The Green Party’s victory in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton is a landmark in British politics, heralding changes in its party system and challenging Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour government. Labour came third in the voting after Reform and now faces losing supporters on its left and right wings in forthcoming local and devolved elections on May 7th. The Conservatives came fourth, confirming this new fragmentation of overall electoral support.
Hannah Spencer, the Green’s winning candidate, proved to be a forceful and eloquent representative of her party’s turn towards an egalitarian social programme, alongside its ecological one, under the new leader Jack Polanski. Her local roots and support for Gaza during the campaign resonated with working class radicals and Muslim minorities to give her a hefty 40 per cent support in this long-standing Labour seat.
That points to potential Green success in many other national constituencies held by Labour. The Reform party should not now be assumed to be the only or main beneficiary of Labour’s loss of polling and voting support.
This major setback for Starmer’s Labour comes after his serious misjudgments in the Mandelson scandal, serial shifts in his prime ministerial and advisory teams and his failure to articulate a governing purpose or strategy. Poor economic performance after Brexit narrows the scope for delivering improvements.
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Starmer’s government also fails to articulate hope and increasingly exudes factionalism. That feeds into a pervasive sense of disintegration: of the social contract Hannah Spencer talked about in her victory speech, and also of the wider trust on which the UK’s political stability – and its constitutional union – depend. Starmer’s continuing political leadership is put in deeper question by this result, not least because he prevented the Labour mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham from standing. The English local and Scottish and Welsh devolved elections on May 7th become all the more perilous for him after this defeat.
