier this year. Neither MP will be allowed to lead the party until 2027, after members recently voted to put lay members in charge, potentially further limiting the new left-wing force’s political impact.
Caroline Russell, the London Assembly’s Green group leader, told PoliticsHome: “Labour councillors are defecting to us and our membership is growing rapidly, so our capacity for doorknocking is surging and our ambition for next May is expanding further every week.
“We are increasingly confident that in boroughs across our city we will be providing a real challenge to many of the Labour super-majority councils.”
While Labour expects to keep overall control of Newham’s mayoralty and council, the party also anticipates that it will lose roughly a dozen seats to independents and the Greens. As Newham’s constituency Labour parties have been suspended for almost five years, there are said to be “hardly any” activists on the ground.
In Tower Hamlets, Labour appears resigned to losing the mayoralty to Lutfur Rahman and his Aspire party again and is primarily aiming to retain the council seats it already has.
Redbridge Labour will meanwhile face a tough challenge from independent candidates, after one came within 528 votes of unseating Health Secretary Wes Streeting at the July 2024 general election.
In Hackney, the Greens are thought to have their best shot yet at winning the mayoralty, having come second with 25 per cent of the vote at the last election in 2023.
A Green source says that in Islington, which is home to senior Labour MPs like Emily Thornberry, their party is confident of winning 15 or more councillors — compared with just three they won last time.
Meanwhile, in Barking and Dagenham, Labour is confident of retaining overall control – having won every single seat in 2022. But Reform UK is poised to make gains, especially in the east of the borough, with Eastbrook and Rush Green ward thought to be among the most vulnerable areas.
Reform’s main targets in London will be the capital’s “doughnut” of outer boroughs. According to Reform London Assembly member Alex Wilson, the party’s activists are working “very hard in Havering, Bexley, Bromley,“ while “looking to make some good progress in other places like Croydon, Hillingdon, possibly Hounslow as well“.
But he adds that Reform intends to stand candidates across the capital: “We’ve been given a very clear direction from the leadership that everybody in London, in every borough and every ward has to have the opportunity to vote for us.“
A London Labour spokesman told PoliticsHome: “We know that in London every vote is hard-won. That is why we are campaigning with purpose in every borough and making the case on delivery, not slogans.
“We have raised the minimum wage twice for thousands of Londoners, Sadiq Khan has delivered 100m free school meals, households will get £150 off their energy bills this April, a quarter of a million children are benefiting from the lifting of the two-child cap, and 2.7m renters will gain more secure homes when Labour’s Renters Rights Bill comes into effect in May.
“Labour is delivering at every level of government to drive down the cost of living, and a vote for Labour in May is a vote to keep that mission going.“
