Hackney could be poised for ‘shock’ in May local elections

The local elections are taking place in May. Photograph: London Borough of Hackney

Less than two years after a landslide election victory, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing calls to resign and his party is languishing in the polls. As the local elections loom on 7 May, Labour’s woes in government have fuelled speculation that the party is no longer safe in its London heartlands.

This has turned eyes towards the party’s strongholds. Amid a surge in support, Green Party leader Zack Polanski has declared his ambition to seize control of one London borough in particular – Hackney. With 44 councillors, right now Labour is by far the largest group on Hackney Council, and the party has dominated here for all but seven years since 1965.

With just three elected members, the Greens are not even the largest opposition party on Hackney Council. But their ambitions are not unfounded. At the 2022 elections, the Green vote surged in areas like Stoke Newington, Dalston and Hackney Wick, and the party went on to swipe the Stoke Newington ward seat from Labour in a 2024 by-election.

The last General Election also saw the Greens increase their vote share significantly in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where their candidate came close to 10,000 votes. Polanski is now weighing up whether he should make a play to be the borough’s next MP.

Green Party mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett (centre) pictured with Zack Polanski (left) and Dylan Law, candidate for Hackney Downs (right). Photograph: Will Morgan

Is this just aggressive campaigning – or should Labour be bracing for an earthquake in this North East London empire?

There are two races happening in Hackney at this year’s elections. The borough is one of five London authorities which elect a Mayor as the executive leader, as well as separate ward councillors. Labour has won the mayoralty ever since Hackney switched to this system in 2002.

Incumbent Mayor Caroline Woodley was first elected in 2023 in a mayoral by-election, after her predecessor Philip Glanville resigned over his links to a disgraced Labour councillor. She is being challenged for a second time for the top job by Zoë Garbett, who co-leads the small Green opposition on Hackney Council.

Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley. Photograph: Hackney Council

Professor Tony Travers, who specialises in local and regional government at the London School of Economics, said the size of Labour’s majorities in many wards would require a “massive” swing for the Greens to overturn them. On this view, he thinks it is “probably easier” for Garbett to seize the mayoralty than for her party than to win enough wards needed to control the council.

Such an outcome would mirror Croydon’s 2022 local elections result, when the Conservative Party won the mayoralty but not enough councillors to secure overall control.

In a borough with two Labour MPs and long seen as “rock solid” Labour territory, losing the mayoralty would still be “a big shock”, Professor Travers told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS). Such a coup would no doubt reverberate across London where some of the best-known party figures have their constituencies, including Sir Keir Starmer.

This outcome, he adds: “Would demand a remarkable degree of councillors working across party lines to govern the council effectively”. The council has not been in this position since 1998, one of the rare occasions where Labour lost control.

The official party line, so far, has been business as usual. When asked if Labour’s woes in government were filtering through to Hackney voters, a local party source said: “On the doorstep people are more concerned about fly-tipping, what’s happening in the park, HMOs – the bread-and-butter stuff.”

This was echoed by a former Labour cabinet member who had left Hackney politics some years ago. “I was a councillor when Tony Blair was PM, so the context is similar. There was a massive pushback over the Iraq war, but there was a view [then] that the council did amazingly well with huge headwinds coming at it,” she said. “Across London, it’s really hard to translate a national feeling at a local level. I walked up those streets year in year out, understanding it wasn’t a solid Labour seat. Every door matters.”

The former councillor added: “People want to have a borough they believe is doing everything they can. From what I read in the papers, I think Hackney Labour is telling that story.”

However, the bread-and-butter issues have not been plain sailing for the Labour-run council. A key moment was last year’s damning investigation by the social housing watchdog, which judged Hackney to be an “outlier” compared to other councils in terms of the scale of its housing failures. Ombudsman Richard Blakeway said the local authority’s positive mindset had led to “multiple missed opportunities” to tackle fundamental problems.

Mayor Woodley has blamed the state of the housing stock and the levels of disrepair on “prolonged” austerity measures, estimated to have cost Hackney over £150m in funding since 2010. However, one Labour source told the LDRS the report had left the local party’s natural supporters disillusioned.

“If you’re a middle-class homeowner it might not matter as much as if you’re on an estate that’s suffered from decades of failure to maintain,” they said. “You can’t really blame councils for chronic underfunding, but the problem is when councillors are too weak to lobby central government.”

“I think there’s going to be a low turnout, but I’m sure the Greens will make headway,” they added.

To make cracks in this Labour’s stronghold, the local Green group are capitalising on the national party’s soaring membership, which has more than doubled since ‘eco-populist’ Polanski took over.

Between January 2025 and January 2026, Hackney Greens’ roughly 650 members have more than quadrupled to 2,800. Local press officer Anne Whitehead says that while this has brought “a lot of growing pains with tactics and strategy,” it has also delivered more than a few energetic, “talented” local volunteers willing and ready to pound the pavements in the borough and the rest of the capital.

Polanski’s strategy to court the youth vote through social media is also on full display in Hackney. One of the Greens’ 2026 candidates is 19-year-old Dylan Law, who is running as Garbett’s second-in-command (though deputy mayors are appointed, not elected).

Born and raised in Hackney, Law entered local politics with a pitch that he could attract support for the party from his generation. When he’s not featuring in social videos with Garbett, he can be found slamming various council policies to his 3,500 TikTok followers.

Should the Greens cause an upset by the time all the votes are counted, they will have been aided by an alliance forged in opposition. Namely, with three ex-Labour councillors who quit the party in 2023 over what they saw as an abandonment of progressive values.

With the Greens, this new Independent Socialist group now forms one half of the two opposition blocs, next to the council’s six Conservative councillors.

For the upcoming elections, both parties have forged an electoral pact to stand aside for each other to ensure the candidate from their “alternative left progressive slate” can beat Labour. They have also declared they will back Garbett for the mayoralty. Does this mean a Green-Independent ruling coalition could be on the cards?

According to one Independent Socialist, Cllr Penny Wrout, such conversations “haven’t really” taken place. Speaking to the LDRS, Cllr Wrout said: “At the moment we’re more about aligning policies and campaigning styles to complement each other.” But she added that the partnership in opposition demonstrates how the two groups could collaborate as an “effective administration”.

None of the local parties have released manifestos yet, nor have they formally announced the full list of candidates they will be standing and where. Whether Labour prevails or sees its safe seats fall like dominoes, for Professor Travers, the election result will illustrate the predicament facing local councils across the country.

“If there were a change in political control, exactly the same problems would be there four years from that happening,” he says, “because there is no magic money tree and none to be found. It’s a bit bleak, really.”

Hackney’s mayoral and council elections will take place on Thursday 7 May 2026.