Nowhere is safe for Labour.

Picture the scene, I’m curled up and ready to sleep after a night of surprisingly funny student comedy, hot water bottle underarm and earplugs in trying to block out the endless vibration of the nightclub I am lucky enough to live above, when a sudden realisation hit me – the Gorton and Denton by-election results will be called in the early hours of the morning.
Filled with the forlorn excitement of a small child on Christmas Eve, I set myself an alarm for 4 AM. I live a terribly exciting life, I know. 

My alarm goes off, I reach for the cold coffee I left on my desk and shoot a bleary-eyed glance at the laptop screen, partially expecting nothing to change. I can see tomorrow’s headlines clearly, ‘Gorton and Denton Recount’, ‘Too close to call’, or a count that runs far past the early hours into the morning because the margins are just that thin. 

Part of me deeply expects a Reform victory, with Matt Goodwin scraping a Parliamentary seat by the skin of his teeth. The idea comes to mind from conversations with family and friends back home in the North West, who tell me now is the time to “Take Back Control” and “Stop the Boats”. If Militant Liverpool is going turquoise, surely a polarised Mancunian seat is an open and shut case? 

From this by-election I expected an entrenchment of the endless centrist deadlock and blame shifting we’ve gotten so accustomed to under Starmer, and yet more political fodder to the Labour right that harsher lines on crime, immigration, and the economy must be taken to “win back Reform voters.” 

Photo Credit, Jonathan Corner for Per Capita Media. United Kingdom Independence Party “mass deportation tour” rally and counterprotestors, St James Park, Liverpool, August 2025. 

What I didn’t expect was a total embarrassment of both Reform and the Labour Party by the Greens. Britain’s ‘left’ establishment is staring down the barrel of a gun, and Polanski’s bold turnaround of his party into a serious political machine has been vindicated. Gorton and Denton’s swing reveals that there is nothing to win ‘back’, Labour’s voters have migrated in full to the Greens. A small Green victory, or a significant level of vote splitting is one thing, but the Green Party securing a 4,000 votes-plus majority in a ‘Labour safe seat’ truly heralds a shift towards a new paradigm of British politics going forward.

If you have been living under a large rock for the last few weeks, Gorton and Denton is a Greater Manchester seat,  which is relatively representative of the political fractures which define contemporary Britain – one both diverse and divided, as well as a tale of two cities – a product of recent boundary shifts which have merged together two areas which on paper may look radically different. Denton is over 90% white, while the rest of the constituency is more ethnically diverse and majority Muslim by faith. 

However, both parts suffer from indices of deprivation far worse than the rest of Manchester, let alone the country. Hannah Spencer, a veritable north star of Polanski’s vision of a new electoral alliance of the disenchanted finds fertile ground here, making hay not just on mobilising ethnic minority communities against perceived racist politics, but on holding the Labour government to account for its support of the genocide in Palestine, and combatting inflation and the rising costs of living across the nation. 

These nodes connect a massive segment of the electorate: nobody likes watching dead children on their social media feed, nobody likes being paid less, and nobody likes their grandmother being harassed in the street for wearing a hijab. 

“Labour’s electoral stranglehold is over” commented Polanski in an interview with the BBC, demonstrative of a sea change in British politics rivalling the emergence of the Labour Party itself in the early 20th century. The results, in the Greens’ 127th target seat, show a 40.7% vote share for Spencer, with Labour’s vote share halving from 50.8% to less than 26% in just 2 years. This is more than simply an unpopular Prime Minister or series of bad policies; Greens’ surge from national irrelevancy to the only serious opposition to the far right in just a few months marks an existential crisis for the Labour Party, who now seem projected to come third place in areas where their victory should be beyond question. 

The Government’s position of warning that “the Greens can never win” and a “vote for Greens is a vote for Reform” may just have been reversed overnight.

The media complex which has propelled Reform uncritically into the public eye as “His Majesty’s Opposition”, complete with its own Shadow Cabinet, can no longer sweep The Greens under the carpet. They can no longer ignore the democratic mandate for what Polanski calls a ‘politics of hope’ that reaches beyond scrapping the two child benefit capt, but a politics built on substantive and transformative progressivism. Instead, the media has launched into a tirade against Polanski, enigmatic of the media backlash against Corbyn’s Labour. Polanski is no longer a pie-in-the-sky hippie to our noble fourth estate, but has become a dangerous and terroristic radical, determined to make your kids take crack cocaine as they recite the Surahs. It is less of a serious expression of new attacks against progressivism, but a display of fear from the country’s centre, as it knows it cannot hold.

Starmer has a lot of catching up to do: “They can identify the grievances, [but] it is only Labour that can unite the country,” he said on the 27th of last month, in reference to both Polanski and Farage, attempting to frame himself as a sensible and rational actor faced down by radicals “on both sides”. But the Prime Minister’s attitude to this by-election, like his ‘new-ish Labour’ project in general, is a hangover from a bygone age. He is speaking as if the Green Party has not, against the backdrop of genocide in Palestine and poverty at home, forged a broad coalition which is holding firm. 

Matt Goodwin’s allegations of ‘sectarian voting’ ring more true of his own campaign than Spencer’s, an attempt to rouse nativist disdain from one half of the community towards the other, while pointing the finger at the white working-class leftist attempting to win over the support of Muslims under the direction of a Queer Jewish man. 

The government’s lines no longer stick. It is simply fantasy to act as if the Green coalition of diverse voters is unsustainable; it is powerful, cutting across boundaries, and it will continue to win.

One thing I noticed following this campaign was the sheer amount of ‘dirty tricks’ employed, with Labour’s focus driven entirely towards confronting Hannah Spencer rather than their claimed goal of stopping Reform and building a unity government. 

We know the Starmer project is no great friend of the British left, as this ‘new-ish’ Labour has based its entire raison d’être on purging, slashing, and condemning the left of the party to the margins, while endlessly tacking towards the far right. Starmer’s job in this by-election was therefore predictably not to prevent Goodwin from taking a Parliamentary seat, but to throw everything into the idea that the Green Party simply does not exist, manufacturing a two-horse race where none existed.

Part of this tactic of derailing the left by any cost can be seen through flyers sent out by Labour campaigners, which pose as an organisation known as “Tactical Choice”. The flyers attempt to fearmonger around the prospect of a Reform victory, stating that only Labour can win against Reform in Gorton and Denton. This line was reflected in party material on social media as well, with Instagram and Twitter posts put out by the party claiming that there was “one point in it” between Angeliki Stogia and Matt Goodwin, omitting entirely the section of polling data which showed the Greens two points ahead of them both… 

Campaign Material produced by Labour during the voting stage of the By-Election. Photo Credit: UK Labour Party https://x.com/UKLabour/status/2026390853309063292

It is blatant that Labour are scared of what a reinvigorated and emergent Green Party can do, but their attempts to block the left are not restricted to borderline election sabotage (country over party, yes?), but can be further seen by their blocking of Andy Burnham for the seat, seemingly the perfect choice as one of the only popular politicians left within the party, but coming from a slightly different faction than the Starmer politburo… making Matt Goodwin the evidently preferable choice for the government. The Party’s treatment of Burnham is evocative of last election cycle, when Starmer ordered Jovan Owusu-Nepaul to stand down from challenging Farage in Clacton; the government’s position seems to be that a Reform victory everywhere is better than left wing success anywhere.

Reform were also not immune from running campaigns of misinformation, with the Guardian reporting that letters sent by a “concerned neighbour” in target areas of the constituency were in fact funded and distributed by the Party. “Patricia Clegg, local pensioner, 74 years old” could in fact be your local Reform media intern, complaining that Britain “no longer feels like the country [they] grew up in.” The Reform letter is just as obsessed at striking at the left as Labour’s is – detailing the “extreme policies” surrounding drug legalisation and “letting men use women’s changing rooms”, doubling the victory of Spencer as not just a fluke but a serious underdog success against two well-funded corporate campaigns from her political right. 

It is imperative to the political and media establishment that the Greens make no more gains, that this election is forgotten about, or ideally did not happen at all. This is why the issues of ‘voter fraud’, ‘family voting’ and ‘sectarianism’ have crawled out the woodwork not as the polls closed, but as the results were called. Allegations of illegal voting don’t simply make up the increasing ‘Americanisation’ of our politics with “DEI” banded about on Newsnight as if it is a thing in the United Kingdom, but I heavily doubt their seriousness. The Acting Returning Officer for the by-election declined to meet with “Democracy Volunteers” regarding their ‘findings’ of widespread voter fraud, though the organisation continued to contribute to the air of illegitimacy around our democratic process fanned by the global far right.

The ethno-religious coding of these serious allegations is no coincidence, with the parameters of respectability stopping politicians and pundits from saying openly “we do not like the way non-white people vote”, terms with more subtlety is required. It is also pretty hard to take seriously a party which bases most of its campaigning on convincing one section of a community to despise and wish to deport the other half when they complain of “sectarian” voting patterns. 

This language of illegitimacy and crime, injected time and time again into British elections where alternative parties win is an issue to follow, because it will soon lose its salience. If the Greens continue to win seat after seat, when will the pundit-class stop trying to exceptionalise and delegitimise the results, and accept the new paradigm? 

Labour and the Conservatives hold serious parliamentary power at the moment, but Gorton and Denton shows that their days are seriously numbered, and their day of reckoning approaches sooner than anybody in Westminster could have anticipated. The ‘two party’ system is dead in the water, with Starmer and Badenoch looking more like Tories and Whigs fighting over the scraps of the old world as their majorities melt away. Their power for now is real, but is revealing itself to be becoming more and more virtual, held in place only by the letter of the law, rather than either popular mandate nor the desires of business. Farage’s deadline for defection approaches, and politicians like rats from a sinking ship will surely jump. We may see some of the same old faces on our evening news, but the truth is that the ideological landscape of British politics has been redrawn overnight. 

Is it time for the Labour Party to stop splitting the left vote, and for Starmer to go the way of Farage in 2019, instructing his party not to block Green candidates to prevent Reform from taking office? Keir, it is not the Greens which are splitting “the progressive vote”, so that Reform UK can “come through the middle”, it is the social democrats.

The future looks bright, and it’s fluorescent. 

Edited by Aidain Clair