Hope Beats Hate: Green Party Defeats Reform and Labour in Huge Gorton and Denton By-Election Victory
In the end it wasn’t even close. Hannah Spencer and the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election by a whopping 41% of the vote – pushing Reform and Labour into a distant second and third place.
The result followed polling by Byline Times which showed the race to be neck and neck, but which crucially suggested that Labour voters were much more likely to switch to the Greens if they believed it would defeat Nigel Farage’s party. This was reiterated by online tactical voting campaigns.
That’s exactly what happened. Throughout the day Green canvassers picked up signs of former Labour voters switching en masse to the Greens, in a bid to keep Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin out.
Their victory came despite a concerted campaign by the Green’s opponents to paint them as extreme. The Labour campaign focused on the party’s drugs liberalisation policies, with the Prime Minister suggesting they would turn playgrounds into “crack dens”, while Reform accused them of a “sectarian” bid to win the votes of the local Muslim population.
The media too played their part. The day before voters went to the polls the Daily Mail, whose owner’s wife recently donated £50,000 to Reform, splashed on a front page branding Zack Polanski’s party the “Green Menace” and suggesting they would hand “illegal migrants[a] free house”.
Spencer too became a target. In an interview with Byline Times she spoke about the sexist attacks on her appearance and personal relationships by pro-Reform sections of the media.
“A lot of it has got quite a misogynistic angle to it,” she said.
“I’ve faced a lot of criticism for my appearance, for my hair, for my relationship status, like, all those things that I just haven’t seen about people like Matt Goodwin.”
None of it worked. In the run up to polling day, Spencer and her party leader Zack Polanski openly embraced the attacks, branding themselves “Green menaces” and urging voters to join them in rejecting this form of politics.
Although optimistic of success, the scale of the Green’s victory caught even the most hopeful figures in Green HQ by surprise, suggesting that the result was not just a rejection of the negative politics of Reform and Labour, but an embrace of the positive campaign Spencer and her party had run.
“We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other,” Spencer said in her victory speech.
“We can demand better without hating each other. We can do that together. We ran a hopeful campaign backed by 1000s of volunteers and activists. We defeated the parties of billionaire donors.
“We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other at all, and we did this with the people who live here, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, just as we have always done in this constituency.”
Within minutes of the result, Reform showed exactly why they had been rejected by voters. Taking to X, Nigel Farage channeled Donald Trump, claiming the defeat was a “victory for sectarian voting and cheating” while insisting that Goodwin, who had been wholesale rejected by the people of Gorton and Denton was “a great candidate for us.”
Goodwin himself went even further, posting that “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain.” He later told his employers at GB News: “Now we can have a conversation in this country about sectarianism and what it’s doing to our democracy, or we can pretend it’s not happening.”
In reality the result was not a victory for sectarianism or “cheating” but for the unity of most voters in the Greater Manchester seat to reject the politics of Reform.
Just as in the recent Caerphilly by-election where an expected Reform win ended up as a decisive victory for Plaid Cymru instead, voters are starting to show their determination to work together in order to reject Nigel Farage’s party and the politics it represents.
The truth is that if such tactical voting is replicated across the country at the next general election then current national opinion polls showing a clear lead for Reform would be unlikely to translate into a parliamentary majority.
Farage’s hardline anti-migrant strategy may have succeeded in getting himself onto newspaper front pages, but it would struggle to succeed as a unifying election-winning message across the country at large.
His one remaining hope is that far from uniting against Reform, the Green party’s success last night further splinters the progressive vote in the UK. Faced with a seemingly viable alternative to Labour, it is possible that we will soon see the Greens overtaking Labour in the polls and at the ballot box.
McSweeney’s Legacy
Wire
The first signs of that could come in May’s upcoming local elections, when voters go to the polls across large parts of the country, including London.
Big gains, or even outright victory for the Greens in Labour’s long-time London stronghold could spell the end not just for Starmer’s leadership, but for the approach for politics taken by his party under his former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney.
This approach, which prioritised Reform-leaning “hero voters” over the views of Labour’s own natural supporters, has succeeded in collapsing support for the party among its own base, while massively boosting helping Farage’s own prospects of a national victory.
This factional approach, which not only presented Labour as not seeking the votes of its own progressive base, but actively rejecting them, has translated this morning into them losing what was one of the previously safest parts of the country for them.
The result will also stand as a massive rebuke to Starmer’s decision to block the party’s Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from standing in the seat.
This decision, which was taken out of fear of Burnham challenging Starmer for the leadership, will now only accelerate the prospect of the Prime Minister’s exit from Downing Street anyway.
As with much that we have seen from Starmer’s Downing Street, a short term tactical decision looks set to come at a long-term political cost.
The timing of Starmer’s departure still remains uncertain. Since McSweeney’s exit, there has been a noticeable switch in Labour’s rhetoric towards Reform, involving a much clearer rejection of the racist politics they represent. As things stand most Labour MPs look set to give their leader one more chance to pursue that approach.
However, what really matters this morning is that an extreme and divisive candidate, with a history of dabbling in racist comments and discredited race science, has been rejected by voters, while a concerted political and media campaign to scare voters about a “Green Menace”, has failed.
For now at least, in a battle between hope and hate, hope has won.
New Endings: How Starmer Lost Gorton and Denton
Britain’s Labour Prime Minister is an accidental genius. Having won a comprehensive election victory in 2024 for not being a disturbed, sociopathic Tory leader, Sir Keir Starmer is now engineering his party into a position of electoral defeat and obituary-laden oblivion. Sclerotic, static, inert, incapable, his Labour Party government risks suffering a most deserved annihilation at the next general election. What they will be replaced with remains the fat, troubling question.
Predictions in politics are always hazardous, and there is nothing to say that Starmer will not gasp across the finishing line when the time comes, should the Labour Party permit him to do so. But there is something to be said about losing the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, regarded as the 38th safest in the 2024 election not only to the winner, a Green Party candidate, but outmatched by the populist, anti-immigration Reform UK Party. In terms of the by-election figures, Hannah Spencer from the Greens won 14,980 votes (40.7% of the total), with Reform UK gathering 28.7% of the vote with 10,578. Labour limped through to third place with 9,364 votes. The swing against Labour since 2024 was a goggling 25%.
Spencer’s background is worth noting, suggesting a savvy tilt from the Greens. Far from being a chic champagne swilling eco-warrior from urban privilege and trendy sympathies, she trained for blue collar work in a traditional Labour seat. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” she stated. “I am a plumber. I am no different to every single person here in this constituency. I work hard. That is what we do.”
The Greens leader Zack Polanski was admirable in praising Spencer’s individual qualities. She was, he remarked, “really authentic”, “just a woman who got into politics a little bit later, so she’d had real jobs.” But the individual personality of a candidate is not necessarily a significant factor before the cruel, mechanistic forces of political economy. This is not to say that voters are distant or cerebrally soft, merely that most are never politically engaged in the way the cadres of expert commentators, party strategists and bumblers suggest they are. Many do not so much vote for a standing figure as much as against others. (Starmer should know better than most.) They are picked for being different from the dunghill that preceded them.
The British PM presented a target of vulnerability in the Gorton and Denton campaign. His poll ratings are a caricature of horror and were not helped by the ongoing revelations from the Jeffrey Epstein files that deeply implicated his choice of ambassador to Washington, Lord Peter Mandelson. Mandelson, who was appointed despite Starmer’s knowledge of the Labour grandee’s links to the late convicted paedophile, sex trafficker and financier, is currently being investigated by the European Anti-Fraud Office and the Metropolitan Police for disclosing confidential government information to Epstein.
Starmer is also facing rumblings of a challenge within his own party. Labour’s chances were not improved by his blocking of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, another potential contender for the Labour leadership, from standing in the seat. The by-election campaign was also one of desperation, leading to accusations by Polanski that Labour’s approach had debased politics, diplomacy and democracy.
There is also no indication that Starmer is reflecting about his own position and role in the debacle, revealing, yet again, a near absence of political judgment. In a muddled letter to his MPs following the defeat, he vented his spleen at the “divisive, sectarian” politics that the Greens had allegedly taken from George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain. These were “not the harmless environmentalists they pretend to be”. They had such “extreme policies like legalising all drugs and pulling out of NATO that most voters strongly reject”.
Yet, despite not being so harmless, they were harmless enough not to pose a national threat, despite “splitting the progressive vote so that Reform come through the middle.” The Greens were unable to mount a general election campaign, as “they simply do not have the resources, the activist base or the local knowledge to replicate this victory across the country.”
Nothing to worry about then, except that there is. The unions are certainly prodding Labour to acknowledge the electoral reality and the collapse of their vote. “Workers and families are hurting,” stated Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. “We have a cost of living crisis largely being ignored and investment in jobs for the here-and-now being blocked by a Treasury that doesn’t seem to understand the basics of what is needed to build Britain.”
UNISON general secretary Andrea Egan offered a simple explanation for the Greens victory: “Many traditional supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully abandoned.” If the Starmer government wished to survive, it needed, as a matter of urgency, “to stand up for workers and defend our fundamental values.”
To date, the Labour strategy has been one of holding the vote against the dark attractions of Reform UK. Foolishly, the Greens were neglected as a relevant force from the progressive left. Starmer now finds himself adopting the language of extremes, with him the sober, reliable figure in the political centre always ready to, as he periodically likes to state, roll up his sleeves to fix a problem. In assailing the Greens and Reform UK as the “extremes of the left” and “extremes of the right”, the PM is sailing dangerously close into waters the 2016 US Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton found herself when she labelled half of Donald J. Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables”. This approach is a perfect recipe to make you unelectable.
The result in Gorton and Denton was appropriate punishment for Starmer’s distant, estranged, incapable leadership, a government that has seemingly not governed where it needed to, and now facing a calamitous reckoning. There is still time, though not much. While by-elections are not necessarily good indicators of future trends, both the Greens and Reform will be glorying in the moment and relishing their chances in other seats. The Labour-Conservative duopoly is collapsing.
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