Iceberg Ahead
Tales from the Coalface of the Green Surge
Modern politics promised to kill the arbitrary. No more kings, no more divine right, no more personal whim. Decisions would pass through rules, courts, procedures, bureaucracies: the legal state. Power would become neutral, rational, impersonal.
Except it never did. Max Weber, in Politics as a Vocation, saw the problem clearly. The modern state can process decisions through supposedly non-arbitrary institutions, but it still needs people to believe in them. And once religion no longer provides the deepest source of authority, modern politics has to find substitutes. We have tried the nation, the proletariat, the people, the 99%. But in an era of mass enfranchisement, legitimacy often returns through a much more unstable source: charisma.
Weber likened charismatic political authority to the power of prophets: individuals who claim a special mission, who speak against corruption, decadence, bureaucracy and dead institutions. Prophets derive their force not from the legal state, but from their capacity to expose its failures. That is why they thrive in moments like ours: stagnant living standards, exhausted institutions, collapsing trust, and the sense that “the system” no longer delivers.
The legal state should not have impunity. But we are now in an era in which prophets of different kinds define themselves against it. Whether the legal state can survive in its current form remains to be seen. What is clear is that the current crisis of legitimacy, combined with the failure of living standards to recover since the 2008 crash, helps explain the local election results we saw on 7 May.
The 12th of September 2024
Coming out of the general election, it was obvious that any by-election held in Hackney North in particular was going to be difficult. At the general election, though Labour had gained 59% of the vote, we had seen a 12.5% swing against Labour from 2019 vote share and a 15% swing from the 2017 result. There was no doubt that it was likely we would lose.
When a by-election came up in Stoke Newington, which is demographically heavily composed of renters, young professionals, public-sector workers the Green Party found its perfect petri dish for the coming Green surge. The Hackney Green Party had been ground zero for Polanski-ism. Dominated by the Green Organise faction, they were early innovators in looking to form a Corbyn coalition and disassociate themselves from being seen as primarily a middle-class ecological party. Hackney had also been ground zero for Corbynism, and wards like Stoke Newington had memberships on a par with whole constituency Labour Parties.
The difference between Corbynism and Green Organise, the faction who feature leading figures in Hackney Green Party, is that because Greens have had to fight for every seat, they are obsessed with canvassing and literature. Their organising bible How to Win Local Elections puts forward in granular detail messaging at every point of the campaign. The culture of electioneering was seen as essential to putting forward their radical message, not external to it, as had often been the case in Corbynism. Though the Greens state that they “do politics differently”, they deploy every political trick that all the other parties do, especially the Lib Dems, the masters of hyper-local campaigning.
It was already clear in that campaign that the Labour base was tanking, compounded by winter fuel and Gaza. The swing at that by-election on 12 September 2024 was 18.2%, which would be around the same swing by which the Greens would end up winning the Hackney mayoralty in 2026. Though they would only need a 14% swing to win from the 2023 mayoral by-election.
Therefore, two years out from the locals, it was looking highly likely that the mayoralty was in play, but also potentially the council majority. Polanski was riding a trend already set in motion. The question for the Green Party in Hackney was whether they could replicate this in wards that were not as demographically favourable to them as Stoke Newington. They had shown that they could do it in wards like Hackney Downs, with a much larger amount of council housing than Stoke Newington. But how could they do this at scale?
We Are Not a Middle-Class Party
The Hackney Green campaign innovated much of the discourse that would be used in Gorton and Denton, which was an anti-system message focused on economic insecurity to unite the immiserated graduate renter with struggling council tenants. Both groups have been hit by a fall in disposable income and were the key engine of the Green campaign across cities.
Political campaigns are often run on disassociation and association. The renters were already in the bag for the Greens. The question was how to create messaging that would resonate with tenants at scale. As we saw in the Mamdani campaign, the key elements would be age plus economic insecurity. One of the bedrocks of the Hackney Labour coalition is older black women. As with Mamdani’s results in New York, this would be the group the Hackney Greens found hardest to break through to. But it was younger social tenants where they made massive strides forward.
In Mile End Institute polling for London in December 2025, you could already see how the Greens had cut into Labour support with social tenants. Among people living in council housing, Labour had 25%, Reform 22%, and the Greens 17%. Compared to other tenure mixes, such as homeowners without a mortgage, Labour was on 21% and the Greens on 8%. The affluence and economic insecurity divide were there to see.
The Decapitation of Your Party
There was a moment when Your Party seemed to be the major force to the left of Labour. Due to purely arbitrary factors, and also the nature of the “purity politics” that Your Party is embedded in, that didn’t happen.
Polanski and the Hackney Greens wanted to ensure that there were no enemies on the left. At one point, 800,000 people signed up for the Your Party mailing list, and polling showed they could have potentially contended with the Greens.
As we have seen in countless 2026 local election results, such as in Newham, where there are two left-of-Labour options standing, the vote splits.
It was noticeable in Hackney that, where a deal was done with the Hackney Independent Socialist Collective, the Green Party gifted Labour numerous seats. For them, it was likely a price worth paying to ensure there wasn’t a Hackney Independent Socialist Collective mayoral candidate.
Turnout
On the doorstep, we were seeing people in their 20s and 30s, young renters, voting left, right and centre. This was a key element of the Corbyn surge. These voters were hard to pick up with standard selections, but with a broader selection they were coming up.
The Green vote cuts across insecure economic housing tenures. Those in temporary accommodation, living with their parents, and in shared ownership were ground zero for the Green surge in the inner city. The Iran war had meant that inflation was too sticky, and their disposable income had not returned to pre-2008 levels.
What the Greens did, as Corbyn had done, and as Farage and Trump have done, is redefine who the electorate is. In countries like Denmark, the norm of voting means they don’t need a populist surge and polarised discourse to get high turnout. Danish elections have consistently been in the 80s in the post-war era. However, in America and the UK, we have not been above 70% since the Brexit referendum, and the last time a general election in the UK hit 70% was in 1997.
Turnout in Hackney in 2017 was 66%, the highest it had been since 1959. Hackney turnout had been trending down way before the rest of the country went below 70% in 1997. Turnout in Hackney in these years local election was 41%, 4% higher than the local elections held at the heigh of Corbynism in 2018 which were 37%.
On these turnout figures in the local election, we can expect turnout in places like Hackney to be near or above 70% at the general election. The differential I believe we saw in the polling between JL Partners polling in Hackney and, say, Electoral Calculus based on Find Out Now polling seems to be around capturing turnout — though JL Partners got closer to the Labour vote share than Electoral Calculus or Poll Checker. But the final figure the Greens got in Hackney went beyond the range YouGov had predicted.
The Green Party and Reform have done what Trump and Corbyn did before, which is redefine who the electorate is. This means that parties like Labour will have to think carefully about how they campaign. Those who are driving the turnout are likely to be the economically insecure and young people.
Base Election
We are in the era of base elections. There is still Peterborough man and woman. But remember Corbyn partially won them in 2017 in places like Peterborough and Bedford.
The group the Labour Party is doing best with at the moment is economically secure non-public-sector workers. In places like Hackney, the pool of these people is not big enough.
Voting is a habit. Once it is broken, it is very hard to get back. The question for Labour in the inner city is: what is its offer to young economically insecure women? This is one of the major challenges we face. It is young women in particular who have surged to the Greens.
Fail on Their Own Terms
In 2016, Gavin Sibthorpe, a Corbyn adviser, said that Corbyn must “fail in his own time”. Anything is possible within our current electoral climate. But in this current electoral moment, where parties are so reliant on their base, conflict with their base becomes much more difficult. There are many issues where Polanski could come into conflict with his base: anti-Semitism, foreign policy, austerity, climate policy, housebuilding, and social conservatism. The key thing will be for the base to become disillusioned. As with Corbyn, it will only work if the criticism comes from the base itself.
One of the central legacies of Corbynism was to establish a left media ecosystem independent of the mainstream press. This new ecosystem will play a massive role in the future of the Polanski project and in shaping the views of the base.
There Are No Heartlands
There are parts of Hackney that have been lost that have been held by Labour since 1923. The Labour Party is on the verge. They must build from the base up to stand any chance of survival.
But the existential threat facing Labour is part of a wider story: the pincer movement between the fall in the standard of living and the crisis of legitimacy that we now face. The disillusionment that could be caused by our most recent political earthquakes could ultimately bring down the whole system, if it becomes increasingly hard to find a means to legitimise the legal state.