Hope Beats Hate: Green Party Defeats Reform and Labour in Huge Gorton and Denton By-Election Victory

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In the end it wasn’t even close. Hannah Spencer and the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election by a whopping 41% of the vote – pushing Reform and Labour into a distant second and third place.

The result followed polling by Byline Times which showed the race to be neck and neck, but which crucially suggested that Labour voters were much more likely to switch to the Greens if they believed it would defeat Nigel Farage’s party. This was reiterated by online tactical voting campaigns.

That’s exactly what happened. Throughout the day Green canvassers picked up signs of former Labour voters switching en masse to the Greens, in a bid to keep Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin out.

Their victory came despite a concerted campaign by the Green’s opponents to paint them as extreme. The Labour campaign focused on the party’s drugs liberalisation policies, with the Prime Minister suggesting they would turn playgrounds into “crack dens”, while Reform accused them of a “sectarian” bid to win the votes of the local Muslim population.

The media too played their part. The day before voters went to the polls the Daily Mail, whose owner’s wife recently donated £50,000 to Reform, splashed on a front page branding Zack Polanski’s party the “Green Menace” and suggesting they would hand “illegal migrants[a] free house”.

Spencer too became a target. In an interview with Byline Times she spoke about the sexist attacks on her appearance and personal relationships by pro-Reform sections of the media.

EXCLUSIVE

Green Party’s Gorton and Denton Candidate Hannah Spencer Attacks the Media’s ‘Misogynistic’ Coverage of Her Campaign

“I’ve faced a lot of criticism for my appearance, my hair, my relationship status… all the things that I just haven’t seen about people like Matt Goodwin,” Spencer tells Byline Times

Adam Bienkov

“A lot of it has got quite a misogynistic angle to it,” she said.

“I’ve faced a lot of criticism for my appearance, for my hair, for my relationship status, like, all those things that I just haven’t seen about people like Matt Goodwin.”

None of it worked. In the run up to polling day, Spencer and her party leader Zack Polanski openly embraced the attacks, branding themselves “Green menaces” and urging voters to join them in rejecting this form of politics.

Although optimistic of success, the scale of the Green’s victory caught even the most hopeful figures in Green HQ by surprise, suggesting that the result was not just a rejection of the negative politics of Reform and Labour, but an embrace of the positive campaign Spencer and her party had run.

“We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other,” Spencer said in her victory speech.

“We can demand better without hating each other. We can do that together. We ran a hopeful campaign backed by 1000s of volunteers and activists. We defeated the parties of billionaire donors. 

“We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other at all, and we did this with the people who live here, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, just as we have always done in this constituency.”

Within minutes of the result, Reform showed exactly why they had been rejected by voters. Taking to X, Nigel Farage channeled Donald Trump, claiming the defeat was a “victory for sectarian voting and cheating” while insisting that Goodwin, who had been wholesale rejected by the people of Gorton and Denton was “a great candidate for us.”

Goodwin himself went even further, posting that “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain.” He later told his employers at GB News: “Now we can have a conversation in this country about sectarianism and what it’s doing to our democracy, or we can pretend it’s not happening.”

In reality the result was not a victory for sectarianism or “cheating” but for the unity of most voters in the Greater Manchester seat to reject the politics of Reform.

Just as in the recent Caerphilly by-election where an expected Reform win ended up as a decisive victory for Plaid Cymru instead, voters are starting to show their determination to work together in order to reject Nigel Farage’s party and the politics it represents.

The truth is that if such tactical voting is replicated across the country at the next general election then current national opinion polls showing a clear lead for Reform would be unlikely to translate into a parliamentary majority.

Farage’s hardline anti-migrant strategy may have succeeded in getting himself onto newspaper front pages, but it would struggle to succeed as a unifying election-winning message across the country at large.

His one remaining hope is that far from uniting against Reform, the Green party’s success last night further splinters the progressive vote in the UK. Faced with a seemingly viable alternative to Labour, it is possible that we will soon see the Greens overtaking Labour in the polls and at the ballot box.

McSweeney’s Legacy

The first signs of that could come in May’s upcoming local elections, when voters go to the polls across large parts of the country, including London.

Big gains, or even outright victory for the Greens in Labour’s long-time London stronghold could spell the end not just for Starmer’s leadership, but for the approach for politics taken by his party under his former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney.

This approach, which prioritised Reform-leaning “hero voters” over the views of Labour’s own natural supporters, has succeeded in collapsing support for the party among its own base, while massively boosting helping Farage’s own prospects of a national victory.

This factional approach, which not only presented Labour as not seeking the votes of its own progressive base, but actively rejecting them, has translated this morning into them losing what was one of the previously safest parts of the country for them.

The result will also stand as a massive rebuke to Starmer’s decision to block the party’s Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from standing in the seat.

This decision, which was taken out of fear of Burnham challenging Starmer for the leadership, will now only accelerate the prospect of the Prime Minister’s exit from Downing Street anyway.

As with much that we have seen from Starmer’s Downing Street, a short term tactical decision looks set to come at a long-term political cost.

The timing of Starmer’s departure still remains uncertain. Since McSweeney’s exit, there has been a noticeable switch in Labour’s rhetoric towards Reform, involving a much clearer rejection of the racist politics they represent. As things stand most Labour MPs look set to give their leader one more chance to pursue that approach.

However, what really matters this morning is that an extreme and divisive candidate, with a history of dabbling in racist comments and discredited race science, has been rejected by voters, while a concerted political and media campaign to scare voters about a  “Green Menace”, has failed.

For now at least, in a battle between hope and hate, hope has won.