What do the local elections in London tell us about the future of left-wing politics in Britain?

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Two years ago, one of the biggest surprises of the 2024 general election was the success of independent left-of-Labour candidates: Jeremy Corbyn re-elected in Islington North, and four other brand new MPs across the Midlands and the North, outperforming the Green Party (and equalling Reform UK) in the number of seats won.

Although no independent candidates succeeded in East London in 2024, some did well: they came second in East Ham and in West Ham and Beckton (both Newham) and Ilford South (in Redbridge), while Leanne Mohamad was within a few hundred votes of unseating Wes Streeting. Standing to the left of Keir Starmer’s “you can leave” Labour, the independents tapped into dissatisfaction with the party – not least its record on Palestine and its taking-for-granted “core voters”, including British Muslims.

East London’s long history of Labour insurgencies

East London has a powerful position in Labour’s mythology, heralding its coming out from under the Liberal or Progressive wing: Keir Hardie was famously the first “independent” Labour MP after his election in West Ham South in 1892, and in 1898 West Ham (now in Newham) became the first Labour council. In 1919, after the First World War, Labour won majorities not just in West Ham but Poplar, Bethnal Green and Stepney (now all in Tower Hamlets) plus the old Hackney Borough Council as well.

There were even Communist mayors (elected as Labour) in 1920s Easy London: Joe Vaughan in Bethnal Green, Edgar Lansbury in Poplar. In 2021, Tower Hamlets’ Labour mayor John Biggs celebrated the centenary of the Poplar Rates Rebellion, led by Edgar’s father, the future Labour leader George Lansbury. Yet while East London is central to Labour’s history, it is also a reminder that new disruptive parties can win, sometimes in alliance with more established ones – but sometimes against them.

There was more recent East London precedent for that, too. Between 2005 and 2010, George Galloway represented Bethnal Green and Bow (in Tower Hamlets) as a Respect MP. The same party won 12 council seats in Tower Hamlets in the 2006 local elections, becoming the official opposition, and also took 3 in Newham, through a strategy that ‘required investment in local community politics’ to upset older patronage systems favouring Labour.

And in 2010, former local Labour leader Lutfur Rahman was elected as an independent mayor in Tower Hamlets – a position he reclaimed (after his 2015 removal and disbarment) in 2022, now as leader of Aspire. His earlier party won 18 seats in 2014 and Aspire gained a majority in 2022 with 24, with Rahman explicitly celebrating the borough’s radical history, including the Rates Rebellion. Were events in East London – as in West Ham in the 1890s – to be harbingers of a new national political party, able to make these claims on Labour’s past?

Your Party

This year, Aspire was one of an array of local parties and independents in England to receive an endorsement from Your Party – the national political party finally set up by the five independent MPs, plus Labour resignee Zarah Sultana, in mid-2025. By that point, enthusiasm about a new left-of-Labour project was already drifting toward the Greens. Failure to stand its own council candidates across the country was, for some, an indication that Your Party had fluffed its opportunity to become the electoral alternative to Labour.

Your Party’s limited successes in ‘building a mass socialist party based in the working class’ are often chalked up to its being ‘mired by incompetence and feuds’. But it was always a big jump from the promise represented by the 2024 independents to such hopes for a new socialist political party. Many that left the Labour Party were bruised by the experience, reluctant to be drawn back into a national formation – taking pride in being independent, encouraging people to (as some pre-election interviews put it) ‘vote local’.

This is a little reminiscent of the early Labour Party, when desires for an “independent” working-class party were mingled with “independentist” or “anti-party” positions suspicious of “party politics” as such. According to the historian Jon Lawrence, for example, George Lansbury ‘made free use of anti-party rhetoric’ in his unsuccessful campaign for the 1912 Bow and Bromley by-election, which he triggered over Labour’s insufficient support for women’s suffrage: ‘we have been caucus-ridden and party-driven too long’, Lansbury said in an election address.

Indeed, in several cases, whether as a result of its specific deficiencies or a more diffuse “independentism”, Your Party’s offers of endorsement were actively turned down.

Your Party expressly focused on Tower Hamlets, Newham and Redbridge in the run-up to the elections, and they have also figured heavily in its post-election review – which celebrates ‘more than 85 Your Party-backed councillors’ elected across the country, but mostly in East London.[i] Tower Hamlets is the obvious ‘municipal socialist success story’, with Rahman re-elected and Aspire gaining a 32-councillor “supermajority” – albeit with a smaller vote share, following a significant Green challenge.[ii]

The Newham Independents Party (NIP) saw success, too, winning 24 seats. With the Greens winning 14, Labour lost a majority it had held, often without opposition, since 1971. In fact, aside from a small period of No Overall Control after the 1968 elections, Labour has had a majority in Newham (or both predecessors) since 1929. Yet divisions between the NIP and the Greens ensured Labour retained 26 seats and the all-important directly-elected mayoralty. This wasn’t just sectarianism: the campaigns indicated significant disagreements, particularly on motoring.

Further north, the Your Party-backed Redbridge Independents now form the official opposition on their council after winning 9 seats, with the Greens stuck on 5. While vote-splitting likely cost them some seats, they also lost in wards where they were not in direct competition. In Churchfields, where the Greens stood aside, the Chingford and Woodford Green Community Independents (CWGCI) – a distinct group linked to former parliamentary candidate Faiza Shaheen and without Your Party endorsement – still failed to get across the line. Regardless, with Labour machines weakened in Tower Hamlets and Newham over a longer period, the challenger parties in Redbridge will take heart from signs of the process commencing there too.

The three Your Party target boroughs show the potential for left-wing independents in areas which have relatively closeknit, embattled communities to provide their bedrock. However, they also suggest more needs to be done to work through the differences between these independents and the insurgent Greens, particularly on transportation and the environment – with different sections of the urban working class having quite different relationships to driving and “low-traffic neighbourhoods”.

The ‘Green Squeeze’

It is also debatable whether they provide a workable model for other boroughs where strong community foundations are harder to find – and where the Greens have already pulled ahead as the main left-wing alternative to Labour. In Barking and Dagenham, for example, the major challenge to Labour hegemony has come from Reform, but left-wing councillors resigning from Labour have favoured the Green Party, who now form a modest group of 4.

In Hackney, an agreement between the Greens and the Hackney Independent Socialist Collective (HISC) eventually expanded into the broader Hackney Community Alliance (HCA), comprised of the two parties plus several far-left and community groups, all backing the Greens’ Zoë Garbett in her successful campaign for mayor. HISC was formed by three former Labour councillors who resigned over the genocide in Gaza, and the Greens partially stood aside in four wards to allow them (plus 3 new HISC candidates with impressive local organising experience) to stand.

With some defeated on over a thousand votes, it would in any other year have been an impressive performance for left-wing independents in a Labour stronghold. But this was not just any year: Green candidates were elected in each ward with more than twice HISC’s vote. While vote-splitting was avoided, the Greens might now wonder if their supermajority on the council – 42 out of 57 seats – could have been even greater.

However, it is particularly striking that the nuanced Hackney Green position on low-traffic neighbourhoods was reportedly ‘shaped and re-shaped by a continuous back-and-forth’ with HISC. With so many new councillors elected, the Hackney Greens may benefit from the experience of defeated HISC candidates in running a council that ‘reflect[s] the borough’s diversity, its solidarity, and its communities.’

HISC had turned down a Your Party endorsement, and they probably suffered from the lack of a national “brand”. But it is unlikely that Your Party would have made much difference. In Cazenove ward, two Your Party-supporting (but not Your Party-backed) HCA candidates polled just a few hundred votes. And in neighbouring Haringey, where the HCA-like Haringey Socialist Alliance did accept Your Party endorsement, the results were not much different.

Similarly, in newly-Green-controlled Waltham Forest, the sole Your Party candidate won 108 votes – just beating the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) to avoid last place. The Waltham Forest Independent Socialists, who stood without Your Party backing or an agreement with the Greens, did a little better, but in both cases, the votes for left-wing independents were slightly greater than the difference between a defeated Green candidate and a winning Labour councillor. And in wards where the cross-borough CWGCI stood without Green opposition, they were a long way from victory.

Independents face a squeeze in local elections dominated by national headlines. Havering, currently still in outer East London, was hardly a target for the left-wing independents or the Greens. Nevertheless, Reform’s victories over the Havering Residents Association – which had led a minority administration since the collapse of a coalition with Labour in 2024 – indicate the significant pressures placed on local parties when national political questions predominate. The less electorally successful left-wing independents will need to think about whether their politics could have been better advanced while wearing a Green rosette – particularly given the party does not whip its councillors.

The future of the Left beyond Labour

The differences may be too great. For some, the Greens’ relative lack of discipline might actually be the problem: the absence of a whip raises significant questions about member-led democracy in a party with varied political traditions. Back in 1912, Lansbury’s defeat vindicated those on the Left that had (to quote Jon Lawrence again) ‘tended to focus on the perfection of party machinery (on achieving “internal democracy”) rather than on its destruction.’

If they are to resist absorption into the Green and go beyond the “left-of-Labour” territory which the Greens have now claimed, Your Party and the left-wing independents will need to draw sharper lines distinguishing their politics. They will also need to find a way of avoiding the fate of groups like TUSC, whose unwavering commitment to “no cuts” budgets has rarely won them elections.

Results in East London do offer some paths forward. In Hackney, HISC have shown that independent left-wing parties can significantly influence the direction of their larger allies, even if they do not themselves benefit electorally in the short term. And although the successes in Tower Hamlets and Newham will be difficult to replicate, they suggest that new left-wing parties can win when they respond to the specific needs of their working-class, multiracial communities.

None of this is easy or inevitable. Labour’s first council in fin-de-siècle West Ham lasted just two years, and it was decades before they emerged as a formidable national party. Parties like Respect came and went, leaving mainly local legacies. But if a new left-wing electoral party is to emerge from the tumult of the past few years, it is going to trace its history through East London.

Daniel Frost is a contemporary political and cultural historian. He is an expert in the relationships between politics, space and place in the suburbs and inner-cities and his doctoral research focused on left-wing activism in twentieth-century Croydon. He is the co-editor of In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956.

References:

[i] Your Party-backed councillors were also elected in Birmingham (2), Bradford (9), Harrow (1), Oldham (2), Sefton (5) and Walsall (1). There were other left-wing and/or pro-Palestine independents elected in some of these areas and elsewhere without Your Party endorsement, including the Camden People’s Alliance in St Pancras and Somers Town, where the Greens had agreed not to stand.

[ii] A further councillor was elected with Aspire on the ballot paper, but had been suspended during the campaign for antisemitic posts on social media.