7 April 2026

Can the Lib Dems fight off a Green challenge?

Both parties would like to be seen as the progressive alternative to Labour

Photo by Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

In Westminster it is eerily quiet as the parties scatter to the four corners of Great Britain and campaign in the Scottish, Welsh and English local elections due on 7 May. That means now is a good opportunity for me to get out of Charles Barry’s gothic wreck and see politics where it is really happening.

I’ll start with my own little corner of south-east London, at the border of Southwark and Lewisham, where I spy some longer-term changes on the left of politics. In my patch the Liberal Democrats have been the longstanding progressive alternative to Labour and until 2015 held one of their few inner London parliamentary seats here, in Bermondsey and Old Southwark, where they still poll a good second.

Now they are now facing a robust challenge from the Greens – bolstered by Zack Polanski’s appeal to urban and downwardly mobile voters and the polling bounce off the back of their Gorton and Denton by-election win – who are trying to steal their lunch and become the natural anti-Labour and anti-system option. When a series of Lib Dem election leaflets dropped through my letterbox saying that the Greens definitely can’t win here, replete with dubious bar charts to prove it, it had a “doth protest too much” feeling.

For a while now, political commentators have spoken about progressive voters disappointed with the government deserting Labour for “the Lib Dems and the Greens”, a sort of amorphous blob of progressive discontent. But of course they are two very different parties competing against each other. We were always bound to reach a point when they had to fight it out for who would benefit most from Labour’s falling support and 7 May will be the first battle.

Ed Davey seems to have realised this. He has started to describe the Greens as “dangerous” and will speak in Newcastle today, where both the Greens and Reforms have surged as alternatives to Labour to the possible detriment of the Lib Dems. His party has done very well out of the disintegration of the Tory party in the affluent shires and has 72 parliamentary seats to show for it. But on 7 May it must work to defend its urban flank from the Greens in Birmingham, London, Newcastle and elsewhere.

This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here

[Further reading: Has Reform UK discovered human rights?]