The Greens' London Labour defection unit
Plus: Old tube trains return to London's tracks, Fold nightclub warned of risk of further drug deaths, and confirmation that Waymo robotaxis will add to the congestion on London's roads.
Spring is on the way and political campaigners are getting ready for May’s London-wide local elections. There’s been a lot of coverage in recent weeks of former Conservative politicians defecting to Reform UK. There’s been less attention paid to how the Green Party has been attempting to do the same to Labour at a local level in London.
Today London Centric reports on the Greens’ efforts to bring seasoned candidates over from Labour, who it rejects, and Labour’s claims that some of those jumping ship were already on their way out of the door.
Scroll down to read that story – or first read some updates on other stories we’ve been covering.
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Waymo: We’ll add more cars to London’s streets
Self-driving car company Waymo had a launch event at the London Transport Museum on Wednesday night, attended by journalists, government ministers, and many of the staff who have worked on the project.
We had a deep dive into how the self-driving taxis are being tested in London earlier this week (read it here, along with the punchy comments section) but the most interesting thing on Wednesday night was the confidence of Waymo executives on two fronts.
First, that, pending government approval, they are on track to carry paying customers in fully-automated vehicles around the streets of London by “Q4”. (To put it in normal language, that means at some point between October and December this year.)
And secondly, that people will love the robotaxis as soon as they get to try one.
The rollout is expected to be staggered at first, with a relatively small number of vehicles put on the streets at the end of the year and demand managed by allowing customers in on an invite-only basis. If you want to get ahead of the queue it might be worth signing up to Waymo’s app in advance.
Waymo’s market research said the places Londoners most want to go are central London and the capital’s airports – although airport journeys won’t be in the initial launch plans. The Waymo executives also made it clear they’re initially pitching it as a premium product, where you pay more than an Uber. In return you gain the right to put on your own music and take a phone call in private without a taxi driver listening in.
There will inevitably be an impact on the capital’s streets. London Centric asked Nicole Gavel, one of Waymo’s top executives, whether the company’s launch is expected to increase or reduce the number of cars on London’s roads – which could slow down existing vehicles and buses.
“We’re bringing cars,” she confirmed.
Nightclub Fold warned “future deaths will occur” unless it changes safety policy
Fold is one of London’s trendiest nightclubs, based on an industrial estate in Canning Town with a strict policy that clubbers have stickers put over their phone cameras before being allowed inside.
It’s also been issued with an urgent requirement to explain how it will improve its safety procedures by a London coroner, following the previously unreported death of a man after he attended a night at the venue.
Haaris Bhatti arrived at the club at 1.20am on Saturday, 19 July 2025, according to a prevention of future deaths report issued this week by senior coroner Mary Hassell. Just before entering the venue Bhatti swallowed a quantity of an unnamed drug. The coroner said that while he “took drugs on a recreational basis” Bhatti was not a frequent user of the unnamed drug in question. Then, during his time in the venue, he took more drugs.
At around 4.45am, according to the coroner, nightclub staff noticed Bhatti was unwell and took him to the club’s welfare room in a wheelchair. He was very hot, had an extremely fast heart rate and extremely high blood pressure, and appeared to the club first aider to be psychotic. He was monitored and informed staff what he had taken.
The coroner said Fold’s employees only called an ambulance more than an hour later, at 5.57am: “Staff agreed with me at inquest that they should have called an ambulance as soon as they got Haaris into the welfare room and saw his condition. The delay in seeking definitive medical care decreased Haaris’s chance of survival. The delay did not seem to me to be simply about any individual member of staff, but rather it reflected the club’s training and culture as a whole. Staff were concerned for Haaris, but this concern did not translate into effective management of his medical emergency.”
“Some nightlife businesses fear harm reduction approaches will result in police scrutiny and legal consequences”
She concluded that Bhatti died from the toxicity of the drugs he had taken. She has asked the club’s owners, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, to provide details of how they would improve management of medical emergencies at Fold in future: “In my opinion, there is a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken.”
London mega club Drumsheds came close to losing its licence in similar circumstances following two drug-related deaths but was overwhelmingly backed by both the local council and the mayor’s office.
Visitors to Fold told London Centric it has relatively strict drugs searches on the door, with clubbers made to empty their belongings into a bowl before being allowed in the venue.
Yet, as spelled out this week by Sadiq Khan’s Nightlife Taskforce report, the reality is that people are always going to go to London nightclubs and take illegal drugs. The report’s authors said the Metropolitan Police’s zero-tolerance attitude to the drugs and opposition to on-site testing of drugs is seen as discouraging “people who’ve consumed drugs from seeking appropriate help”.
“Some nightlife businesses fear that taking harm reduction approaches will result in police scrutiny and legal consequences,” the taskforce concluded.
Remember the old tube trains that used to run on the District line? This weekend one of them is re-entering service in west London, having been refitted with fast-charging batteries (and toilets) in a pioneering experiment by Great Western Railway. Paying passengers will be able to use the service on the little-used 2.5 mile branch line between West Ealing and Greenford, initially on Saturdays only. If successful, the prototype could ultimately enable the replacement of old diesel trains without the substantial cost of electrifying lines.
Hampstead cafe wars continue
The battle for control of north London’s park cafes continues, with locals protesting the takeover of four family-run venues by the Australian-inspired chain Daisy Green.
The City of London, the local authority that controls Hampstead Heath, has given Hoxton Beach, the company that currently operates the cafes at Parliament Hill Lido, Highgate Wood and Queen’s Park, until Monday to vacate the properties. But following a letter sent by Hoxton Beach’s lawyers, the City has put a temporary pause on eviction proceedings. The operators of the fourth cafe have already gone voluntarily.
Victory for Hoxton Beach could be short lived, with the City refusing to rule out seeking a possession order for the cafes and sending in bailiffs. It also published a punchy letter from the chair of the City of London’s Hampstead Heath committee, Alderman Gregory Jones KC, accusing a “small number of individuals” of directing “hostility, intimidation and harassment” towards both Daisy Green and the City.
In his eyes Hoxton Beach applied to keep the existing sites and lost out in a competitive re-tendering process: “It is difficult to reconcile claims of protecting the Heath, and the communities it serves, when there are malicious efforts to financially undermine the very charity that preserves it,” he complained.
Which poses a question over democratic control of the space: Why does the City of London get to decide what happens to a large chunk of green space (and its cafes) far from the Square Mile? Rather than being an ancient arrangement, this was a fudge in the late 1980s after the abolition of the Greater London Council left the area without a natural legal owner. It was residents of Hampstead who campaigned for the City of London to take control – rather than let the area be divided between the locally-elected boroughs.
Prince Charles Cinema’s negotiations with its landlord “beyond slow”
It’s a year since the Prince Charles Cinema went public with claims that a company controlled by landlord Asif Aziz was trying to force it out of its lease. This week, the cultural venue, which will host Timothée Chalamet on Sunday afternoon, provided an update on its dispute.
“Progress has been, frankly, beyond slow, at times close to a full stop,” said the venue’s operators, who said the case is still heading to the courtroom. “At present, there has been no breakthrough. Their appointed experts are now engaged with ours, and we are waiting to see whether there is any reasonable shift in their stance.”
The cinema’s battle has had some unexpected side-effects. The Prince Charles Cinema deal led London Centric down a trail of reporting which has taken in endless aspects of Aziz’s business dealings, from cockroach-infested flats in Croydon to regularly leasing properties to tax-evading gift shops.
Inside the Green Party’s London defection unit
By Polly Smythe
There are two big insurgent political election campaigns underway in London at the moment. Reform UK is putting almost all its efforts into outer London boroughs, backed by millions of pounds of funding and an internal training manual that was leaked to London Centric last month.
Meanwhile, the Greens want to make gains in the Labour-dominated inner parts of capital, particularly in Lewisham, Southwark, and Hackney. Yet despite the influx of funds and members that has accompanied Zack Polanski’s election as leader, the Greens are still playing catch-up in terms of candidates, staffing levels and campaign know-how. It’s up against a Labour party that has lost members but has more staff with much greater experience of running elections.
Without long to get candidates selected and up and running, the Greens are instead turning to defections as a way to fill their ranks, bringing councillors over from other parties, especially Labour.
Over the last year Polanski’s party has picked up fifteen councillors across London, with the biggest wave coming last December when five councillors in Brent jumped from Labour to Green at once.
There are two parts to its decision to embrace defections: boosting the sense of momentum behind the party in the media, while also attracting established local campaigners from other parties who might bring with them a loyal personal vote in individual council seats.
London Centric spoke to people who’ve made the move, as well as those who’ve stayed put, to find out how secret conversations over coffee can turn into the decision to switch parties.
“More hostile to us than to Reform”
Eugene McCarthy, chair of the London Green Party federation, told London Centric that the party doesn’t “have a target list of people we want to defect.” Instead, the process begins at the borough level, with existing Green councillors informally sounding out possible allies in Labour and other parties.
“It builds more trust when these are person to person conversations, rather than person to opaque institution,” said McCarthy. Once contact has been made, the councillor has to then formally request to defect.
It can be hard to time defections, with announcements impacted by a reluctance to be the first councillor in a borough to move, or by the desire to finish any projects shared with Labour colleagues before relations are damaged.
“These are people they’ve been comradely with, they’re now airing all the dirty laundry,” he said. Because of the bitterness that former colleagues crossing the floor can cause, “They [Labour] are more hostile to us than to Reform.”
Once a councillor has made up their mind to switch, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll be welcomed by the Greens. The local party isn’t able to unilaterally sign up a new member, explained McCarthy. “A councillor has to make a request to defect, and then go through an approval process.”
That process has three stages. First, there’s an interview with the local Green Party, in which they ask someone’s main political objective for jumping across,
McCarthy explained: “We’ve had some people say ‘I want to win.’ They’ve ultimately not gotten through the rest of the defection process.”
Once that interview is done, the party conducts a background check to look for any skeletons in the closet, before getting the final sign off from the national party.
But as Farage seeks to defend his party from allegations it is a “rescue charity for every panicky Tory MPs,” so too the Greens run the risk of their ranks becoming packed with ex-Labour councillors.
“Pure opportunism”
Labour has sought to portray the departing councillors as either already deselected, embittered, or having effectively left the party long before the formal defection. Some of the councillors claimed by the Greens as defections were suspended by Labour at the time they crossed the floor.
Last September, three Labour councillors in Barking and Dagenham defected to the Greens, accusing Starmer’s party of “abandoning its moral compass.”
Dominic Twomey, Labour leader of the council, told London Centric that the three councillors had only defected once they’d failed to be reselected by Labour for May’s elections. A similar response was given by Labour to the defections in Brent.
“This is pure opportunism,” said Twomey. “They obviously felt very disgruntled at not getting through the selection process, and clearly that disgruntlement led them to going across to the Green Party.”
He said he would have respected them more if they had defected on “moralistic” grounds prior to their attempted reselections: “I would have held my hands up when they crossed.”
“Turncoats”
In Southwark, Labour responded to the recent defection of Reggie Popoola, deputy cabinet member for landlord services, by saying it had already initiated “disciplinary proceedings against him over the abandonment of his duties to local residents.”
Popoola, the councillor for Nunhead & Queen's Road, said the local Labour Party had a “strong inkling I was going to jump ship” which it wanted to “mitigate the impact of by saying I was incompetent”.
“If I was so bad, they wouldn’t have reselected me or given me leadership roles,” he said.
In a WhatsApp group chat, seen by London Centric, Popoola and other defectors were labelled “turncoats” by one Southwark Labour councillor, with another former colleague saying it was “regretful” to see defectors willing “to upset friends and allies, for the sake of personal advancement and support for our political rivals.”
The debate over whether to defect can go both ways, with Popoola raising concerns during the defection process about diversity in his new party.
“Being a black man in politics can be quite hard,” said Popoola. “There was truly a lack of representation, and the Greens weren’t necessarily answering my questions at first in terms of how they were doing better.”
Eventually, the Greens promised him they were “trying to promote and encourage more black representation throughout the party, and that I would be a key part of that process.”
“Even in London, that’s not enough to win most seats”
McCarthy said the Green party is aware not all attempts by Labour councillors to defect will be strictly ideological and said he had already personally rejected one person hoping to join the party. Plus, in some council wards, Green candidates have already been selected, meaning not all the defectors will be able to stand in the same areas come May.
“For people who are defecting just to get reelected, the whole process is designed to weed them out,” he said. “Some people don’t even get rejected. They just get told ‘this isn’t right for you’ before they get into the process”. He gave the example of one Labour councillor who’d first approached the Greens, only to then instead defect to the Conservatives.
Unlike Reform, which claims it won’t accept any further defectors after the local elections on 7 May, the Greens haven’t set a hard date for those wishing to move. But McCarthy thinks anyone considering making the jump “should have done it by now”.
“A lot of these Labour party people in particular think they can sit on their arse and win,” said McCarthy. “That’s not the case. “The Greens are polling at around 17%. Even in London, that’s not enough to win most seats. We need to get out there on the ground. And that takes at least three or five months to do.”
He warned that defectors joining the Greens would have to put the work in: “Otherwise, they’re going to defect, assume they have this massive name recognition, which they don’t have, and then lose, get really disappointed, and get really disheartened with the party.”
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A packed issue! Re: Waymo - as a cyclist, pedestrian, bus user and driver in London, who’s also used Waymos in California, from a safer driving perspective I’m enthusiastic. Much less chance of being hit by one of its cars, than by some of the capital’s less good / more aggressive drivers.
I’ll be interested to see who is responsible should an autonomous car be charged with a driving offence. And how it handles stray road cones. Predicting they’ll be some entertaining physical blocking of vehicles when they first become widespread in central London.
Although they’re quite good at doing it to each other without our help: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/self-driving-waymo-cars-keep-sf-residents-awake-all-night-by-honking-at-each-other/
RE Hampstead Heath: I was curious about how the current arrangements came to be and was looking into it this week.
It seems that the original preferred option was for Camden to run it, but didn't want to have to bear the cost of doing so. So City of London ended up being the fallback option.
Speech from Frank Dobson on this:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1987-04-10/debates/b4895eb7-9499-44a3-966f-bec8cd967c91/GreaterLondonCouncil(Abolition)?hl=en-GB#:~:text=That%20would%20be%20grossly%20unfair,to%20London%20as%20a%20whole.