BRITISH LOCAL ELECTIONS: LABOUR VOTE COLLAPSES, GREEN SUPPORT SURGES

Surging electoral support for Zack Polanski and the UK Green Party.

 

Will the New Zealand Green Party learn any lessons from the electoral success of the UK Green Party? Or will it continue to tag along behind a Labour Party offering nothing but more of the same?


KEIR STARMER looks like a man staggering through the wreckage of his own project, insisting everything is fine while the ground crumbles beneath him. After Labour’s vote collapsed in the UK local elections, any leader with a grip on political reality might have paused, reflected, or at least pretended to hear the message sent by millions of voters. Instead, Starmer doubled down on centrism — the very centrism that has drained Labour of purpose, hollowed out its support, and left working-class communities colder and poorer than before.

The British electorate hasn’t merely drifted away from Labour; they have abandoned it. Losing nearly 1,500 council seats is not a mid-term wobble. It is a political indictment. And it is not difficult to understand why. Labour has done little more than defend an economic status quo that has failed working people for decades. Wages stagnate, public services crumble, and inequality widens — yet Labour’s leadership clings to the fantasy that technocratic tinkering will somehow deliver transformation. Add to that Labour’s active support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza — a stance that has alienated huge swathes of its own base — and the collapse becomes even easier to explain.

Inside Labour, the knives are out for Starmer. But the idea that replacing him with another centrist functionary will fix anything is delusional. The problem is not the man; it is the politics he represents. Starmer is simply the most polished representative of a Labour establishment that spent years sabotaging Jeremy Corbyn — a leader who did offer real change, who did articulate a break with neoliberalism, and who did inspire millions. Those who undermined Corbyn now reap the consequences of their own cowardice. They hollowed out the party’s soul, and now the shell is collapsing.

Rachel Reeves, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, herself once understood the scale of the crisis. In 2018, she wrote that Britain was divided, that people had lost faith in politics, and that Labour needed a new economic settlement rooted in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Yet in government, Reeves and Starmer have delivered none of this. Instead of a new settlement, they have offered warmed-over market orthodoxy. Instead of rebuilding trust, they have deepened disillusionment. And into that vacuum steps Nigel Farage and Reform — the predictable, dangerous consequence of a political class that refuses to confront the failures of the economic model it worships.

But while Labour sinks, something else is happening. The Green Party has surged — not by pandering to the centre, but by speaking directly to the everyday concerns of ordinary people and offering a platform that can reasonably be described as ecosocialist. Under Zack Polanski’s leadership, the Greens have achieved extraordinary things in under a year: membership surpassing 230,000, a historic by-election victory, and now 587 local council seats — a gain of 441. This is not a protest vote. It is a realignment. It is evidence that when a party speaks clearly, boldly, and with conviction, people respond.

The Greens have not frightened voters away. Quite the opposite. It is the dismal centrism of Starmer’s Labour that voters are fleeing. The British electorate is not allergic to radicalism; it is allergic to stagnation, managerialism, and the suffocating politics of there 'is no alternative' and 'lesser evilism'.

And here in New Zealand, we should pay attention. Our own centrist duopoly stumbles on, with both major parties unable to inspire even a third of the electorate that still bothers to vote. We live in a country where the Deputy Prime Minister leads a party polling under 10 percent — a symptom of a political system running on fumes. Yet the Green Party here has failed to capitalise on the same mood for change that is reshaping politics abroad.

Commentator Bryce Edwards warned last November that compared to figures like Polanski in the UK or Zohran Mamdani in New York, the New Zealand left is timid, stuck in the past, and unwilling to embrace the anti-establishment radicalism that speaks to people living through a broken economic system. Six months later, with a general election looming, nothing has changed. Instead of becoming the advocate for transformative politics, the Greens have tethered themselves to Labour — a Labour Party that long ago abandoned any pretence of challenging neoliberalism. By doing so, the Greens are not offering an alternative; they are helping to prop up the very status quo their voters want to escape. Its leadership should be ashamed of themselves.

The lesson from Britain is not subtle. When the centre collapses, people look for parties that offer clarity, courage, and a break with the failed economic consensus. Labour refused — and was punished. The Greens stepped forward — and were rewarded. New Zealand’s Greens face the same choice. They can continue to orbit Labour, hoping for scraps of influence in a government committed to managing decline. Or they can seize the political moment, articulate a bold ecosocialist alternative, and speak to the many, many people who know the system is broken and want something better.

History is not kind to parties that mistake caution for wisdom. The British Labour Party is learning that the hard way. The question now is whether the New Zealand Greens will learn from Labour’s collapse — or repeat it.