At the start of this decade, Labour held 37 of the 70 seats on Bristol City Council; all four of the city’s MPs were Labour. In the 2021 local elections there was a thirteen-seat swing from Labour to the Greens. Three years later, the Greens gained ten more seats and effectively took control of the council. At the general election held on the same day in 2024, Thangam Debbonaire...
Alsayed Al-Maghrabi, a Labour councillor of Palestinian ancestry, quit Labour for the Greens. He told me he had joined Labour only because of Jeremy Corbyn and began to doubt whether he was in the right party in 2023, after ‘seeing Starmer provide political cover for Israel’s genocide’. I asked him how the Greens became the dominant political force in the city. He credited the election of Zack Polanski as party leader last September, but the Greens had broken through in Bristol years before that.
