london
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The special election in the north of England was expected to be a close one. It was supposed to be a three-way battle between the ruling Labor Party, which is struggling to hold onto seats in the historic heartland, and two outside parties: the far-right populist Reform UK Party and the upstart progressive Green Party.
As it turns out, it wasn’t even close to that.
Hannah Spencer, 34, a plumber and local councilor, won a seat in Gorton and Denton, near Manchester, England, with 14,890 votes, more than 40% of the total votes cast. Reform UK, which has led in most national polls for more than a year, came in second with 10,578 votes, followed by Labor in third with 9,364 votes, about 25% of the total.
“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician. I’m a plumber,” Spencer said after the results were announced, apologizing to clients for having to cancel work to move to Westminster. Mr Spencer, whose campaign has focused on the cost of living issue, said he was running as a candidate because he questioned the value of “hard work” in Britain today.
“In the past, you could get something by working hard. You got a house, you got a nice life, you got holidays,” she said. “But what do you get for working hard now? Because if you talk to anyone here, they’ll tell you. People who work hard and can’t put food on the table. They can’t put uniforms on their kids. They can’t put the heat on. Life has changed.”
The result was an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Labour’s electoral backyard, which is made up of working-class voters, students and large numbers of ethnic minorities. Retired Labor MP Andrew Gwynne, who resigned due to health reasons, won his seat in the 2024 general election with more than 50% of the vote. And now the Greens have reversed Mr Starmer’s claim that only Labor can prevent a reformist government from becoming the next government, an outcome many experts had predicted.
Mr Spencer’s victory means the Greens now have five members in the 650-member parliament, but more importantly it means they have won a by-election for the first time, giving them a major boost ahead of local elections in May, when voters will elect members of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and local councils in England. By-elections (votes held in individual seats during a general election) are often of great significance and serve as weathervanes for national politics.
“The gun has gone off for local elections in 70 days,” Green Party Leader Zach Polanski said at a victory rally early Friday morning. “This is an existential crisis for the Labor Party.”
Several recent Labor decisions are now being called into question. These include the party’s decision to target Reform UK, the upstart party led by Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit and a friend of US President Donald Trump, as a “real opposition party”. Despite winning just four seats in the last general election, Mr Starmer quickly decided to promote the reformer as Britain’s next government candidate, hoping the possibility of Mr Farage becoming prime minister would encourage voters to support Labor.
But the Greens’ victory means Labor is fighting on two fronts. As the de facto opposition party, Labor has spent much of its first year in power appealing to right-wing voters by toughening its rhetoric and policies on immigration.
Analysts at the time questioned the wisdom of that strategy. Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King’s College London, told CNN that Labor appears willing to risk upsetting progressive voters with a tough stance on immigration, because voters forced to choose between Labor and Reform will ultimately “vote Labor to keep that bastard out.”
Now, that strategy may have backfired, with Labor finding itself losing voters to the left by pushing them to the right.
“Our politicians have an absolutely frightening mental perception of what northern voters are like and how they think,” Menon said. “The idea that everyone north of Watford is basically racist and a complete oik seems to be a common view in our politics right now.”
Spencer’s victory calls that view into question. The Green Party reached out to ethnic minority voters in the constituency and even published pre-election material in Urdu and Bangla. In his victory speech, Spencer criticized “divisive people who constantly scapegoat and blame our community for every problem in society.”
Her comments were a thinly veiled attack on Reform candidate Matt Goodwin, a former academic turned far-right activist, who had refused to deny his claim that people born in Britain to ethnic minority backgrounds are not necessarily British. “It takes more than a piece of paper to make someone ‘British’,” Mr Goodwin said during his campaign.
Mr Farage said the result was a “victory for sectarian voting” and a victory for “electoral fraud”, but gave no evidence. But the Democratic Volunteers group of independent election observers raised concerns about the “extremely high” level of family voting, meaning families could be seen as influencing the votes of others by going to polling stations together.
The result also calls into question Labor’s decision to block Andy Burnham, the hugely popular Labor mayor of Greater Manchester, seen as a potential leadership rival to Mr Starmer, from running in the election. Labor MP Karl Turner told the BBC he had “begged” Mr Starmer not to block Mr Burnham from running, adding there was “no doubt” Mr Burnham would win.
Labor’s decision to hold a by-election earlier than necessary also appears to have backfired, as it would have given the Greens a boost ahead of local elections on May 7. Labor MPs have previously told CNN that the party could oust Starmer as leader if the by-election results continue to be disastrous.
Mr Starmer said the result was “very disappointing”. He pointed out that the current government “often has such an outcome in the medium term,” but stressed that he understands that voters are “waiting for change.”
Polanski has reinvigorated the Green Party with his leadership and appears set to profit from that impatience.
“Labour’s electoral stranglehold is over,” he told a crowd in Manchester. “This is a seismic victory. We tore the roof off British politics and it’s because people realized there was an alternative.”
