UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under pressure to reinvent his ailing Labour government with a leftwards pivot after the Green Party captured one of its House of Commons seats via a special election.
The result underscores the recent fragmentation of UK politics and the disruption of long-held electoral certainties.
It has “torn the roof off” British politics, said Green Party Leader Zack Polanski.
Spencer’s win marks the first-ever by-election victory for the Greens, as well as their first seat in northern England, highlighting the increasing reach of the left-wing party in a context where Labour voters are abandoning it in both directions.
Spencer’s margin of victory was much more comfortable than commentators had expected, with polls consistently understating the Greens’ appeal.
The swing from Labour was 26% in Gorton and Denton, and the Greens now have five MPs in Parliament.
Andrea Egan, general secretary at workers’ union Unison, said Labour should be “taking the fight” to Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage “rather than letting him set the agenda.”
As Tom Jones reports below for TheCritic.co.uk, the election has grim implications.
The Gorton and Denton by-election, by virtue of having been won by the Greens, marks a more momentous shift for the left than the right. Ava Santina has written about this for us, and a recent Critic Show episode is devoted entirely to the fracturing of the left.
But like the overweight kid trying to avoid getting near the ball in PE, just because you don’t win, that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned.
The first is that Reform may need to start thinking about expectation management. As an insurgent party, they were happy to talk up their chances of winning in order to build the narrative that the two main parties are finished. But this made the race seem closer than the result ended up being: 4,000 votes behind the Greens and just over 1,000 votes ahead of Labour therefore will be made to seem like an underperformance by the media.
It was not. In terms of the size of the swing needed from the 2024 General Election, Gorton and Denton was 413th on Reform’s target list. Even with their polling shoring up at around 30 per cent, as it is in national polls, turning the sixth Labour seat over was a stretch too far. On the upside, a national campaign against the Greens will be a much more favourable proposition for Reform, coming as it does against a weaker campaigning machine than Labour — and increased scrutiny on the Green Party, which it will fail.
A lesson may also be on the need to find local candidates. I hate that local candidates boost election performances, I hate that Hannah Spencer claimed she had never seen Matt Goodwin in the local Asda “doing his big shop”, but most of all I hate that it works. A local candidate would not have swung Gorton and Denton their way, but there will be a significant number of seats where it will. It’s yet another problem for Reform’s candidate selection team to deal with.
As for the other right-wing parties, the question is, “why bother?”
The Conservatives took just 706 votes. 1.9 per cent of the vote. That is their lowest ever vote share in a by-election. They lose their deposit for the first time at an English by election for nearly 40 years.
We have heard much about the need for a Reform-Conservative pact. It has come, overwhelmingly, from establishment media figures whose professional relevance depends on preserving their access to the Conservative Party — and who can see that access, and therefore their own influence, draining away. Such a pact would necessitate the Conservatives to stand aside in hundreds of seats like this. It is so ingrained in the Conservative psyche to stand candidates everywhere that it is part of the party’s constitution. Farage has been burned before with a Conservative pact — it is incumbent on the Conservatives to make any such a deal happen.
The Conservative statement after the result spoke much about this result rendering Starmer a lame duck, but nothing about their failure to play any role in this result being delivered.
Meanwhile Advance UK, the Ben Habib vehicle, took 154 votes — less than the Monster Raving Loony Party. A vision of Restore Britain’s future? Perhaps. There is a question here. If things are really as bad as the leaders of these parties claim, then how can they justify siphoning off votes from adjacent right-wing parties over ever-finer points of right-wing doctrine? When the house is on fire, it is a strange moment to insist on arguing about the exact brand of extinguisher.
Perhaps parties formed with the sole aim of giving histrionic social media addicts something to do will not be Britain’s salvation. Who knew.
Finally, the lesson that all parties of the right should take is in the dangers of sectarian voting.
For a long time the conventional parties have been happy with sectarian voting, so long as it delivered conventional parties.
The salience of the Muslim vote in this election — coupled with the Green Party’s campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla — has reinforced a narrative that has been gathering force since the rise of the so-called “Gaza independents”: that Britain has a sectarian voting problem that can no longer be ignored.
It is fast becoming an ingrained part of our political culture: Sky’s coverage of the result included Sam Coates examining and speaking about the proportion of the seat that is ethnic minority.
There is a risk here.
A political class steeped in American news and habits of thought may interpret this development as merely the British version of familiar US-style demographic politics, where politics is more attuned to minute changes amongst identity and interest groups.
It is not. American immigrants, and therefore their voting patterns, are markedly different to those in Britain. We are not getting “suburban moms”.
The Electoral Commission grants Democracy Volunteers access to polling stations during elections, and the group has reported seeing “concerningly high levels” of family voting (an illegal practice in which two voters occupy a single polling booth, often with one directing the other’s vote) in the by-election.
John Ault, director of Democracy Volunteers, said: “Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.”
He added: “We rarely issue a report on the night of an election, but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high. In the other recent Westminster parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby we saw family voting in 12 per cent of polling stations, affecting 1 per cent of voters. In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68 per cent of polling stations, affecting 12 per cent of those voters observed.”
Manchester City Council have hit back, arguing that “No such issues have been reported today”, and blaming Democracy Volunteers for not reporting these issues at the time. This issue is too obvious to ignore (although some will try), and at least some parties will find it politically expedient to oppose it. These voting patterns have been documented for a long time. Perhaps, after the next election, we will finally have the chance to deal with them. Small mercies, but mercies nonetheless.
Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister who is bookmakers’ favorite to succeed Starmer, said the result was “a wake-up call.”
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