Green Party win points to a fairer more tolerant Britain

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Hannah Spencer stormed the Gorton and Denton by-election. This is the first parliamentary by-election the Green Party has won. It won’t be the last.

‘Urgh, Labour’

The day before the vote, a group of us from the North East were knocking on doors there. Speaking to voters who’d not yet been contacted – either always out at work, or maybe just back from their hols.

I quickly got to know the “urgh, Labour” face. Men, women, old, young, black, brown, white – whenever the subject of Labour came up they looked like they’d found a hair in their coffee. Not anger, more a bewildered disgust.

Some of it was about the local services. Fly tipping, rubbish. A bit about the poor quality of housing. From the state of the front door I could see some landlords were skimping on maintenance. Some spoke to me about Gaza.

Mostly, though, people raised the cost of living in one form or another. Energy bills. Rents. Food prices. Insecure work. Not a single person said anything remotely transphobic. That seems to be an obsession of online culture warriors. The working people of Gorton and Denton are more worried about their depleted bank accounts.

The future’s Green

Wednesday drive time I did a Times Radio interview on my phone. John Pienaar remarked how upbeat I sounded. I told him what people told me – the Green vote was strong. It wasn’t a scientific sample, but from what I’d seen Hannah Spencer was going to win.

So is anything less than a resounding victory a bad result for you, he asked. Isn’t it remarkable, I said, how this has been framed. This is an ultra-safe Labour seat. Whatever happens, Labour’s last remaining argument has been shredded. You don’t need to vote Labour to stop Reform.

Gorton and Denton was 127th on the Greens’ target list. In other words, if the Greens won by just 1 vote, they’d expect to win 127 seats in a general election. Political analysts Electoral Calculus looked at the demographics and said that, based on this result, we’d see only 33 Labour MPs elected at the next general selection. 10 Tories, 38 Lib Dems, and 254 Reform.

249 Green MPs would be elected, including all three Newcastle seats. I’ve been working on those already. Data from campaigning already shows that Greens will replace Labour in council seats across Newcastle this May. No more will people hold their nose and vote Labour to keep out Tories or Reform. People will vote Green to win.

Green Party positive, not divisive

John Pienaar put it to me that the Greens had run a divisive campaign by raising the issue of Gaza. I said that in a democracy people can and should choose their own voting criteria:

People like you and me, John, read the economic sections of the manifestos. Most people don’t. They see video of hospitals being bombed and civilians being gunned down while queuing for food. They want to see some compassion from their leaders. They look at the way their politicians respond to issues like Gaza and use that as an indicator of their character.

We were out again from 6am Thursday, delivering “get out the vote” reminders. Then door knocking in the rain until well after it was dark. Voters didn’t let the weather deter them. I guess they’re used to it in Manchester.

The establishment parties have been roundly thrashed, and Reform candidate Matt Goodwin blames the electorate, calling them “a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives.” We can expect to see them ramp up the dirty tricks. Not just fake polls, but nasty disinformation. But they’ve already been doing it.

The Green Party said loud and proud, we will tax billionaires. We will take utilities into public ownership. We’ll have a humane asylum system. We’ll introduce rent controls. We will treat drugs like a public health problem. And we will treat everyone with dignity and human rights, and stand against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

And it worked. The Great British public heard all the slurs and lies from Labour and Reform, and thought, you know what, I quite like the sound of a country where everyone works together. A tolerant Britain. A fair Britain. And they voted for a northern working class woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man.

Featured image via Barold / the Canary