Standing on the steps of Hackney Town Hall earlier today (8 May), Zack Polanski declared the era of two-party politics “dead and buried”. The Green Party leader was speaking shortly after Zoe Garbett was elected as Hackney’s first non-Labour mayor. At the time of writing, Polanski’s party now has more than 1,000 councillors in England, has squeezed Labour’s vote in Manchester and Exeter, and looks set to make a major breakthrough in the Senedd in Wales. After a difficult campaign, in which his party was wracked with accusations of anti-Semitism among its candidates, Polanski has begun his victory lap. But is it premature?
Hackney was one of the Green Party’s primary targets. Labour had spent almost a quarter of a century in power in the east London borough. But Garbett won by an even bigger majority than the Greens’ performance in the Gorton Denton by-election in February, taking almost half of the vote (47.2 per cent). The party’s popularity in the borough bodes well if, as has been suggested, Polanski decides to run in Hackney himself at the general election in 2029.
In the final days of campaigning in Hackney, Labour seemed to have given up hope. One source on the ground told me the party did very little on polling day compared to 2022. Even before the result was announced, rumours were swirling that the Greens had won; the announcement that Polanski would be attending the count himself only confirmed this assumption. (Though the mayoral result has been announced, at the time of writing the make-up of the council had not been decided. But Green Party sources say they were confident they would take that too.)
On the one hand, Hackney was always going to be straightforward for the Greens. Garbett is an ally of Polanski, the council is in his east London patch (he lives in the north of the borough with his boyfriend), and its residents – urban, progressive, graduates – are the exact voters the Green Party is trying to attract. It is a ready-made pocket of Green Party success. And the same demographic has mobilised in Manchester, where the Greens took a dent out of Labour’s hegemony on the city council. Several of the wards covered by this election, such as Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage, sit within Hannah Spencer’s Gorton and Denton constituency. Exceeding their own expectations, the Greens took 18 seats on the council. Labour, meanwhile, lost 24.
The Greens are revelling in this result. “Andy [Burnham] might struggle to find a winnable seat,” one Green Party source suggested, matching a similar briefing from Burnham’s Labour critics. But would he? While the Greens may have successfully squeezed Labour’s progressive base in the north-west, Burnham remains popular. Data from Ipsos published on 8 May shows Burnham is the only net popular politician in the UK. One soft-left Labour source said: “It might be true that there are no safe Labour seats, but there are safe Burnham seats. His personal popularity and brand is strong enough to return him to parliament – anyone who denies this is denying reality.”
This is likely to remain a key attack line for the Greens. But there is still a long way to go, and the Greens are not complacent. As one source pointed out to me this morning, as the first smattering of results trickled in, the party is “confident of record-breaking gains in London but starting from a very low point and Labour very high”. And we still don’t know how much of an effect recent accusations of anti-Semitism among the party’s candidates and negative coverage of Polanski himself will have on the party’s performance.
For now, we only have half of the picture. As the results keep trickling in, could Polanski’s ambition to “replace Labour” soon be more than a simply a bold political slogan? Or is there a ceiling on these shoots of Green success?
[Further reading: The week an anti-Semitism crisis engulfed the Greens]
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