In the end it wasn’t even close. The Greens won the Manchester Gorton and Denton by-election with some to spare, winning 40.7 per cent of the vote. Reform UK, who looked the main challengers at the beginning of the campaign came second on 28.7 per cent, and Labour, as had looked likely, were pushed into third on 25.4 per cent.
The defeat reflects very badly on Starmer
Even taking into account the long history of by-elections producing a protest vote which does not get repeated at a general election, Keir Starmer is pretty well finished as Prime Minister. The defeat reflects very badly on him personally because he intervened to stop a candidate who might well have won the seat: Andy Burnham. Starmer will remain in office only so long as it suits his challengers for him to stay there. And when he does depart, Britain will have a Prime Minister who is substantially to the left of him. The fact that it is the Greens, rather than Reform, that won will convince many in Labour that they should be swinging more towards the left than the right.
The result also shows just how powerful the issue of Palestine remains among Britain’s Muslim population, in spite of the ceasefire. Even when winning a landslide majority in 2024, Labour lost several seats to single-issue Gaza candidates. The Greens won here because they shamelessly went after the Muslim vote, which makes up 28 per cent of the population in the constituency.
Interestingly, they managed to win in spite of some of their other policies being rather less attractive to socially-conservative Muslim voters, such as their stance on trans issues and legalisation of all drugs.
The Greens’ success, too, shows how angry young people are with Labour, and perhaps how big the issue of student debt has become – and that this trumps all other economic concerns. This was also a seat with a high student population, and the by-election was held during term time. The Greens must be the first party which has ever stood for office in Britain actively wanting to make the country poorer. Its leader Zack Polanski suggested last Autumn that he wants to reduce consumption, and many others in the party have toyed with the idea of ‘degrowth’ – in other words, permanent recession by another name. But it seems there are plenty of voters who are less concerned with the country becoming poorer than they are at revenge against their favourite bogeymen: billionaires (which the Greens want to subject to a wealth tax) and landlords (Polanski says he wants to abolish ‘landlordism’).
The result here reveals the extent to which some voters are prepared to gang up on Reform UK by voting for whichever party has the greatest chance of defeating them. Gorton and Denton, however, is very far from being a typical seat. While it does have a white working class population, it also has a Muslim and student population much higher than the national average. Reform UK might be expected to do much better in many other Labour seats.
But above all, the result confirms that the Greens have risen very quickly to become the mirror image of Reform UK: an insurgent party of the Left. Last year, Britain became a three party political system after a century of two-party dominance. It is now a four party one, with huge uncertainties as to how this could play out in a general election.
