Meet the Candidates: from Abrams to Winifred and in between – the Labour members who went Green

With the majority of polls predicting a seismic shift away from Labour across the country in this week’s local elections, Greens are projected to break the party’s 20-year grip on Lambeth Council.

Whether recent events shift Lambeth’s result on Thursday is anyone’s guess. But if the polls are right, that grip ends not purely through a loss at the ballot box, but because the labour movement is abandoning a Labour Party brand whose ideology is increasingly out of step with its membership.

Brixton Buzz spoke to some candidates who recently left the Labour Party about why they made the move. Some you’ll already know from these pages, others you’re meeting for the first time. Here are seven Labour-to-Green journeys, in their own words:

Ciara Alleyne, 22 – Green Party candidate, Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction

Alleyne joined Labour because her family had always voted Labour, and was inspired after canvassing with then-Labour MP Zara Sultana.

She had assumed most Labour MPs would be like Sultana. They weren’t.

The shift came at a Patchwork Foundation masterclass with Zack Polanski, whose linking of the climate crisis to social and economic inequality she found “absolutely life changing.”

If elected, her first priority would be increasing democracy through direct communication with residents.

“I love the idea of citizens’ assemblies – gathering everyone in a room and asking people what they want.”

 

– Ciara Alleyne, Green Party candidate, Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction

Seraphina Spicer, 28 – Green Party candidate, Brixton Windrush

Spicer was a private renter moving every ten months before settling in Lambeth in 2020.

Months after moving to her three-block estate, residents were hit with unexpected service charges and major works bills. She organised the blocks, ran a pavement strike with the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC), and won the money back.

She joined Labour at 18, excited by Corbyn, but left under Starmer – disillusioned by broken promises and attacks on the trans community. A box office worker and freelance fiction writer, she joined the Greens in September 2025.

If elected, she wants to get Lambeth’s workers and residents unionised.

“We won’t have proper climate action without action against capitalism, without tackling the cost of living and everything.”

 

– Seraphina Spicer, Green Party candidate, Brixton Windrush

Matt Wilcock, 31 – Green Party candidate, Knight’s Hill

Wilcock grew up in the borough and runs Leaves Breathe, a community gardening social enterprise creating gardens on council estates and in elderly housing.

He learned to garden at the Bzz community garden which wraps around the Norwood bus garage. He joined Labour in 2013 on social justice grounds.

After campaigning with Green councillor Pete Elliott in Gipsy Hill, he started voting Green locally while still voting Labour nationally – but left the party altogether over its increasingly anti-immigration rhetoric under Starmer.

Wilcock, who is half Polish with family roots in London’s Polish community, was particulary upset by Labour’s weaponisation of race and immigration, and said to Brixton Buzz on Kier Starmer:

“I’m not gonna vote for a Waitrose version of Farage,”

 

– Matt Wilcock, Green Party candidate, Knight’s Hill

Dario Goodwin – Green Party candidate, Brixton Acre Lane

From a South African anti-apartheid family, Dario was a Labour member for 15 years.

The final straw came in June 2025 at a Lambeth CLP meeting, where he begged his Labour MP Florence Eshalomi not to vote for the welfare reform bill. He had just worked on a paper for the Equality Trust showing the disability benefit cuts would cost lives.

“There was no humanity left in the central party. If we were having to beg people, for people’s lives effectively, at every stage, there’s just no salvaging it.”

 

– Dario Goodwin on Labour.

An IWGB trade union activist, he joined the Greens in early July 2025 to vote for Zack Polanski as leader.

He’s realistic that the Greens may sit in opposition rather than take control after May 7, and wants to work through the casework his team has logged at thousands of doors – going back to residents one by one.

“Even if I can help one person with a leaky pipe or rubbish collection, that will be a bonus. I want to be deep in it.”

 

– Dario Goodwin, Green Party candidate, Brixton Acre Lane

Michael Chessum, Green Party candidate, Brixton Acre Lane

As national organiser of Another Europe Is Possible, he became one of the most prominent voices in the Labour-left debate on Brexit and migrants’ rights.

He’s written for the Guardian, the New Statesman and the London Review of Books, and is the author of This Is Only The Beginning: the making of a new left, from anti-austerity to the fall of Corbyn.

After 13 years in the Labour Party, he joined the Greens in June 2025 – not, he wrote at the time, on moral grounds, but on strategic ones.

“The road to renewing the British left now runs through the Green Party.”

 

– Michael Chessum, Green Party candidate, Brixton Acre Lane

Cllr Martin Abrams, Green Party candidate, Streatham Hill East

After moving to Streatham, he was part of the Labour-left effort to democratise the local party – replacing Chuka Umunna’s tightly controlled delegate structure with one-member-one-vote, and helping get Bell Ribeiro-Addy selected and elected after Umunna defected to Change UK.

He was suspended in 2024 for backing a Gaza ceasefire motion, smeared as a ‘fake Jew’ by Labour colleagues, and blocked from re-standing as Labour in 2026, he resigned Labour in August 2025.

He calls Keir Starmer “probably the most duplicitous Prime Minister we’ve ever had.” Abrams admits he stayed longer than he should have, unwilling to give up on the years he’d put in.

“I was always in the camp of stay and fight. The party does not belong to them. It belongs to every single member.”

 

– Cllr Martin Abrams, Green Party candidate, Streatham Hill East

Sonia Winifred, former Labour councillor, Knight’s Hill

A councillor since 2014 and former Cabinet Member for Equalities and Culture, she is a respected community champion – “for some of the people who often don’t get a voice or seat at the table,” in the words of Florence Eshalomi MP.

On 24 January 2024 she voted with her conscience for a Green ceasefire motion.

The disciplinary hearing that followed she called:

“the most hostile, aggressive, and humiliating environment I have ever encountered in my 10 years as a Labour Councillor.”

 

– Sonia Winifred, Green Party

She resigned her seat the same day. A year later she joined the Greens, not as a candidate but as a member, having lived in Lambeth for over 50 years and represented its communities for ten of them.