Green Party’s Manchester election upset is a crippling blow to Labour – and a major boon to anti-Zionism |
LONDON — Up until around 3:30 a.m. Friday, the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton was one of the safest, most rock-solid parliamentary seats held by Britain’s governing Labour party.
But, in a spectacular blow to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s already dicey hopes of retaining the premiership, voters gave the far-left Green Party its first-ever win in a special election.
Labour — which earlier this week accused the Greens of “whipping up hatred” among Muslim voters after they called for the party to be “punished for Gaza” — was relegated to third place behind the right-wing populist Reform UK.
Reform’s controversial candidate, former academic Matthew Goodwin, told the BBC that the Greens’ win was a victory for “a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives.”
Labour, the Greens and Reform UK had been in a tight three-way fight throughout the campaign, and the result had been expected to be extremely close.
However, the Greens’ Hannah Spencer, who now sits as the party’s first MP for a constituency in the north of England, ended up with a comfortable victory. She tripled the party’s share of the vote at the 2024 general election, to win nearly 41 percent. Reform trailed a distant second with 28.7%, while Labour, which has held the seat uninterrupted for nearly a century, saw its vote halved to 25%.
Labour MPs were Friday describing the result as a “catastrophe,” with some calling on Starmer to quit, while others were urging a shift to the left to head off the potential threat posed by the Greens.
Pollster Luke Tryl told the Daily Telegraph that the result indicates that both Starmer and his deputy prime minister, former Foreign Secretary David Lammy, could face defeat in their north London constituencies at the next general election if the Greens are able to maintain their momentum.
‘Labour must be punished for Gaza’
Gorton and Denton is a demographically and ethnically mixed urban constituency in northwest England. The strong white working-class vote, large numbers of students and a significant Muslim population had once been reliably Labour. But the Greens began making inroads among young and Muslim voters at the 2024 general election — a process that has been turbocharged by Zack Polanski since he became the party’s leader last autumn.
Once the special election was called due to the resignation of the incumbent Labour MP, Polanski made clear the Greens would attempt to capitalize on their strongly pro-Palestinian line.
“We’ll want people on the ground to know our position on Gaza, that we’ve stood with the Palestinian people,” he told The Times. “Gorton and Denton has a large Muslim population. Of course, we want to speak to........