10 hours ago
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This week, I sat in the gallery of the House of Commons and watched a historic moment unfold: Hannah Spencer was sworn in as the MP for Gorton and Denton, making her the first female plumber to sit in parliament, and the first ever Green MP in the north of England.
It marked the start of a new era: for Gorton and Denton, for the Green party and for British politics across the board. It’s not hyperbole to say that our win – in a seat that was 127th on our target list – has changed everything.
A major poll this week proves this, showing that people intend to vote Green at the next election in higher numbers than ever. We have leapfrogged Labour in the polls and are nipping at Reform UK’s heels – because people can see that we are the only party genuinely taking the fight to Reform and spelling out clearly how we’ll end rip-off Britain.
In less than 70 days’ time, we will have elections for local councils, mayors and the Welsh Senedd. I predict a Green wave sweeping England and Wales. I’ve been visiting local Green parties from Hackney to Huddersfield. Even before our win in Gorton and Denton, the energy and drive from the hundreds of supporters turning out in each place was breathtaking. That energy will only gather force now.
There are some in Labour who are clearly looking to learn lessons for their party from the massive loss they suffered in Gorton and Denton – notably Sadiq Khan, writing in this paper. But still, Keir Starmer, their leader, is burying his head in the sand, accusing us of pursuing “sectarian politics”. The opposite is true: our message of hope and a plan for change resonated with voters across divides of faith.
Thinking now about the result, it is not hard to explain why that happened. In the summer of 2024, this Labour government swept into power promising change. Since then, we’ve had precious little of it – instead, we’ve seen managed decline accompanied by culture-war posturing.
Our economy, for all Labour’s tinkering, is still fundamentally rigged against the interests of ordinary people – and we can all feel it. We pay through the nose for our water bills while water companies pollute our rivers and shareholders pocket the profit. Household incomes have barely risen in 20 years, while the wealth of the super-rich has spiralled. Young people face becoming a lost generation, saddled with student debt and unable to find decent work. And this Labour government simply doesn’t have the answers.
Instead, the government has tacked firmly to the right on issues such as immigration – cruelly stripping away pathways to citizenship for people who have built their lives here, and taking lessons from rightwing governments across Europe on designing hardline immigration systems.
Starmer and his team knew that these policies and the rhetoric that accompanied them – remember his “island of strangers” speech – would alienate many of Labour’s traditional voters. But he made a calculation that it wouldn’t matter, because those voters had nowhere else to go. In 2023, Starmer said “if you don’t like the changes we have made … you can leave”, and it’s fair to say people have really taken him up on the offer.
In Gorton and Denton, voters showed that they are willing to move over in droves to the Green party, because we now represent them and the issues they care about where Labour do not.
That matters not just for that seat – where I know Hannah will make a huge difference as a hard-working local MP – but for voters across the country who have seen that if you vote Green, you can get Green.
No longer can the Labour party claim that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, or that we risk splitting the vote and letting the right in. In the byelection, we decisively showed Matt Goodwin the door – not by pandering to Reform’s divisive narratives on race and immigration, but by standing firmly against them.
But we did more than that. Journalists who spoke to Muslim voters in the constituency found that overwhelmingly, they backed Hannah because they felt she understood their concerns – about jobs, about the struggle to get by and about creating a more caring society. Ultimately, voters backed us because they could see that Labour is out of answers when it comes to the real issues people face.
The Green party, by contrast, has a plan. We’ll lower bills by bringing water into public ownership and ending shareholder profiteering. We’ll tackle inflation and the cost of living at the same time with sensible measures such as rent controls. And by taxing the wealth of the super-rich fairly, we can ensure that money flows through our economy rather than being hoarded in assets or offshore accounts.
These are popular, commonsense ideas. For a long time, voters have enthusiastically backed the Green party’s policies – but have often stopped short of supporting us at the ballot box, afraid to “waste” their vote. We saw that change in Gorton and Denton – and that result unlocked a new level of confidence for potential Green voters that they can truly vote for what they want and get it.
At the start of the campaign, I said it would be a battle between Reform’s big money and our people power. We showed that not only can people power win, it can win big. Hannah Spencer took on the billionaire donors and won – and the message now is that we can do that everywhere.
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Zack Polanski is leader of the Green party
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