Carys Evans sits with Labour’s worst London local election result since 1968, the Green surge that flipped her own borough, and what it means to feel politically homeless in a city that just changed its mind
I’ve voted Labour in every single election since I turned eighteen, local, general, mayoral, the lot, out of a kind of inherited loyalty as much as genuine enthusiasm most years if I’m honest, and this May, for the first time in my adult life, I voted Green instead, and my own borough went Green too, part of what turned out to be the party’s best-ever result across London, 278 seats gained citywide, two directly-elected mayors flipped in Hackney and Lewisham. I keep waiting to feel guilty about that and mostly just feel relieved instead.
What Actually Happened Across London In May
Labour had its worst local election result in London since 1968, which is a genuinely staggering sentence to type out, fifty-eight years of results being the benchmark this year’s performance fell short of. The Green Party’s 278-seat gain and Reform UK’s own smaller but still notable 79-seat gain represented the two clearest beneficiaries of that Labour collapse, alongside modest gains for the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives picking up whatever scraps were left once the bigger realignment had happened.
Why I Actually Made The Switch This Particular Year
It wasn’t any single policy, if I’m honest, it was an accumulated sense that my local Labour councillors had stopped actually listening to specific local concerns, the exact kind of pothole and planning-application frustration that used to feel like the whole point of local as opposed to national politics, in favour of just riding whatever the national party line happened to be that month. The Green candidate in my ward showed up to three separate community meetings I personally attended. I genuinely couldn’t tell you the last time I’d seen my previous Labour councillor at one.
What This National Realignment Actually Feels Like From The Ground
I think what’s genuinely disorienting about this moment is that it’s not a simple story, not Labour losing to one clear alternative the way these narratives usually get simplified in the immediate aftermath. Both the Green surge and the Reform gain represent voters leaving Labour in opposite ideological directions simultaneously, some pulled left by climate and housing frustration, others pulled right by immigration and economic anxiety, both groups apparently equally fed up with the same governing party for entirely different, almost contradictory reasons.
Why I Feel Genuinely Politically Homeless Writing This
My comedy writing has always leaned political, obviously, that’s the whole beat, but I’ve always written it from inside a stable, if occasionally frustrated, Labour identity, and I don’t currently have that stable identity to write from anymore. I voted Green out of genuine local frustration rather than deep ideological Green Party conviction, and I don’t know yet whether that vote represents a permanent realignment in how I think about myself politically or just one election’s protest that I’ll walk back the next time Labour puts up a candidate who actually shows up to the community meetings.
What My Own Borough’s New Green Councillors Have Actually Done So Far
Genuinely more responsive in these first few months than I expected, quick replies to constituent emails, visible presence at the exact kind of local meetings I mentioned, a level of basic responsiveness that shouldn’t feel remarkable but genuinely does after years of the opposite. Whether that translates into actual delivered policy outcomes over a full term remains, obviously, an open question I can’t answer yet from three months in.
What I’m Actually Going To Write About Next
I think the honest, useful piece here isn’t gloating about Labour’s historic collapse, plenty of other people are already writing that piece with considerably more glee than I actually feel. It’s trying to understand what it means that London’s electorate fractured in two genuinely opposite directions at once this May, and whether that fracture represents a temporary protest or something more permanently reshaping how this city votes going forward. I don’t have that answer yet. I have a Green councillor who returns my emails and a lifetime Labour voting history I’m still working out how to feel about, sitting right next to each other, uncomfortably, on the same kitchen table where I write all of this.
What My Mum Said When I Told Her How I’d Voted
She went quiet on the phone for a second, which is its own kind of answer coming from her, before saying only that her own grandmother had walked door to door for the Labour candidate in the same borough back in the fifties, and that she wasn’t going to tell me who to vote for but she wanted me to know that history before I made peace with breaking it. I think about that conversation more than I’ve admitted to anyone else yet. Political homelessness apparently comes with its own particular kind of family weight attached, at least in my house.
Where That Actually Leaves Me Going Into Whatever Comes Next
Not resolved, honestly. I’m not writing this piece to announce a permanent new allegiance, green rosette proudly pinned, done and settled. I’m writing it because I think a lot of Londoners are sitting exactly where I am right now, a genuinely fractured city figuring out in real time whether May was a one-off protest or the actual beginning of something else. I don’t know which one it is yet. I suspect nobody fully does, not even the councillors who just won on the strength of it.