- The UK is staring down the barrel of a Reform government in 2029. Such a result would be a historic defeat for the working class and minority communities. A victory for Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and candidate for the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) in this by-election would be a victory for the working class and all progressives. Hannah says her message is ‘that Greens will cut the cost of living and expose Britain’s role in the Gaza genocide’. Her victory would show that policies to the left of Labour can defeat Reform and Labour. This would give credibility to those policies and confidence that the left and ecological movement can win in these circumstances.
- Green policies on welfare/social spending, Palestine, democratic rights, military spending/nuclear weapons, migrants, drugs policy, taking back all the utilities into public ownership, and taxing the rich are to the left of Labour and mirror many of the policies we want Your Party to agree to and fight for.
- A victory for the Greens would be a defeat for the Labour leadership and its policy of attempting to defeat Reform by adopting its anti-migrant policies. Starmer’s position will be weakened and a leadership challenge is even more likely with the chance of a soft-left replacement. Those left activists still in the Labour party would welcome such a challenge.
- This would completely undermine Labour’s desperate tactic of saying only it can defeat Reform and so people should rally around it to stop fascism getting closer. Labour is paving the way for the far right by normalising the authoritarian anti-migrant, anti-trans agenda and establish that progressive-minded voters want an alternative, not just lesser evilism.
- Your Party would benefit from the increased electoral credibility of the platform that the Greens are standing on since it is likely to agree to many similar policies.
- This unitary approach should make it possible to develop future collaborative relationships with the Green Party locally and across England and Cymru/Wales. This is the approach being adopted already in a number of localities where independent socialist candidates with the support of local Your Party campaigners are forging electoral pacts with the GPEW.
- The history of our movement shows that we have to start from the interests of the working class as a whole and not the concerns of small numbers of socialists who wish to place their differences with other progressive forces as the main criteria for taking a political position on the key questions of the day.
- Calling for a vote for the Greens does not mean that ACR has no disagreements with their formal positions. We have a different view of the balance between intervention in elections and the mass struggle. We have a different understanding of the nature of capitalism, the need for a rupture with the British state and the transition to an eco-socialist future. However, we can work with them in this campaign which will focus on where we agree.
- We regret the fact that YP, while correctly deciding not to put up its own candidate at this time, has not called for a Green vote even after nominations have closed. This by-election is too important for socialists to abstain. From that point of view we welcome Zarah Sultana’s personal statement. Sadly, the Grassroots Left in Your Party has issued a statement which is totally out of step with the views of many in the party and the understandable desire to have a united front against Reform (and Labour!).
- A vote for the Greens and a united campaign will be a blow to the far-right juggernaut and will show that there is an alternative politics to those of the right and the capitulation of Labour to their agenda. Creating working alliances with Green activists can help efforts to make the Green movement more anti-capitalist. The best strategic path for socialists in the next few years is to work towards a Red-Green alliance at the 2029 general election, and to fight for it to be on a consistent anticapitalist platform.
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Whilst it is true that defeat for Reform is much to be desired, ACR’s analysis places too much weight on electoral/ voting calculations. That is ironic, given ACR’s correct assertion of the primacy of mass struggle over electoral politics.
The right wing ‘Juggernaut’ will not be defeated by electoral finessing, but only through mass working class mobilisation.
We must avoid repeating the mistakes of the dying days of Weimar politics.
The left is largely united behind a Green vote in Gorton and Denton, and rightly so. ACR has called for it. Sultana has called for it personally. Revolutionaries who refuse to take sides in a three-way contest between Labour, Reform, and the Greens are not being principled; they are being useless. Your Party was right not to stand its own candidate here: the organisation is not strong enough, and a Reform victory would be a serious defeat for the working class and minority communities across Manchester. The Grassroots Left statement, which could not bring itself to back the Greens even after nominations closed, mistakes paralysis for sophistication.
Good. But what happens on 27 February?
Those of us who lived through the Scottish independence referendum know the danger. The 2014 Yes campaign unleashed an extraordinary wave of working-class energy: mass meetings, community organising, a genuine popular movement from below. And then, almost overnight, it was channelled into the SNP. Absorbed. Domesticated. Tens of thousands of newly radicalised people poured into a party that had no intention of challenging capitalism, and the independent movement withered. By the time the SNP’s hollowness became undeniable, much of that energy had dissipated entirely.
Gorton and Denton is obviously a smaller stage. But the logic is the same. If the enthusiasm generated by opposing Reform is captured entirely within the Greens’ electoral machinery, it will meet the same fate. The Greens are a petty-bourgeois formation with progressive positions on specific questions. They deserve a vote against Reform. They are not, and cannot become, a vehicle for working-class self-organisation. Ask council workers in Bristol or Brighton what a Green administration means in practice. Progressive manifestos do not survive contact with the capitalist state unless the party implementing them is rooted in, and accountable to, organised labour.
What we need is not an electoral strategy to stop Reform. We need independent working-class mobilisation on united front demands: housing, wages, Palestine, defence of migrants, the climate emergency. These are the fights that can isolate Reform in communities where it is currently filling a vacuum left by Labour’s betrayals. A Green MP can amplify that. A Green MP cannot substitute for it. The energy must flow into tenants’ unions, workplace organisation, anti-racist mobilisations, and a class struggle party that Your Party could yet become, not into another electoral formation that will accommodate to the state the moment it holds office.
Vote Green on 26 February. Make sure the movement doesn’t stop at the ballot box.