British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered his worst nightmares as the recount results came in early this Friday. The Green Party candidate in the Gorton and Denton constituency by-election, Hannah Spencer, a plumber (by profession; nothing to do with the term used in political jargon) with enormous personal energy and great public vocation, has achieved a landslide victory, winning a seat that the Labor Party had comfortably retained for the last 15 years.
The outcome of these elections confirms three omens that . Firstly, voters no longer see the Labor Party as the useful vote to stop the rise of the extreme right, which in these elections has come in second place. that calls a spade a spade on issues such as Gaza, Donald Trump or social inequality, has become a real alternative with possibilities. The progressive vote has done more than just fragment: it has divided, to the point that the real possibility of a overtaking to labor.
Nothing new under the sun. The United Kingdom is beginning to suffer the political upheaval that other European countries are already experiencing. Because if Labor now fears being replaced by a new force, more extreme, further to the left and more populist, the Conservative Party has been suffering from the same thing for a long time. , all the surveys predict, is on its way to completely replacing the tories in the heart of the right-wing British voters.
The results of Gorton and Denton have been a serious warning of the general turnaround that is to come. The Green Party has obtained first position, with 41% of the votes; Reform UK has achieved 29%; the Labor Party, 26%. In the case of the conservatives, their presence and support have been residual, with 2% of the votes.
But the great tragedy for Labor is that just two years ago it conquered this working-class constituency south of Manchester with little difficulty. In these by-elections he has suddenly lost 25 percentage points.
“The Labor Party must stop trying tricks and become the Labor Party again. Stop listening to your rich friends and start listening to ordinary people,” Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, the most powerful trade union center in the United Kingdom, told Starmer. Graham has long maintained a public and fierce criticism of the prime minister, but his reaction this Friday represents the exhaustion of the far left wing of Labor.
An alarming thermometer
By-elections are held every time a deputy resigns his seat, whether due to illness, personal circumstances, death or because a scandal forces his resignation. The voters of the constituency go to the polls again, and these elections are always interpreted as a thermometer of the general political reality. In the case of Gorton and Denton, after the resignation of Andrew Gwynne – who cited health reasons, although he had been removed from the Labor Party due to the leak of some derogatory comments towards voters in a WhatsApp group – the result has been a high and worrying fever for the main British left-wing force.
“It’s not just that these results are going to make Starmer’s life much more difficult. It’s worse than that, because the Labor Party has lost in a terrible way. It has been 15 points behind the Greens,” said sociologist John Curtice on the BBC, an essential voice in understanding the United Kingdom’s electoral results in recent years.
The threat from the left
who has only been at the head of the Green Party for a few months, has represented a complete turnaround in the traditional British left. His so-called “ecopopulism”, a direct and fresh way of defending left-wing proposals such as increasing taxes on the wealthy, has been embraced by a large part of a progressive electorate fed up with Starmer’s lukewarmness. His critics accuse Polanski of miscalculating and playing with unrealistic economic approaches, but that does not seem to worry his voters much.
“If we see a similar turn in the next general election, there will be a tide of new Green deputies. When I was elected leader of the party, I said that we were here to replace the Labor Party. And I meant it,” Polanski proclaimed this morning, who has also accused the Starmer party of running a dirty campaign with the wrong strategy. “They knew they couldn’t win, and they have risked dividing the left vote and allowing Reform UK to come in. People have now understood that [los verdes] They are the solution to stop the extreme right,” he said.
The ultra candidate, Matt Goodwin, has taken advantage of the celebration of his surprising second position to raise the specter of the radical left and Islamophobia so much liked by Reform UK voters.
“Progressives have been indoctrinated on how to vote. We have seen a coalition of Islamists and progressives woke who have allied themselves to conquer the constituency”, he tried to point out.
The Specter of Andy Burnham
When the possibility of fighting for the seat of Gorton and Denton arose, he wanted to fight for that position. The shadow of a threatening rival, with serious possibilities of taking the leadership of the party from him, led Starmer to maneuver, with the statutes in hand, to stop that attempt. He argued that Burnham could not abandon her responsibilities in such a weighty mayor’s office, and that her replacement would mean a new election and many electoral expenses for the party.
The reality, as has been demonstrated this morning and as even the candidates of the rival formations recognized, is that only Burnham had serious possibilities of stopping a Labor debacle like the one that has finally occurred. Because in Gorton and Denton barely 37,000 voters have voted, but the abrupt turn of the result has generated a wave of interpretation that paints dire omens for Starmer’s Labor party.
The party’s candidate, Angeliki Stogia, has not even appeared before the press to admit her defeat. He has left it in the hands of the president of the Labor Party, Anna Turley, who has used the argument of excuses that is used on these occasions: they knew that they were going to be tough elections, she said, and that the electorate would take advantage of the opportunity to punish the Government. But the policies of division advocated by the greens and the extreme right, he added, will not solve the problems of citizens.
Labor MPs, however, know that this balm no longer heals the wound. The general perception of recent weeks is that of a truce. They know that voters would punish a continuous state of war like the one conservatives suffered for years.
But the situation continues to be one of temporaryity and extension for Starmer. The next broad elections will be on May 7. Municipal elections will be held in England and regional elections in Scotland and Wales. and support to survive this new onslaught.
