Lewisham councillors Tauseef Anwar and Rudi Schmidt defect to Greens

The two new Green Party councillors were announced at an event at Evelyn Triangle on Sunday 22 March, and Green MP for North Herefordshire Ellie Chowns arrived to add her congratulations.

Rudi Schmidt has been a councillor for Evelyn Ward since 2022, and was chair of the overview and scrutiny panel.

He will be standing as a Green Party candidate for re-election in Evelyn Ward on 7 May.

He said: “I can no longer represent a party that has stopped aligning with my values.

"The Labour government has failed our community through continued austerity, welfare cuts affecting disabled people, and its complicity on the genocide in Gaza."

He argued that Labour councillors in Lewisham are "controlled by the national party and everyone's thinking about their careers ..

"The Greens can better use our spending power, we can better use our assets, we can protect our land, we can protect our youth services, we can protect our playgrounds .."

His vision was to "build a network of Green councils that can stand up to national government, that can stand up to Labour austerity, that can stand up to complicity in in Gaza, and that can stand against exploitation.

"We do not need to have an exploitative economic system in the UK, we can have a fair and just system." 

Councillor Liam Shrivastava is Lewisham Green Party's group leader and is standing for election as mayor of Lewisham.

He said that when he was a member of the Labour Party, he and councillor Tauseef Anwar had brought a motion to the Pension Investment Committee to commit to divesting away from investments complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

The motion passed, but afterwards they were threatened with disciplinary action by the Lewisham Labour group chief whip.

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Anwar has been a Labour councillor for Crofton Park ward since 2018 and will now sit for the Greens until 7 May, but he is not standing for re-election.

“My decision to leave Labour did not start today," he said.

"It began when Keir Starmer justified Israel cutting power and water to civilians in Gaza. Since then, the party has increasingly punished those who spoke out against it, including myself."

He said that he and other Labour 'rebels' had stayed in the party, trying to change it. "But now, I think, we have given up. Especially now, we see a real alternative, the Greens."

Pointing to Labour's planned changes to immigration policy, he said they are "the cruellist policies towards legal migrants in recent history.

"It is such a shameful thing for Labour to do.

 "Increasing indefinite leave from five years to ten. For low-paid workers, 15 years. And for everyone who earns more than a six-figure salary, it's three years.

 "It's simply a class issue."

Anwar introduced the motion which led to Lewisham declaring a Climate Emergency, in 2019 and represented the borough at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.

He runs a business focussed on energy efficiency and created the Association of Net Zero Installers.

'Labour has ruined the whole net-zero industry'

He argued that Labour has "betrayed its promise" to create 400,000 green jobs.

"I work in the net-zero industry, they've ruined the whole industry."

Anwar said that Labour's sudden cancellation of the ECO4 scheme, without any successor or transitional plans, had damaged the entire green retrofit industry, throwing tens of thousands of workers out of their jobs.

He threw his support behind Shrivastava's mayoral campaign to become the next elected mayor of Lewisham and the Green party's bid to win more councillor seats in Lewisham, and noted his close connections to Redbridge, where he said he would also be campaigning with the Greens.

The Green Party said that more than 50 councillors have defected to the Green Party in recent months.

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