The Green’s historic victory in the Gorton and Denton byelection was, by any measure, a stinging rebuke to Labour from a disaffected electorate. The numbers speak for themselves: a 26% swing away from Labour in a seat it had held for almost 100 years, placing it third behind Reform, whose candidate, a pound-shop Enoch Powell, ran a toxic campaign. To top it off, the humiliation was amplified by a billion breathless reporters, a mass of YouTubers and most of Britain’s greyhound lovers (the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, has rescued four).
Keir Starmer was left flailing, desperately in need of a finely tuned message that would calm furious backbenchers, prevent members defecting to the Greens, and sound like he had solutions to the nation's woes. Instead, his comms team came up with this: “It's a very disappointing result. Incumbent governments quite often get results like that midterm. But I do understand that voters are frustrated.”
Sigh. It was like no one had told him Labour had been trounced by a rapidly growing leftwing party that had never previously won a byelection.
I won’t linger on what followed immediately after his opening gambit (it amounted to a stab at authenticity and an interminable list of the problems that make everyday life a grind) because I want to draw your attention to his deeply cynical final thought: “I will also fight against extremes in politics on the right and the left. Parties who want to tear our country apart. The Labour party is the only party that can unite our country and our communities. And we will line up together in that fight against the extremes of the left and the right for the values that we believe in.”
Hold your horses, pal. “The extreme of the left and the right”? Any reasonable reading of this quote – in the context of Gorton and Denton – is that the prime minister thinks the Green party is “extreme” and ready to “tear the country apart”, thereby chucking it into the same sin-bin as the profoundly anti-immigrant Reform UK.
This is clearly false equivalence. While the Greens have advanced some policy positions that lack coherence under scrutiny, only one party has demonstrated time and again that its policies and rhetoric are deeply rooted in division and xenophobia: Reform.
Let’s take Reform’s byelection candidate, Matt Goodwin, who’d stepped away from his day job as GB News rage-baiter-in-chief to be parachuted into Gorton and Denton – a seat 200 miles away from his pad in the home counties. Goodwin refused to disown remarks made last year linking national identity to biology: that “Englishness” is “an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations” and that “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”. All this in a constituency where nearly half the population – 44% – identify as coming from minority ethnic backgrounds.
If Starmer hopes to prevent a repeat defeat, he must stop trying to out-Reform Reform and stop peddling falsehoods about the Greens
As if degrading brown and black voters wasn’t enough, Goodwin has also previously pitted women against one another. In an unearthed blogpost, he espoused the view that those without children should be punished with a “negative child benefit” while those with more than two kids should be exempt from income tax altogether. These ideas were ripped off from the hard-right Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán.
After losing the byelection, Goodwin went the extra mile with a statement so crass it inspired the hashtag #MattBadloss: “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain ...”
That, prime minister, is the definition of extreme and divisive.
In sharp contrast, the Green party fielded the relatable Hannah Spencer, a plumber and local councillor who’d previously run as the Green candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoralty (where she came fifth behind Andy Burnham). Her campaign also faced criticism, the most substantive of which focused on its use of foreign-policy wedge issues in a constituency that has significant local problems to address. In spite of that, Spencer’s vibey, anti-racist, empathetic message worked; she won 40% of the vote. Moreover, her victory speech will have struck a chord with traditional Labour voters: working people – regardless of ethnicity – need to unite against the tax-dodging corporate kleptocracy that is lining its pockets while evading accountability.
If Starmer hopes to prevent a repeat of Gorton and Denton, he must stop trying to out-Reform Reform and stop peddling falsehoods about the Greens (he’s been at it again today in parliament, appearing to agree with Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke’s false claim that Green co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali, has protested “in support of the ayatollah”).
Instead, Labour must be more Labour. It could start by devising a comprehensive and credible plan for growth, reforming the “iron-clad fiscal rules”, be seen to take on vested corporate interests, and distance itself from US and Israeli hegemony. It also needs to find itself candidates like Hannah Spencer – who, once upon a time, would have been a natural fit for Labour.
Sangita Myska is an award-winning journalist and presenter best known for her political and social commentary.