The Greens have every reason to celebrate their victory in the Gorton and Denton byelection. From a standing start in a Manchester constituency, Zack Polanski’s team tripled his party’s vote to capture a seat that had effectively voted Labour in every election but one since 1906 – the year Labour was born. Labour coming third behind Reform UK is not routine midterm turbulence. A 20-point collapse in the party’s vote is extraordinary.
Sir Keir Starmer was abandoned by a coalition of young progressives, working-class former Labour voters and Muslims. May’s Scottish and Welsh parliamentary as well as English council elections will paint the map in many colours. Not a lot of it will be red if this result is anything to go by. Labour’s vaunted ground game can’t save it if the ground has shifted. The party can’t turn out voters who’ve already tuned out.
It wasn’t just the size of the win, or the fact that turnout was as high as it was in 2024. Nor was it expected – the Green party hadn’t even listed the seat among its top 100 targets. What really surprised people was the way they won it. By choosing a young plumber, Hannah Spencer, as its candidate, the party punctured the caricature of it as metropolitan radicals. Campaigning on affordability, she sounded like Labour before Labour lost its moral cadence. The result was a narrative success: proof that the Greens can reach ordinary voters, hold minority communities and speak Labour’s historic language – despite Sir Keir describing them as sectarian and extreme.
National elections are different: they require infrastructure and money that the Greens don’t have. If the party can’t replicate its winning ways elsewhere, Gorton and Denton will be largely symbolic. While Nigel Farage lost out, Reform UK managed to capture 29% of the vote in inner Manchester. That should set alarm bells ringing in Downing Street: the anti-government mood is broad and deep, and Labour’s coalition risks splitting in two.
Beyond the Green surge lies something larger: the steady fracturing of Britain into a five-party system. The Lib Dems and Conservatives did not feature in this race. Both lost their deposits. But the two major parties are now squeezed from many directions at once. Under first past the post, that means lower winning thresholds, hyper-local contests, tactical voting and a more unstable electoral landscape.
Labour can now be replaced in its own heartlands by a leftwing party. Responsibility for this rests with Sir Keir. He blocked the popular Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham from standing, and put his own interests ahead of his party’s. With Labour struggling in the polls and reeling from the Mandelson-Epstein revelations, it is not clear that Mr Burnham was a shoo-in. But he would have been the favourite – polling well with Labour, Reform and Green voters. However, if Labour requires a charismatic local candidate to hold safe seats, that suggests a very real national brand weakness.
Clinging to fiscal rules and deadened rhetoric will not save Labour. A change of leader means little without a shift from defensive managerialism to economic optimism and a clear programme. Under Sir Keir’s leadership, voters cannot see who benefits or what improves. In that vacuum, prudence feels like purposeless pain – and that, as Labour has found out, corrodes authority, loyalty and belief.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
