Polanski’s pooches: the Green Party leader with Hannah Spencer and her hounds in Gorton and Denton. The result there could be seen by disaffected Labour voters as providing a realistic alternative to Starmer’s authoritarianism
The Green Party’s historic parliamentary by-election victory in Greater Manchester yesterday could utterly transform how local elections across London play out on May 7, especially in Croydon, and if repeated at scale might even force Keir Starmer out of No10 Downing Street.
Plumber and greyhound owner Hannah Spencer was declared the winner of the Gorton and Denton by-election in the small hours of this morning, becoming the Green Party’s fifth MP with 40.7% of the vote, relegating Starmer’s Labour into third place in a seat which they had won as recently as July 2024 with a 50% vote share.
Starmer, and Labour’s authoritarian National Executive Committee, blocked Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from being a candidate to return to Parliament through this by-election, a move many agree doomed Labour to defeat.
Labour had resorted to dirty tricks against the Greens in the final days of the campaign, to no avail, as Spencer, strongly backed by her party leader, Zack Polanski, attracted 14,980 votes to 10,578 for Reform Ltd’s Matt Goodwin, with Labour reduced to 9,364 votes. The Conservatives and LibDem candidates lost their deposits, both polling below 2%.
It is the first time in nearly 100 years that the Gorton area of Manchester has not been represented by a Labour MP.
Gorton and Denton is an area with a large Muslim population. The rejection of Starmer’s Labour after less than two years in government is also seen as significant for other areas of the country where revulsion at Britain’s inaction and inertia over the genocide in Gaza could also have an impact at the local elections in 10 weeks’ time.
This website has a track record of informed and accurate predictions of election outcomes in Croydon, where national polling is often irrelevant and utterly misleading. This has been especially so over the past six or seven years, as resentment against Labour’s crashing of Croydon Council’s finances still resonates strongly with residents, who have been saddled with the costs of paying off massive toxic debts.
Vote shift: from 50% in 2024 to third place in 2026, the electorate in Gorton and Denton rejected Starmer’s scabdal-mired Labour Party
Of course, a parliamentary by-election in the north-west of England cannot be taken as a direct indicator of how people might vote in Croydon, or across London, on May 7.
But even before the polls closed in Manchester last night, Labour’s strategists in London were reconfiguring their plans for the city’s local elections, with the party’s London Region HQ – an organisation not known for its sound judgement – deciding to pull campaign resources out of Croydon as a target seat.
The London-wide strategy now is to defend what they have got, rather than pursue “attack” seats to win control of new councils.
Fresh hope: Hannah Spencer MP has shown the Greens to be a viable alternative vote, against Labour and the racists of Reform
Labour sources suggest that the party is looking at redirecting activists to shore up campaigns in what are now considered vulnerable boroughs, including Lambeth and Southwark, Lewisham, Hackney, Islington and even Starmer’s home borough of Camden. The Greens are a real threat to dozens of council seats right across the capital.
With Croydon Labour struggling just to find enough members to have 70 names on the ballot papers come May 7, this will not be welcome news from the party’s High Command.
In 2024’s General Election, while Labour won three of the four Croydon parliamentary seats, they struggled to get the vote out in their heartland seats of Croydon West, Croydon East and Streatham and Croydon North.
Whether through a combination of inertia or distaste for the post-Corbyn Labour Party, or the distrust after the dark times caused by Tony Newman and his Numpties at the Town Hall, MPs Steve Reed, Sarah Jones and newbie Natasha Irons lost thousands of votes, just because people who have previously been Labour supporters didn’t bother to turn out to vote – not for Labour or for any other political party.
In new constituencies within new boundaries, Reed’s vote share in Streatham and Croydon North was down 5.8% in 2024, with turnout down 9.6%. Irons was elected in Croydon East with 42.4% of the vote, as Labour’s vote share was down 5.7% compared to 2019, and turnout was down by 10.1%.
And in Sarah Jones’s new Croydon West constituency, she won with a vote share reduced by 12.6%, as turnout was just 48.9%, a shudderingly apathetic rate for a General Election, down 13.9% from 2019.
Such figures of themselves would be disastrous for Rowenna Davis, Labour’s mayoral candidate in Croydon, if even close to replicated on May 7, when there’s likely to be even lower turn-outs of voters.
Losing votes: the polling shares in Streatham and Croydon North in 2024. Steve Reed would lose his parliamentary seat to the Greens in the Gorton and Denton result was replicated in south London today
But worse for Davis and Labour, last night’s Gorton and Denton by-election result has given voters who want to “punish” Labour a pretty effective way of doing so.
As Inside Croydon columnist Andrew Fisher said this morning on BlueSky: “Real risk for Labour that this accelerates their abandonment by progressive voters, because it shows Greens can win…
“Greens will claim this establishes them as the progressive party to stop Reform in England.”
Fisher notes that in Gorton and Denton, the Green vote tripled, while Labour’s halved.
If anything close to that voting shift were to happen in Croydon, the borough would have three Green MPs.
It’s looking as if, on May 7, we will see two separate electoral battles across the borough: north of the A232, it will be Labour v Greens, while south of the Croydon Flyover, it will be the Conservatives versus the badly organised “ghost” candidates (sometimes literally) of Reform Ltd.
The Gorton and Denton by-election gave almost 70% of votes to challenger parties. Croydon may be one of the final bastions of two-party politics, but May 7 seems increasingly likely to challenge the old, and failed, duopoly.
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