5 hours ago
7
Guardian columnist
A mighty sigh of relief sweeps across the country. Above all else, what mattered was the emphatic rejection of Nigel Farage’s poison, as a resounding 67% of progressive voters chased off Reform’s mere 29% support. The darkness of Reform’s apparent poll lead starts to melt away. The Gorton and Denton result avoided a split between anti-Reform parties that would let Farage’s party slither into the seat despite overwhelming opposition. Its malevolent candidate, Matt Goodwin, whisked away with a characteristically sulphurous hiss of spite about the “a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives”.
The calamitous result for Labour is, in comparison, a second-order matter in this era of the crumbling old party duopoly. (The Tories lost their deposit.) Keir Starmer suffers blow after blow as battalions of troubles fall on him, knocked by the Epstein fallout despite no personal connection, while Trump – so far – escapes despite close intimacy.
But this result adds to the tally of Starmer’s unforced errors. Everyone visiting the constituency found plentiful voters who would have voted for Andy Burnham had Starmer not fixed the NEC to block him. A craftier politician would have hugged Burnham close as an asset. Would Burnham have beaten such a strong showing from the Greens? We shall never know if he dodged a bullet. This “what-if” swells his reputation, though he may have no chance to join any imminent leadership challenge.
Labour’s prospects for May’s elections plunged even lower last night. A Green party that once seemed flaky will now often look like the safer anti-Reform vote if they can field more pitch-perfect candidates like Hannah Spencer: plumber, councillor, all-round good sort. Her honeyed victory words will soften many a Labour voter’s heart. She is a leftist without the bilious fist-shaking of the old sectarian socialists: “Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry … I think that absolutely everybody should get a nice life.” Nice. Byelections are often no guide to a general election three years away, but the trouncing of Farage may make this one historic.
Journalist and Green party member
Since Zack Polanski was elected Green leader last summer, the party’s membership has soared from about 60,000 to nearly 200,000. It has risen rapidly in the polls. But until last night, Polanski hadn’t faced a serious electoral test. Some old hands worried that while YouGov surveys come and go, hard wins are harder. Those cynics have now been silenced. The party has shown its surge isn’t just a bubble of online vibes. It can turn out support at the polling booth.
Of course much of the credit for this stunning victory – the Greens’ first ever win in a parliamentary byelection – goes to Polanski, who understood that the party needed to be more willing to embrace controversy, and stepped firmly into the large space Starmer left to Labour’s left. Much of it goes to the candidate – now MP – Hannah Spencer, almost universally known as “Hannah the plumber”, whose sense of humour, down to earth charisma and knack for explaining radical ideas like they’re common sense won her thousands of fans within hours of being selected.
More than either of them, though, this campaign was won by thousands of activists – Green members from across Greater Manchester and right across the UK (I know of activists who travelled from Shetland and Northern Ireland) who travelled to the constituency because they saw this byelection as a battle for the country’s soul – and they wanted to play their part. The Greens said they had 2,000 people out campaigning yesterday, while Reform and Labour claimed 1,000 each. Those are extraordinary numbers and the fact that the party had the logistical capacity to effectively target that energy shows that it’s managed to turn its membership surge into an effective machine.
Most of all, though, this Green victory should be credited to the voters of Gorton and Denton. They rejected the toxic rhetoric of Matt Goodwin and Reform, and Labour’s outright lies. They stood firm through a week of smears, which included claims that Polanski plans to turn our playgrounds into crack dens and daughters into sex workers. And they didn’t wince. They understood what was going on – that the smear machine was just getting going. And that, as voters, the best thing to do is ignore it.
Sociologist at the University of Manchester
Walking the familiar streets of Denton, where I grew up and where my family still live, the volume of Reform UK placards and nationalist flags had given me real cause for concern. The result shows, however, that despite the bluster and bravado of Reform, most voters saw through the shallowness of what was on offer.
I know people who voted Reform – friends, former friends, neighbours – and to some extent I understand why. Years of neglect under both Labour and the Conservatives have left people feeling abandoned. The cost-of-living crisis continues to bite. Access to healthcare, housing, social services and decent education is strained. Austerity has cut particularly deep in towns like Denton, often forgotten until a byelection rolls around. The library that shaped my childhood closed more than a decade ago and the youth spaces that once offered so much have largely disappeared. Add to this the conduct of Andrew Gwynne and his local allies in the Trigger Me Timbers scandal, and the disillusionment becomes even easier to understand.
The problems are real – but the solutions Reform offered were not. Its politics relies on fear and scapegoating, and the racism feels barely disguised. Migrants are blamed for every social problem while the deeper causes – an economic system concentrating wealth in the hands of the few – go unchallenged. Reform’s enthusiasm for the comments of Jim Ratcliffe, an out-of-touch tax exile pointing at migrants while hoarding obscene wealth, illustrates the distraction perfectly.
Voters rejected that narrative. They backed the Greens not only as a repudiation of scapegoating politics, but because the Greens offered a credible, anti-austerity platform rooted in rebuilding public services, improving living standards and advancing a politics grounded in compassion. In doing so, they sent a clear signal to Labour, whose rightward drift and neglect of its base have consequences. One MP cannot transform the constituency, impressive though Hannah Spencer is, but the result offers a genuine sense of momentum.
Alongside the antifascist mobilisation that outnumbered and outmanoeuvred Britain First in Manchester, and in the context of the recent Palestine Action victory, there are signs of openings for a resurgence of the left – if we are able to seize them.
Journalist and commentator
The party-level implications of last night’s byelection can be covered in three sentences. Coming third in their 50th safest seat is existentially bad for Labour. Losing their deposit as the rightwing vote consolidated behind Reform UK bodes very poorly for the Tories anywhere they’ve already been overtaken. It was an excellent result for the Greens and a pretty good one, given the seat, for Nigel Farage.
A much more interesting question is what it means. Superficially, Gorton and Denton looks like a victory for radicalism; Luke Tryl of More in Common suggested this morning that it was “the parties that offer the greatest change from the status quo” that are riding the wave.
I’m not sure that’s right. Yes, both Farage and Zack Polanski talk a radical-sounding game on various subjects. But a much more plausible explanation for both parties’ success is that they offer implausible but attractive ways of retaining the bits of the status quo their voters actually like.
While differing enormously in their values and choices of targets, both Reform and the Greens offer their voters a radicalism targeted largely at a cast of convenient villains. If only we cracked down enough on immigration, or the super-rich, then all might yet be gravy again. Neither has any appetite for suggesting to voters that digging Britain out of its current malaise might involve hard choices for those voters.
At first glance this looks very different to Keir Starmer’s self-consciously vacant managerialism. But at its most important level the difference is superficial: his belief that squeezing non-doms and “getting the grownups back in the room” would restore growth was a different flavour of fantasy, but it was fantasy all the same.
We thus confront the major downside of multiparty politics. Levelling with the voters is a prisoner’s dilemma, and with five parties there will always be new defectors.
