(Feb 27): The Green Party won a special election for a Manchester seat in the House of Commons, underscoring the threat posed to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s governing Labour Party on its left flank.
Green candidate Hannah Spencer, a local plumber, secured 40.7% of the vote in Gorton and Denton, the constituency vacated last month by Andrew Gwynne, who had won the seat with a large majority for Labour in 2024. That was enough to beat Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, a councillor, who took 28.7% and 25.4% of the vote respectively.
While British voters often use by-elections to show displeasure with sitting governments, the defeat is a blow to Starmer as it comes in a seat that his party won with a 37-point majority just 19 months ago. Moreover, it’s the first time in more than 90 years that the Gorton portion of the seat won’t be represented by Labour.
It also portends big losses for the governing party in a round of local elections in May, at which it must fight off parties including the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party on the left, while facing down Nigel Farage’s populist Reform party on the right.
The prime minister is now likely to face internal criticism for blocking Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, from standing to be Labour’s candidate in Gorton and Denton. Some Labour MPs had touted Thursday’s vote as a moment of danger for the premier, amid rumblings of discontent about his leadership.
On Friday, it will become clearer if potential rivals — including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner — are gearing up to mount a challenge, or if they’re prepared to sit it out at least until local elections in May.
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Labour hemorrhaged almost two in every three seats it was defending in last year’s local votes, and its dire performance in national polling, trailing Reform in particular, suggests it’ll do badly again this year. The elections cover local councils spread across England, as well as the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales. A bad result has the potential to trigger a leadership challenge.
In Thursday’s by-election, the main opposition Conservative Party’s candidate, Charlotte Cadden, took 1.9% of the vote, while Jackie Pearcey from Parliament’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, won 1.8%.
For Green Party Leader Zack Polanski, Spencer’s victory is vindication of his approach of taking on the populist right at their own game. Since he took over the leadership in September, the party has jumped in the polls, though even before then, it doubled its seats in last year’s local elections.
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However, for Reform the result is a blow, especially as the party had led in polls by Find Out Now and Electoral Calculus in the run-up to the vote. The party had sought to portray the vote as a straight race between its candidate and the Greens. Goodwin, a 44-year-old academic-turned-television pundit, was a controversial pick in an area with a large Muslim majority, having in the past said “millions of British Muslims” hold views “fundamentally opposed to British values”.
The party nevertheless appears poised to make big gains in the forthcoming set of local votes. Reform has led national polls since April last year, and has also won the only other by-election in the current Parliament, when Sarah Pochin scraped victory by six votes in another former Labour stronghold, Runcorn and Helsby, in May. In last year’s local elections, Reform won more than 670 new seats, took control of 10 councils and secured two mayoralties.
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