Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer give a victory speech to supporters in Manchester early Friday after being declared the winner of the Gorton and Denton byelection to choose a new Member of Parliament. Photo by Adam Vaughan/EPA
Feb. 27 (UPI) — Britain’s Green Party won the Gorton and Denton byelection in southeast Manchester with a more than 4,000-seat majority, beating the ruling Labour Party into third place, and 12 points clear of Reform UK.
The Greens’ new Member of Parliament, Hannah Spencer, a plumber from a neighboring suburb of Manchester, produced a convincing win in Thursday’s poll, overturning the 13,000-seat majority won in the 2024 general election by the previous Labour holder of the seat who is standing down due to ill-health.
Spencer won 14,980 seats, or 40.7% of the vote, Reform’s Matt Goodwin, 10,578 and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia trailing in third place with 9,364. The Conservative Party’s candidate came in a distant fourth with just 706 votes. Turnout was 47.6%.
The win, a first for the Green Party in a byelection, takes the party’s contingent in the House of Commons to five.
Speaking in the early hours of Friday after the results were announced, 34-year-old Spencer vowed to “fight” for the people of Gorton and Denton “who feel left behind and isolated.”
“There is an appetite here for change, and there are people across this constituency and much further beyond who are rejecting the old political parties and who are coming together to fight for something better, but who are doing it positively and in a really hopeful way.”
Spencer said her victory proved there was “no longer any such thing as a safe seat” and that there was “no part of the country where the Green Party cannot win.”
Asked if the Greens’ intention was to “eviscerate” Labour, Party leader Zack Polanski said that taking a seat Labour had held for more than 100 years showed it was “beginning already.”
“If we see a swing like this at the next general election, there will be a tidal wave of new Green MPs. This is an existential crisis for the Labour Party,” he said.
Labour’s second-straight loss of a byelection with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the helm, and with local elections just around the corner in May, could prove highly consequential for his future.
Speaking to reporters Friday, a defiant Starmer rejected any suggestion he might be considering his position, saying he would never quit.
“I came into politics late in life to fight for change for those people who need it. I will keep on fighting for those people for as long as I’ve got breath in my body,” he said.
Starmer played down the loss saying that while it was “very disappointing,” voters often took out frustrations on sitting administrations in mid way through their terms.
However, Strathclyde University Politics Professor John Curtice said the Green Party was now challenging Labour’s stranglehold on the left of British politics in a way that would cause the parliamentary wing of the party to seriously question whether Starmer was still the right person to lead the country.
Reform UK chairman David Bull, telling the BBC he was “absolutely thrilled” with his party’s performance,” echoed that analysis.
“Keir Starmer is in big trouble now — it is not a matter of if he leaves office, it’s when he leaves.”
Party leader, MP Nigel Farage, warned the Greens’ win would embolden the radical left and said opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch should apologize for leading the party to the worst result in its history.
“Roll on the elections on May 7. It will be goodbye Starmer and goodbye to the Tory [Conservative] party,” he wrote on X.
Badenoch, who is Black, called on Starmer to quit immediately.
“Our country is not broken, but this byelection showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending, Reform telling people you can’t be British if you’re not white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalize crack-cocaine,” she wrote in a statement.
“The result shows Keir Starmer’s premiership is finished. He lost authority a long time ago, a mere hostage at the mercy of a divided Labour Party that cannot decide who to replace him with. He has lost the support of his MPs and the country. He is in office but not in power. If had any integrity he would go,” said Badenoch.
