Results

Turn out 2024: 47.8%  Labour majority: 13,413 

Turn out 2026  47.6% Green majority: 4402

____________________________________________________________________________

It is not hyperbole to say the Gorton and Denton by-election result is historic. This was Labour’s 38^th safest seat and the seventh largest by-election swing against a Labour government. It was not even a Green target seat.  Turnout was similar to the general election so the results were not distorted by a low turnout.  The Greens might have mobilised new voters but the evidence is that they did not win because Labour voters stayed at home. These peoplel switched to the party to their left.

The Greens’ local party machine before the election was like a pea shooter competing with a tank. Burnham – the popular King of the North – was regularly on the streets during the campaign. Labour threw in numerous MPs, ministers and councilors to shake the flesh. It bussed in its declining membership from across the North.  But the Greens won their first Northern MP and their first by-election win.

Labour strategy shattered

The Labour leadership strategy of chasing the so-called ‘hero’ voters who supported Reform in its former red wall strongholds has been buried.  McSweeney and his team of supposedly wizard strategists thought that they could ignore their progressive voters because they would always come back to Labour to stop a worse Tory or Reform alternative. We called it the Macron strategy in an earlier article here. The French president won two terms not because his policies inspired a majority but because rallying around him meant you stopped the hard right Marine le Pen winning. 

John McDonnell MP and the left inside and outside Labour have said repeatedly since the loveless landslide in July 2024 that this strategy of pandering to Reform on migration and other issues would only boost it. It would open up the threat of a Reform or Reform/Tory coalition government.  Yesterday it not only meant Reform beat Labour but so did the Greens.

Labour complicity with the Israeli state genocide in Palestine is still justifiably pushing people away from it. All those people who marched for Palestine and who risked repression for supporting Palestine Action should feel proud this morning. Their efforts have kept Palestine on the agenda, we have played a part in the Green victory. Indeed Hannah Spencer, the new MP, talked clearly about Palestine in her post-results interviews. Very simply she said she cared as much about the difficulties of people in Manchester faced with the cost of living crisis as she did about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. How dare Reform leader, Nadhim Zahawi, and accuse the Greens on TV of sectarianism for talking about Gaza during the campaign! On the same evening we saw a small child on film mercilessly killed by the IDF in the West Bank.

Reform’s racist excuses

Matthew Goodwin – what a joy seeing him squirm next to Hannah Spencer during her victory speech – tried to make out that ‘family voting’ or ‘cheating’ was the reason he lost.  The council and the returning officers have not at this stage accepted the accusations of these election ‘observers’. Dan Hodges, who writes for right wing newspapers, completely debunked these accusations on Sky News last night. Even if their claims stood up the numbers involved would not change the result.  The Reform attack line fits with their generally racist attitude to ethnic communities –  as though white people never go as a family to a polling booth and ask each other who to vote for. It implies that Muslim communities are not trustworthy, that they cheat.

Having campaign material in languages other than English is also sectarianism according to Reform. It implied the Greens had Urdu only leaflets, whereas they were bilingual.  It contends that parties can easily manipulate such communities – colonialism is revisited here.  The Labour party and other mainstream parties have regularly put out bilingual material.  Will Labour join with Greens to denounce Reform’s post-electoral demonization of these communities?

Why the Greens won

The figures above show that voters switched straight from Labour to the Greens. A good number did so because they positively agreed with a progressive programme. Clearly another group saw this as the best way of defeating Reform. Even some Lib Dem votes seem to have switched.  Labour should not kid itself that the Greens won just because they seemed the best placed anti-Reform party.  Zack Polanski’s new leadership of the Greens where he has essentially added a left social democratic programme to the environmental one is certainly a factor in this victory. Tripling the membership also helps provide the thousands of volunteers who helped get the vote out yesterday.  We also need to recognise that concerns about the state of the environment are ever present. The Labour government’s sneering about bat tunnels and dumping environmental regulations  are of concern to people everywhere, not just in middle class or rural areas.

When George Galloway won his famous by-election victories he often adapted to social conservative views among various communities. In recent years he would even openly castigate woke policies on sexuality or gender and echo reactionary policies on migrants or the environment. The Greens have proved you can beat Reform and Labour with quite radical, progressive policies (see posters below).  They argued for their progressive medical and social drug policy despite the despicable Labour campaign to portray it as giving children drugs in the playground. Even Starmer pitched in claiming his teenage daughters were at risk.

Hannah Spencer defended gay and trans rights.  Like Mandami in New York it shows with the right sort of consistent campaigning you can win (or at least neutralise) the arguments.  A lot of commentators thought the Labour smear campaign on the drugs issue would pay off. Similarly Labour hit out at Zack’s critical NATO policy. Again it failed.

For socialists this is an important lesson.  We can argue for progressive policies outside the ‘extreme centre consensus’ and still win. Of course you have to make these policies real and meaningful to people – simplistic and wooden leftist propaganda will not work.

Understanding the Greens today

Let us hope too that some of the people on the Marxist or revolutionary left wake up and smell the coffee. There is often little understanding of any change taking place in the Greens since Zack’s new leadership. You cannot dismiss the Greens as middle class, a new form of liberal democrats or just ‘sell outs’ waiting to betray once in power. You have to recognise that they include tens of thousands of workers and particularly young people.  You cannot deny they defend workers interests and mother nature when they put forward most of their policies today.  You have to live in some red bubble to suggest the Greens have a negative effect, that they are diverting people away from real struggle, from the true working class strategy and ultimately helping the ruling class. 

If you read the press of the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party or Counterfire it was hard to find clear, public calls to vote Green in Gorton from the start of the campaign.  In the last week there was a sentence or two in one or other article saying it would be good if Hannah Spencer won.  We have to do better than that.  

We still need a new left party. We are not saying join the Greens but it  does mean that they can be allies and that their membership today is part of the movement we need to move if we want to build a socialist alternative.  Working out local or national electoral deals will also have to recognise the reality of the Green surge.  It is now certain they will overtake the Labour Party membership.  Unrealistic notions I have heard from some left groups of what Your Party can do in terms of electoral intervention have to be tempered. We should aim for all branches to engage with local Green groups where possible.

Thankfully both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana called for a vote for the Greens in Gorton and say they are ready to work on alliances with them.  We need to help the Greens deepen their move towards a left social democratic/socialist framework. At the same time we should make the left more eco-socialist and green. 

What now for Labour?

Certainly we know that a lot of the left still working inside the Labour Party more or less welcomed this result.  They see correctly that it opens the way for a leadership contest where the soft left headed by Burnham or Rayner can win.  Lucy Powell, straight after the result, said that Labour cannot win if it tries to ‘outReform Reform’.  All the journalists on the ground also reported that many Labour voters said they would have voted for Burnham.  Nobody can deny that McSweeney and Starmer blocked Burnham from standing to protect Starmer’s position and the rightwing leadership. Burnham played a loyal Labour game campaigning in a hopeless cause.  Will the unions block him again if he tries for another seat soon?

Wes Streeting and the right wing leadership will also now have to move. The Mandelson and McSweeney exits will have made things more difficult for him. The problem they have is that it is their strategy which has led to this disaster. It is possible that some sort of new amalgam that tries to integrate some of the soft left concerns might be attempted.  Once MPs are confronted with the danger of losing their seats and political careers previous loyalty to Starmer goes out the window. So expect quite a bear fight.

Surely too the Greens’ success will attract more defections from Labour members.  Left Labour people always hope that a leadership campaign with a soft left candidate like Burnham or Rayner would bring people back into Labour and help build the ‘inside’ left.  Given the Green surge this is less likely now.  The soft left have been weak on Palestine and defending democratic rights against repressive measures like the proscription of Palestine action. Defending migrants has not been a soft left priority either. These are precisely the questions today drawing people away from Labour towards the Greens.

People like Rayner or Burnham are not really the left alternative we need but their opposition to Starmer weakens the rightwing policies of the government. Already last night some Labour people were attacking Shabana Mahmood’s reactionary anti-migrant programme. If it means she is pushed back this is positive.

Reform reaching a threshold?

Gorton still shows Reform beating Labour and there are other seats where they are better placed, this was not a target seat.  Labour is still vulnerable to Reform. However the difficulty for hard right parties like Reform is that they have a solid base – reflected in their steady polling at around 30% – but find it harder to go much beyond that. In other countries like in Italy this has meant alliances with mainstream conservative forces which they push to the right.  So this points to the difficulty for Reform to win a majority on its own.  Farage is also been disturbed by forces to his right such as the Rupert Lowe  Restore party or Tommy Robinson. Most surveys of opinion actually show that there is still a progressive majority opinion in the country, including on issues of migration. Part of the problem is that only the Greens of the mainstream parties have been openly praising the contribution of migrants and opposing drastic restrictions on asylum.

The Greens score yesterday also shows they won support in Denton, the more white working class area which shows that it is myth to say white workers in the north cannot be won away from Reform.  The fact that Farage has resorted to saying they lost because the muslim communities cheated shows that he is rattled.

Being human is important

Sometimes behind all the campaign policies and materials it really comes down to the candidates. Voters look at them and decide they prefer her or him to represent my interests, my community. Here the Greens played a great game. They wisely did not choose Zack Polanski but went for a local woman plumber. Indeed their campaign riffed a great deal on Hannah the plumber who got her hands dirty fixing things. It seemed to personify the Green message about getting ordinary people into parliament, doing politics differently. Against her we had a Labour candidate who was a manager who worked for Arup linking with local authorities on infrastructure or architectural projects. She just epitomised today’s Labour party – that strategic junior partnership with corporate capital.  Even the way she dressed compared to Hannah emphasised that difference. As for Matt Goodwin this was a disastrous choice for Reform, they may have been better with a Lee Anderson type. He just said London academic and media elite. Unsurprisingly he was kept away from the public.

Once in a while there are good days for socialists to wake up to. Today was definitely one of them. Hope has won over hate.