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Labour MPs have said for weeks that the outcome they most feared at the Gorton and Denton byelection was a Green party victory.
On Friday morning, those fears were realised.
The Greens’ convincing win in the Manchester seat gives the leftwing party its best byelection result and its first northern seat. More importantly, however, it gives progressive voters a clear signal that they do not have to vote Labour to beat Reform – a signal that could prove catastrophic for the government in some of its strongest heartlands over the next few years.
“What makes this loss so consequential to Labour is not just the scale of the defeat but the message it sends to voters about future contests,” said the pollster Luke Tryl. “One of Labour’s ace cards had been the hope that, however frustrated or disillusioned progressive voters might be with the Starmer government, the threat of Reform would be enough to bring them back into the fold and reunite the left – a similar approach to President Macron’s re-election against Marine Le Pen [in France].
“But that argument risks collapsing following last night’s result.”
John Curtice, a professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the result underlined how two pillars of Labour’s traditional support – white, working-class voters and ethnic minorities – had deserted them.
“The Green party’s historic success in the Gorton and Denton byelection means the future of British politics is now even more uncertain than it was already,” he wrote in a piece for the BBC.
Hannah Spencer’s victory, with a majority of 4,402 votes over Reform, gives the Greens their fifth Westminster MP, 120 miles away from the next closest Green seat, proving the party can now win outside its cluster of southern support. She told supporters at the vote count on Friday morning: “To people here in Gorton and Denton who feel left behind and isolated, I see you and I will fight for you.”
The Green party vote share of 41% is four times bigger than their previous best byelection result, and the increase in their vote is five times larger than they have achieved in any byelection since 2010.
Officials for the Greens and Labour said there had been a shift among Muslim voters, with many mentioning Starmer’s positions on Gaza as a key reason for moving away from the party.
Spencer sought to capitalise on this with a campaign that targeted Muslim voters, including with videos in Urdu, in an echo of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York. “I can’t and won’t accept this victory tonight without calling out the politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society,” she said from the count. “My Muslim friends and neighbours are just like me: human.”
But for Starmer, Labour’s distant third place is likely to reignite questions about his leadership and renew the criticism of those on the left of the party that he has not done enough to impress its progressive base. It follows a similar result last year in the Welsh Senedd seat of Caerphilly, where Plaid Cymru topped the ballot, ending more than 100 years of Labour dominance in the region.
The prime minister’s decision to block Andy Burnham from running for the seat is likely to come under renewed scrutiny, given many voters said they would have been more likely to vote Labour if the Greater Manchester mayor had been the candidate.
Speaking before the result, one Labour MP said: “The worst outcome for us would be a win for the Greens, or any result which shows us finishing behind them. That could herald the kind of split in the left which we saw in the right at the last election and which gave us a landslide victory.”
Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, said: “What I take from this is that people want to see the Labour party shout more loudly about our values and how we are trying to change people’s lives for the better.”
Andrea Egan, the general secretary of the trade union Unison, said: “The Greens won for a simple reason: many traditional Labour supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully abandoned.
“A Labour government should be standing up for workers, defending migrants and refugees, and taking the fight to Nigel Farage rather than letting him set the agenda.”
After Starmer fended off an apparent coup attempt against his leadership this month, those close to the leader insisted he would show a more authentic progressivism.
He now faces more pressure than ever to empower the left of his party, something those on Labour’s right worry could pull them away from the kinds of swing voters who normally decide elections.
For Reform, the party’s second place result, with a swing of 14%, adds to a sense that the party’s momentum may have stalled. The seat is well down its target list – below 400 – and so is not needed if Reform is to win a majority at the next election.
But party officials had hoped to prove that their anti-immigration message could translate into votes even in urban areas.
Party leaders had come under fire for selecting Matt Goodwin, the former academic and prominent rightwing activist, as their candidate, rather than a more moderate, local candidate.
Goodwin criticised the result on Friday morning, saying: “What you saw was a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives that came together to dominate the constituency.”
For the Conservatives, meanwhile, the result confirmed the party has collapsed in areas where Reform is performing strongly. The 1.9% won by their candidate, Charlotte Cadden, is the party’s worst byelection result in history, and marks only the second time the party has lost its deposit in a vote by polling under 5% since 1962.
