It is a week away from the local elections that will take place in much of the England on 7^thMay.  Almost two years ago, the Labour Party won a landslide 411 seats in the July 2024 general election.  The polls for the forthcoming local elections suggest that Labour will be in third place in many wards and boroughs.

How can this change of fortunes have come about?  Labour got into power in 2024 because the electorate felt that their concerns had been ignored by the previous Tory administrations under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.  Many erstwhile Tory voters stayed at home or registered a protest by voting for Reform.   It is remarkable that Starmer won so many seats while getting fewer votes for Labour in 2024 than Corbyn got in 2017.  Such are the vagaries of the first past the post electoral system.

A constant, between the 2024 General Election and the upcoming 2026 local elections, is that large swathes of the electorate feel that they have been abandoned by both the Labour and the Conservative parties who are increasingly indistinguishable in the policies that they follow.  The consequent sense of disillusionment with the party political system generally has now led to the extraordinary situation that the electorate will possibly reject the two party system and vote in large numbers for parties like Reform on the right and the Greens who are seen as centre-left to express their general frustration with the entire political process.

Reform largely tap into the perception that excess immigration explains why native born UK people face poorer working lives with high taxation and diminished services.  

The Greens, in the past, have appealed mainly to those preoccupied with issues of climate change and identity politics.  Until recently they never had more than one MP in Parliament.  They would have made little headway against a Labour Party that addressed the concerns of its supporters.  But, some two years into the current administration, Labour supporters feel that their party has little idea how to address those concerns.  Many of those supporters are looking for an alternative party and will seriously consider voting Green in the May elections.

On the international front, Polanski has been prepared to describe the Israeli attack on Gaza as genocide.  He also unequivocally condemns the US and Israeli attack on Iran.  However, on Ukraine, he has never condemned the eastwards expansion of NATO that caused this war.  British working people will suffer the consequences of high energy prices because the UK joined in the sanctioning of Russian oil and gas.  Polanski has nothing to say on this.

We remain sceptical that the Greens would serve working-class interests any better than Labour. It has long been our view that Labour’s central failure is its adoption of fiscal rules that severely constrain its room for manoeuvre. In his speech of 18th March, Polanski expressed reservations about Rachel Reeves’s fiscal framework and invoked the familiar argument that government finances are fundamentally different from those of a household. He is plainly aware that winning disillusioned Labour voters requires such rhetoric. But there is little reason to believe he has thought through what doing things differently would actually involve.

The clearest signal of the limits of “Zackonomics” is his approving citation of Olivier Blanchard — an economist whose career has been closely associated with IMF-style austerity and who has been no friend to expansionary public investment. Citing Blanchard while promising to break free of bond market discipline is a contradiction that Polanski has not resolved. One is left wondering whether, faced with a sterling crisis or a gilt market sell-off, his instincts would prove any more robust than Liz Truss’s. Would a Polanski government ever consider ending the practice of auctioning bonds at market-set yields — the institutional mechanism that effectively gives financial markets a veto over fiscal policy? We doubt it.

In addition, a main reason that he is proving attractive to unhappy Labour supporters is that he is openly talking about a wealth tax.  In his March 18^th speech he proposed 1% tax on wealth above £10 million and a 2% tax on wealth above £1 billion.

In proposing such a tax, Polanski is taking up the idea of Gary Stevenson, a one-time successful financial trader in the City of London.  Stevenson passionately believes that inequality is the main problem in British society.  When Stevenson was growing up, it was assumed that all middle class people and many working class people would own their own homes.  Now home ownership is a declining prospect for all but the wealthy.  Stevenson proposes that a wealth tax will help reverse this state of affairs.  Whether true or not, his argument has won over many on the left in the Labour Party.  Since Polanski is advocating a wealth tax, many erstwhile Labour supporters may now vote Green in the May local elections.

It is an odd point in English politics.  Local elections should be about how councils are dealing with local issues.  But on May 7^th many Labour voters who may be reasonably satisfied with their local Labour council will choose to vote Green to emphasise their dissatisfaction with Labour at the national level.

If they do so, they should do it, not because they have any great faith in Polanski’s abilities or intentions, but because it is necessary to send a clear message to Labour MPs that the current administration has failed its supporters, on national and international issues, and that patience is running out. The only party that consistently supports the working class interest and makes the link between austerity at home and imperialism abroad is the Workers’ Party of Britain. Labour Affairs recommends that where a Workers’ Party candidate is available you should vote for them.