Every barb Labour has directed at the Greens can now be returned with interest. “It’s a wasted vote.” “Do you want to see Reform in power?” New polling ahead of the crucial Gorton and Denton byelection this week, while by no means decisive, puts the Greens first on 22%, followed by Reform UK (20%), then Labour (18%), with 31% undecided. But still Keir Starmer falsely claims that “only Labour can beat Reform”. Does he want to see Reform in power?
I’m not a party person. I subscribe to the old-fashioned belief that journalists should have no political loyalties. But I see the Greens stepping into the howling void Labour has vacated and becoming everything you might have wanted Labour to be. In their byelection contender, Hannah Spencer, they have a brilliant candidate: a working plumber and plasterer with first-hand experience of the cracks and leaks in our social fabric and bright ideas for fixing them. Here and in many other constituencies, the Greens now appear to be the most plausible opposition to take on the extreme right.
YouGov’s voting intention polls show that since January 2025, Labour’s national share has declined from 26% to 18%, on a steady downward cruise that no rhetoric, U-turn or reboot has been able to jolt. The Greens, in contrast, on an equally steady trajectory, have risen in the same period from 8% to 17%. Throughout the Gorton and Denton contest, the gambling companies have judged them the best bet. So if, as Labour claims, the key aim is to stop Reform UK from gaining power, it should stand its candidate down and let the Greens walk home.
Of course, I’m not being entirely serious: I know Labour would never entertain the idea. But I’m using this outrageous proposal to highlight two things. The first is the way its rhetoric that suggests clinging on to nurse for fear of something worse backfires the moment a better nurse arrives. The second is that its claim to be laser-focused on stopping Reform rings hollow the moment it falls behind another contender in the polls. This is not and has never been Labour’s primary aim. If it were, it would have introduced electoral reform. I cannot emphasise this enough: the only thing that would allow Nigel Farage’s party to take power is our unfair and undemocratic first-past-the-post system – and Starmer’s determination to maintain it.
If stopping Reform were the overriding aim, Labour would also deploy what research shows is the killer attack line against that party. A survey of 6,000 people by the group Persuasion UK found that by far the most effective message of five options was focused on corporate interests and went as follows: “Nigel Farage says he’s on people’s side – but when you take a closer look it’s pretty clear who he’s really fighting for, isn’t it? It’s the rich, the powerful, his mates in big business.” It explained that Reform UK has taken vast donations from fossil fuel investors and climate science deniers. This, Persuasion UK said, is why Farage wants to cut public services, workers’ rights and taxes for the richest. “He’s not smashing the system. He and his rich friends basically are the system.”
None of the other attack lines came anywhere near this for efficacy. So why doesn’t Labour use it? Because that might alienate the people Starmer seems keenest to appease: Labour’s own corporate backers and the billionaire proprietors of the rightwing press. The leadership’s key objective is not stopping Farage, but frightening people into voting Labour. Quite frankly, it has nothing else left.
One by one, it has destroyed the hopes that people vested in it, alienating potential voters on everything from Gaza to benefits to its self-destructive apeing of Reform’s rhetoric on immigration; from its vicious factional warfare against leftwingers in the party to its tearing up of environmental protections and attacks on wildlife, which, in a country of nature lovers, is utter, self-defeating madness. Disgust and disillusionment among former supporters is everywhere palpable.
This byelection should have been a stroll for Labour. Not only was Gorton and Denton among its safest seats, but the Reform candidate, Matt Goodwin, is among the most unprepossessing people I’ve ever met. I was up against him on Question Time a year ago. We were picked up in the same car from the station; then I watched how he interacted with others, including a political ally, in the green room. He came across as utterly charmless and squirming with discomfort. When he tried to smile, his lips stretched, but no other part of his face seemed to move. This could explain why he has been seen so little in the constituency he’s contesting. For God’s sake, don’t let him near the voters!
He presents a target a mile wide. He has suggested punishing women who don’t have children through the tax system, while removing income tax “for women who have two or more children”. First the punitive right in this country, in the form of the Conservative chancellor George Osborne, penalised women for having more than two babies through the two-child benefit cap. Now, in the form of Goodwin, it proposes to whip them the other way. As ever, women’s reproductive choices must yield to culture wars waged by power-hungry men.
Last week the Guardian revealed that Goodwin was accused by a young woman working at GB News, where he presents a show, of making inappropriate comments that she took to be sexual harassment, causing her great distress. He apologised after she made a complaint. A source at GB News remarked that Farage believed “that is just Matt being Matt”. Ah yes, like “Boris being Boris”: the endless licence granted to the most obnoxious men in politics, while denied to everyone else.
As for the 44% of people in the constituency with minority ethnic backgrounds, Goodwin has claimed “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”. You have been warned.
What could be easier than trouncing him? But I have the feeling that if Labour stood unopposed, it would still manage to lose. Had it set out to alienate its base while infuriating voters everywhere, it could not have done a better job.
I’m delighted to see how well the Greens are doing. But we also need a strong and sincere Labour party. It’s tragic to witness how Starmer and his moral bypass of a government have ruined it – and opened the door to something much worse.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
