It is eerily quiet in Westminster as parties spread across the UK and campaign in the Scottish, Welsh and English local elections on May 7. This means that now is a good opportunity for me to get out of Charles Barry’s gothic ruin and see politics where it’s really happening.
I’ll start with my little corner of south-east London, on the border of Southwark and Lewisham, where I spy some long-term changes on the left of politics. In my party the Liberal Democrats have long been the progressive alternative to Labour, and until 2015 held one of their few inner London parliamentary seats here, in Bermondsey and Old Southwark, where they still have a good second.
Now they face a strong challenge from the Greens – boosted by Zack Polanski’s appeal to urban voters and with movement down and the vote bouncing after their Gorton and Denton by-election wins – who are trying to steal their lunch and become the natural anti-Labour and anti-establishment option. When a batch of Lib Dem election leaflets dropped through my letterbox saying that the Greens definitely can’t win here, complete with dubious ribbon signs to prove it, there was a sense of “protest too much”.
For some time now, political commentators have been talking about progressive voters disillusioned with the government deserting Labor for the Lib Dems and Greens, a sort of amorphous point of progressive discontent. But of course they are two very different parties competing with each other. We were always bound to reach a point where they had to fight over who would benefit most from Labour’s declining support and May 7 will be the first battle.
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Ed Davey seems to have realized this. He has begun to describe the Greens as “dangerous” and will speak today in Newcastle, where the Greens and Reform have grown as alternatives to Labor to the possible detriment of the Lib Dems. His party has done very well by breaking up the Conservative party in rich countries and has 72 parliamentary seats to show for it. But on May 7 she must work to defend her urban wing from the Greens in Birmingham, London, Newcastle and elsewhere.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; get it every morning by subscribing to Substack here
(Further reading: Has the Reformation in the United Kingdom revealed human rights?)
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