Along with most people who know something about elections, I’ve spent a lot of time issuing cautions about not taking by-elections too seriously. They rarely provide much of a guide to future events. Here I am, for example, making the point about Eden-Monaro in 2020, and here I am with a similar caution about a British seat, Chesham & Amersham, the following year.
But every now and then there’s one that really makes you sit up and take notice, although the need for caution doesn’t go away. Australians will remember Aston in 2023, which gave notice to the Liberal Party (had it been minded to pay attention) that its problems were deeper than it realised. And this week it’s Britain, with the Greens winning a previously safe Labour seat, Gorton & Denton, in the suburbs of Manchester.
The previous MP, Andrew Gwynne, had held the seat for Labour in 2024 with 50.8% of the vote, more than 13,000 votes ahead of his nearest rival, the far-right Reform, on 14.1%. The Greens were a close third with 13.2%. Gwynne was made a junior minister in Keir Starmer’s government, but he lost his job and was suspended from the party last year after the revelation of racist and antisemitic comments he’d posted to a WhatsApp group. After sitting for almost a year as an independent he resigned last month, ostensibly on the grounds of ill health.
So the combination of Gwynne’s problems and the government’s own unpopularity made for difficult prospects in a by-election. Labour promptly made that worse by turning down a potential star candidate, Manchester mayor and former MP Andy Burnham, apparently on the grounds that he could become a challenger for the leadership (he had previously run against both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn). Local councillor Angeliki Stogia got the gig instead.
But even with those disadvantages, 36 points was a pretty big margin for error. And in Stogia’s favor was the fact that her two main opponents, Reform and the Greens, were on opposite sides of the spectrum and therefore would not combine against her. Indeed, with the recent surge in support for Reform she was well placed to argue that supporters of the Greens and other progressive and mainstream parties should switch to Labour as the only way to stop the far right.
The Greens weren’t persuaded. They made the opposite argument: that Labour was too badly on the nose to win, and that therefore they were the only ones who could beat Reform. And in the final week, as Labour’s woes accumulated with the scandal over former New Labour guru and ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson, that came to seem increasingly plausible.
Even so, the result was stunning. Greens candidate Hannah Spencer didn’t just win the seat, she won comfortably, trebling her party’s vote to 40.6%. Reform was a distant second on 28.7%, a gap of 4,400 votes; Labour was third with 25.4%, exactly half of its previous vote. No-one else got their deposit back: the Conservatives had 1.9%, just ahead of the Liberal Democrats with 1.8%. For all the talk of Labour’s working-class base shifting to the far right, the combined left and centre-left vote amounted to more than 68%, against a little over 30% for the right-of-centre parties.
That represents a swing of about ten points from left to right since 2024, which for a by-election is nothing spectacular. The only thing that kept Reform even marginally in the hunt was the split between Labour and Greens; with preferential or runoff voting it would have had no hope. The system forces voters to guess at who is better placed to keep out their least-preferred option; on this occasion most of them guessed correctly, but there’s no guarantee that will always happen.
While other parties accept the need for co-operation and for tactical voting, Labour seems determined to go it alone. Having won a huge majority at the 2024 election it proceeded to behave as if its share of seats – and not the 33.7% of the vote that it received – was the true measure of its support. Its awakening has been a rude one, and there is probably worse to come.
Yes, it’s just a by-election. Starmer is less than two years into a five-year term, and a great deal could happen in the next three years. The Greens will now be subject to intense scrutiny, and it’s not clear how well they’ll cope with it (just as Reform is not coping very well); it’s still possible that the next election will resolve itself into a more or less normal two-party contest. But not if Labour keeps on the way it’s going.
The World is Not Enough 