Starmer under pressure to tack left after Green election upset

Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under pressure to reinvent his ailing Labour government with a leftwards pivot after the Green Party captured one of its House of Commons seats via a special election.

The result underscores the recent fragmentation of U.K. politics and the disruption of long-held electoral certainties. It has “torn the roof off” British politics, said Green Party Leader Zack Polanski.

His party’s candidate, Hannah Spencer, a local plumber, secured 40.7% of the vote in Gorton and Denton, a Manchester constituency vacated last month by Andrew Gwynne who had won the seat with a large majority for Labour a little over 18 months ago. That was enough to beat Reform U.K.’s Matt Goodwin and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia who took 28.7% and 25.4% of the vote respectively.

Spencer’s win marks the first-ever by-election victory for the Greens, as well as their first seat in northern England, highlighting the increasing reach of the left-wing party in a context where Labour voters are abandoning it in both directions. Spencer’s margin of victory was much more comfortable than commentators had expected, with polls consistently understating the Greens’ appeal.

Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister who is bookmakers’ favorite to succeed Starmer, said the result was “a wake-up call.” She called for a “Labour agenda” and said “we have to be braver,” in words that will be seen as a warning to the premier to shift left or face a potential leadership challenge.

Left-leaning Labour MP Karl Turner said Starmer had to stop “ignoring” the parliamentary Labour Party. “Labour MPs are cheesed off with the last four years,” he told the BBC. “The Greens won for a simple reason: many traditional Labour supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully abandoned,” said Andrea Egan, general secretary at workers’ union Unison.

The swing from Labour was 26% in Gorton and Denton, and the Greens now have five MPs in Parliament. Egan said Labour should be “taking the fight” to Reform U.K. Leader Nigel Farage “rather than letting him set the agenda.”

Gilts weakened modestly at the open, sending the 10-year yield one basis point higher to 4.29%. The pound was around 87.60 pence per euro on Friday, the weakest since Dec. 19. James Turner, head of global fixed income in EMEA at BlackRock, told Bloomberg TV: “This is one by-election in a mid-term part of the political spectrum, so we shouldn’t read too much into one by-election.”

But it may yet prove a turning point in the breakdown of the U.K.’s two-party politics. Starmer had relied on the claim that only his party could hold back Reform, but voters skeptical of the right-wing insurgents had the confidence to vote Green in large numbers instead, where for so many years that would have risked a wasted vote.

Luke Tryl of the pollster More in Common compared Starmer’s position to that of former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who shed votes to both left and right as he led his party to a historic defeat in the 2024 general election. “Labour’s base has fragmented across the board — a chunk of ‘red wall’ working class voters to Reform, and graduates, students and Muslim voters to the Greens. They’re experiencing their own version of the Tory pincer movement.”

Coming after an October by-election for the Welsh Senedd in the constituency of Caerphilly in which Labour was routed by another left-wing party, Plaid Cymru, the result will increase pressure on Starmer to rethink his strategy.

While British voters often use by-elections to show displeasure with sitting governments, both the defeat and its scale are blows to Starmer coming in a seat that his party won comfortably on a 37-point majority just 19 months ago. Moreover, it’s the first time in more than 90 years that the Gorton portion of the seat won’t be represented by Labour.

Under the prime minister’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who left government earlier this month over his role in the appointment of Peter Mandelson as U.S. ambassador, Starmer had tried to attract more right-of-center voters by sounding tougher on immigration, changing tack on transgender rights and striking an economic message of firm fiscal rigor.

The Manchester result is also a blow for Reform, which had led in some constituency polls in the run-up to the vote. But Goodwin, a 44-year-old academic-turned-television pundit, was a controversial pick in an area with a large Muslim majority, having in the past said “millions of British Muslims” hold views “fundamentally opposed to British values.”

For Green Party Leader Polanski, Spencer’s victory is vindication of his approach of taking Farage on at his own game. Since he took over the leadership in September, the party has jumped in the polls, though even before then, it doubled its seats in last year’s local elections.

In Thursday’s by-election, the main opposition Conservative Party’s candidate took 1.9% of the vote, while the contender from Parliament’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, won 1.8%. Voter turnout was 47.62%. “We’re seeing a rejection of the main parties,” said FocalData’s Joe Twyman.

While the Tories weren’t expected to be contenders, John Curtice, a pollster and professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said their share was their worst ever in a by-election.

“What was left of the Conservative vote in the constituency was certainly gobbled up by Reform,” he said. “These are truly very poor results, both for Labour and for the Conservatives — the future of British politics now looks more uncertain than it has done at any stage since 1945.”

Starmer is likely to face internal criticism for blocking Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Greater Manchester, from standing to be Labour’s candidate in Gorton and Denton. Some Labour MPs had touted Thursday’s vote as a moment of danger for the premier, amid rumblings of discontent about his leadership.

On Friday, it will become clearer if potential rivals — including Rayner and Health Secretary Wes Streeting — are gearing up to mount a challenge, or if they’re prepared to sit it out at least until the local elections in May. Speaking to the press after the result, Starmer vowed to “keep on fighting.”

The result portends big losses for the governing party in May’s ballot, when Labour must fight off parties including the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party on the left, while facing down Reform on the right. The elections cover local councils spread across England, as well as the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales. A bad result has the potential to trigger a leadership challenge.

In last year’s local votes, Labour hemorrhaged almost two in every three seats it was defending, while Reform won more than 670 new seats, took control of 10 councils and secured two mayoralties. Labour’s dire performance in national polling, trailing Reform in particular, suggests it’ll do badly again this year.

Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said Labour was now caught in a bind after their rightward shift. “They could be entering a sort of electoral valley of death where nobody is particularly pleased with them,” he said.

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—With assistance from Alice Gledhill, Ellen Milligan and Joe Mayes.