“We thought we were up against a brick wall – but it was a half-open door”

For the first time in 12 years, Newham’s Labour local councillors will have company.

The Green Party came second across the Borough at the May local elections, putting them ahead of the Conservatives, and won over 50 per cent of votes in the Stratford Olympic Park ward.

This breakthrough came as a surprise to many – not least to the two newly elected Green councillors, Nate Higgins and Danny Keeling – who thought this campaign would be more of an effort to prepare the ground for a potential win in 2026.

“When we started out a year ago, we genuinely thought this was going to be a five-year process,” says Higgins. “Nobody in the team thought we’d come second across Newham, keep our deposit for the mayoral election, stand a full slate of candidates and get councillors elected” – all of which they managed to do. “There wasn’t a team” interjects Keeling. “There were only four of us!”

Danny Keeling has been chair of Newham Greens for four years. For much of that time, in part due to the pandemic, the local party has been in a quasi-dormant state. The newly established ward of Stratford Olympic Park provided an opportunity for a fresh start, which the Greens seized upon, first by a process of consultation of local residents. Their local survey results suggested an opportunity to break Labour’s grip.

“It suggested we might have been overestimating the strength of the Labour Party in Newham,” explains Higgins. The campaigners sensed a strong disillusionment with the Labour Party. On the doorstep, Keeling says, “people said they never saw their councillors, they didn’t know what they were up to or even who they were sometimes”.

“I spoke to people who had problems with bins – emails went unanswered for weeks until just before the election. At the end of the day we’re just talking about bins here – the easiest problem to solve!” they say, with some measure of disbelief. (Keeling is the first openly non-binary member of the Council, and uses they/them pronouns)

The perception of Labour from many residents they spoke to was one of an inward-looking party, too preoccupied with its own internal struggles to properly listen and respond to residents. Yet the two speak very highly of the Labour candidates they were up against and lay the blame firmly with the “labour machine” in Newham.

They are also keen to emphasise that their campaigning did not hinge on attacking Labour. “We didn’t spend our campaign talking about Labour, but about Nate and Danny, the work we want to do, and why being in the council chamber will allow us to do more for the people we want to represent.”

They promise no negative or mud-slinging politics. “Good relations will be important for us to be able to do what we want to do,” says Higgins. “We don’t want a slanging match, we want to get things done.” – a turn of phrase which resonates with Mayor Rokhsana Fiaz’s pledge after Labour’s win that the new cabinet would “get stuff done”.

Despite being in a minority of two out of 66 councillors, the Greens see themselves as the ‘official opposition.’ “We’re Green councillors but we’re also the representatives of everyone who didn’t vote Labour in this election,” says Higgins.

Striking the balance between working constructively with Labour and taking a firm position as Greens is likely to throw up its fair share of dilemmas for the pair. For Keeling, the needs of residents come before any longer-term party considerations. “I’m a councillor first” they say, “In the end, it’s about what residents want.”

But as Greens they remain campaigners to the core. “Not every problem can be solved at the council level,” says Higgins “but people aren’t interested in local representatives saying ‘it’s nothing to do with me guv’.”

Higgins and Keeling clearly have very different personalities, temperaments, and communication styles – something which they feel has been an asset to their campaign. But aside from their politics they share another point in common; both share a profound anger that can be summarised in a single word. “Austerity is such a small word for the huge harm it causes, especially to those most vulnerable, most reliant on government-run services,” says Higgins.

Both of the councillors come from deprived backgrounds, having watched their mothers struggle to make ends meet as children. For Higgins, this experience is what continues to drive his political work today. “I can see now how the choices that others were making affected my family,” he says.

For Keeling, it is not a struggle they can put behind them yet. “I used a foodbank this week,” they explain. “All my bills have gone up and I’m on universal credit. I’m actively having to make choices about eating or heating.”

There is nothing abstract about the politics the two councillors bring to Newham, and their backgrounds give them an acute understanding of the crucial difference local politics can make to people’s lives. As Higgins puts it: “We want to be on the side of the most vulnerable in society and tell the truth. No-one could accuse the Greens of being afraid to tell the truth.”

The councillors are quick to dismiss any suggestion that the ward is an outlier, unrepresentative of the rest of the Borough in terms of its population and demographics. “That’s the story Labour would like it to be, and it would be really convenient to say that Stratford Olympic Park isn’t real Newham,” says Higgins, adding that the Green results in other parts of the Borough, such as Beckton, refute this hypothesis.

Beatrice White is deputy editor of the Green European Journal. She is based in Brussels and Stratford

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