By half four in the morning, the Greens were not talking about carbon targets. Hannah Spencer was talking about fairness. Work hard, play by the rules, and still fall behind. A country that no longer supports those who do the right thing.
It was a speech any mainstream politician could have given. Out defending the Prime Minister on the morning round, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander even said she agreed with much of its diagnosis. What made it seismic was the result behind it. The Greens had just taken one of Labour’s forty safest seats. A 27.5 point surge for the Greens. A 25 point collapse in Labour’s vote. Among the worst governing party reversals in modern by-election history.
This was not a freak gust of protest. The signs have been there for a while.
The Greens came second in 40 constituencies in the 2024 general election. In 39 of those cases, they were second to Labour. In Bristol Central, Labour’s progressive, graduate-heavy base migrated to the left. In Leicester South, Gaza helped unseat Jonathan Ashworth for an Independent. In both cases, Labour’s coalition strained and fractured under the pressure. The landslide masked it. Gorton and Denton has exposed it. In so doing, it has not just presented an uncomfortable set of headlines today but has laid bare more fundamental questions of strategy – specifically, why have the leadership’s efforts been focused on pursuing Reform when perhaps an equal danger lay to its left?
The Greens have now demonstrated they can fuse progressive graduates, younger voters and sections of Muslim communities into a coherent insurgency to Labour’s left. This is no longer a single-issue climate vehicle. It is a repository for disaffection with Labour in the same way Reform is to its right.
For Labour, the humiliation cuts deeper still. It did not simply lose. It came third, behind Reform. The thirty-year fallback argument, vote Labour to keep the right out, looks threadbare when Labour cannot even present itself as the primary alternative.
This result calls into serious doubt the Prime Minister’s entire electoral strategy: to frame the next general election as a fight for the soul of the country. A straight Labour versus Reform fight. Last night was the second major by-election (after Caerphilly) where this approach was tried and Labour have been surmounted as the progressive party of choice against Reform.
Recriminations have begun. Immigration rhetoric. Gaza. Tone. Strategy. Underneath it all sits a judgement call that will not fade. The Prime Minister’s decision to block Andy Burnham from contesting the seat, largely to block the threat of a future leadership challenge, will be revisited with relish. Burnham, rooted in Greater Manchester, with his own personal brand of politics, is widely assumed to have been able to hold it. Politics is unforgiving of counterfactuals. The defeat is owned at the top.
Three weeks ago, MPs flinched from moving against the leader. No obvious successor. Too much risk. That logic may still apply. But Gorton and Denton changes the atmosphere. A Prime Minister already struggling in the country now carries one of the sharpest by-election defeats in Labour’s history with personal responsibility. With the residents of Gorton and Denton making a decisive shift to the left, MPs on Labour’s backbenches who subscribe to a similar brand of politics will feel further emboldened. The PM will come under pressure to shift the rhetoric of the government, if not its policy as well, in time for the local elections in May.
The wider significance is structural. On Labour’s right, Reform consolidates and questions the legitimacy of outcomes when it falls short. On its left, the Greens now have proof of concept. Add the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the SNP and the Commons looks less like a duopoly and more like a crowded field.
Conclusions that this result signals the death of two-party politics are premature. By-elections distort. Protest votes cohere. Governments bleed mid-term, as Heidi Alexander argued on her unenviable morning round this morning. The bigger argument she sought to make was that this Government has the ‘right long-term vision’. The question is whether the Prime Minister’s own Cabinet, not to say his own MPs, will give him the time to test that proposition.
The direction of travel is also unmistakable. Britain is entering a more fragmented, volatile phase. The old electoral coalitions are loosening. Voters are shopping around.
Labour’s problem is not diagnosis. Every party can recite the symptoms. Stagnant growth. Strained services. A sense that effort does not translate into security. The problem is persuasion. Why this government. Why this strategy. Why now. The fact its own MPs are debating this often publicly and with different answers, confounds the problem.
With a large majority and three years before a general election, Labour has time and agency. What it lacks is a settled argument that binds its progressive base without haemorrhaging support elsewhere.
Gorton and Denton is not just a bad night. It is a warning.
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