Dylan Law is quietly confident that the Greens can take Hackney in May’s local elections. Born locally, in Homerton, Law is running in this year’s local elections while studying for his first year of university.
Law joined the party shortly before Polanski’s election last year, after meeting Zoë Garbett – a councillor in Dalston and the party’s 2024 candidate for mayor of London – and other Hackney Greens at a community forum in the town hall. After just a few months’ involvement with the Greens, Law made a bold proposal to Garbett: that they should work together to win the upcoming Hackney mayoral election. Law told Garbett, “We’re very different people. How about you run [for mayor] and I run for deputy? You get the young professionals as your base, and my base would be the black community in Hackney.” (While the position of deputy mayor itself isn’t elected, it would be in Garbett’s gift if she won the top job to appoint Law as her deputy.) The pair have been joined at the hip ever since: they were mentioned by Polanski in his victory speech after he won the election last September.
On Saturday 10 January, I visited Dalston’s community hall, where the local Greens were getting organised. In a corner of the room, huddled around a trestle table, volunteers stuffed envelopes with cards wishing Hackney residents a happy New Year from the Green Party. Thick wads of envelopes were squeezed into tote bags and rucksacks, and carried across the borough to be handed out to residents – in Shacklewell, Hackney Downs and Stoke Newington, among others – each one a potential backer of the newly galvanised Hackney Greens.
An inner-London borough, Hackney sits to the north east of Westminster. It is known for its vibrant, progressive culture and diverse communities. It became an official London borough in 1900 and, following the First and Second World Wars, became a hub of multiculturalism with Jewish, Cypriot and Afro-Caribbean communities settling in the area. Diane Abbott, who has represented Hackney North and Stoke Newington in the Commons since 1987, was the UK’s first black female MP. Of late, the borough has become more famous for inflows of gentrifying youngsters and “Hoxton hipsters”.
Though Labour has dominated Hackney for the past two decades, the borough is prime Green territory. Zack Polanski himself has lived in the north of the borough with his partner, Richie Bryan, and party insiders have speculated that Polanski would stand in one of its two constituencies in a general election. Over the past few years, the party has been creeping up on Labour. At the last mayoral election in 2023, Garbett came in second behind the Labour candidate, Caroline Woodley with 24.5 per cent of the vote – a 7.5 per cent increase for the Greens (in the same period, Labour’s share of the vote dropped by 9.3 per cent).
The Hackney Mayoral election – which will take place on 7 May this year – is a key target for Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Already, Green gains have been overturning more than a century of Labour dominance in the borough. If the Greens win in May, it will be the first time a non-Labour candidate has been Hackney mayor (the position was created in 2002).
Local members like their chances. Disaffection with the Labour administration was already driving some local voters towards the Hackney Greens; since Polanski’s election as party leader in September 2025, support for the party has surged. It has all added up to success for the Hackney Greens. Between January 2025 and January 2026, their membership grew by 350 per cent, from 650 to 2,950. And the growth is still coming. On that Saturday in January – as longer-term members organised rounds of door-knocking and stuffed envelopes – somebody who had joined the party just three days went out with canvassers on their rounds.
“It’s that combination of people seeing Zack out on the airwaves on a national level, and then seeing us locally in Hackney,” Garbett said, of the party’s rapid rise. Garbett is friendly and sharp – with cropped dark hair and a pink fringe. As we spoke, she posted envelopes through each letterbox along the street, stopping to introduce herself to a young family who lived there as they were leaving the house. “They can see us working to save the libraries, working on youth services, standing up for Palestine, and being really active locally – but now we’re so much more organised.”
She told me that voters felt let down by the failures of both the Labour government and the local Labour administration in Hackney. She said of the latter, “they’ve moved away from their core values”.
The Greens are also welcoming deserters from Your Party. These defectors are leaving their party more on grounds of organisation than values. One party insider told me that the Hackney Greens are seeing a lot of new members who went from Labour to Your Party, but left to join the Greens owing to the split between the party’s co-founders, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn.
In between rounds of door-knocking, I met some of those members. In the queue for coffee at a local community hub before heading out once again in a different part of Hackney with Garbett and Law, I spoke to two young people who had originally felt hopeful at the prospect of a new, socialist party and had thought about joining Your Party. They found Sultana and her politics particularly inspiring. But the party’s fumbled membership launch in September, and repeated public falling-outs between its co-founders have pushed them away. They told me of their deep disappointment that such a crucial opportunity has been squandered.
The Green Party has clearly benefitted from Your Party’s misfortune. Recent high-profile moves from Your Party to the Greens include Mish Rahman and Jamie Driscoll. One party insider told me the Green Party has more than 180,000 members compared to Your Party’s 60,000.
May is already marked out as a potential watershed month in the year’s political calendar, with local elections across the country. The Greens are hopeful that the mayoralty could become the foundation stone of a new Hackney fortress for the party, one from which Zack Polanski might become an MP and even PM. Dylan Law isn’t scared by the prospect of winning: but he often thinks of the responsibility that will come if he is elected Hackney’s deputy mayor. “I don’t think about losing,” he said at the Bath House in Hackney Wick. “But it scares me… the responsibility of it. Especially to be one of the first people from my community to do that kind of thing, and from my age group. I’m scared about it, but I’m ready.”
Growth has been so rapid as to test the administrative capacity of the central party. The central HR team has not been able to keep up with the amount of members they need to process. That day of canvassing was the Hackney Greens’ biggest yet. The May elections will be the first major test of Polanski’s power, and perhaps the moment the Green Party is officially anointed as a major force on the British left. Still, the party isn’t complacent. There are still 15 weeks until the local elections up until which this energy will need to be kept going. One party insider present during the canvassing told me, “we can [win the election] if we keep the momentum up.”
Note: This article was amended on 26 January 2026 to remove an assertion that Dylan Law is running to be the deputy mayor of Hackney. The deputy mayor isn’t a directly elected position. Law is running for election to the council and should he and Zoë Garbett win, he will be appointed her deputy mayor. It was also amended to remove an assertion that Labour has enjoyed a majority on Hackney Council since 1920. The council was Conservative controlled from 1968 to 1972, and had no overall control from 1998 to 2002.
[Further reading: Wes Streeting fails to woo the Socialist Campaign Group]
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