As Labour purges its soft left, a by-election in Greater Manchester could hand the Greens their breakthrough.
I recently sat down with Neil Kinnock, a man who knows a thing or two about how to lose an election. He gave an excoriating account of Keir Starmer’s performance, lamenting his inaction, pandering and inconceivable neutrality. Maybe if he’d had this perspective in 1983 he might’ve saved Labour voters considerable heartbreak over nine miserable years, but at least Kinnock knows what he’s talking about. Like Starmer, he chased short-term approval by driving out the left, only to leave the party weaker as a result.
And so we come to the Gorton and Denton by-election, a sacrificial lamb in the race to cast out the party’s soft left. Starmer took uncharacteristically decisive action on Andy Burnham, a popular figure who likely would have won the seat, but doesn’t quite fit the mould of Starmer’s ideological requirements, and would have offered an alternative to his leadership.
Burnham believes in progressive taxation and the values of house building. More importantly he talks like the Green Party’s Zack Polanski, who has leached remarkable numbers from the Labour membership since he became leader last September.
Starmer has spent too much of his premiership on private jets doing foreign policy to understand the domestic concerns of a country battling a cost of living crisis. He’s just been in China talking about Greater Manchester, arguing that the by-election is a referendum on “true patriotism”. On the ground in Levenshulme, people are talking about a wealth tax or their concerns around immigration, and he’d know that if he’d bothered to make a brief appearance there. Perhaps if he’d spent less time overseas, the Prime Minister might have realised sooner that he was facing a double-pronged threat from Reform and the Greens.
One staffer, to my probably insensitive laughter, told me they hadn’t anticipated a leftwing insurgency at all.
Their calculation couldn’t be further from reality. At a cobbled together Green rally last week at the Greater Manchester Pakistani community centre, multiple attendees told me they would have voted for Andy Burnham had he been given the chance to stand. Over and over again attendees told me they were fed up with Starmer’s inaction on public sector pay, taxation and the Israel-Gaza war.
Their attention has now turned to the bookies’ favourite Hannah Spencer, a Trafford councillor and plumber, who preaches the merits of a wealth tax and — most importantly — symbolises change. People are poor, people are fed up and a Podsnappery call from the Labour leadership to not “let in that nasty poisonous politics of Reform” is unlikely to cut through in a constituency that has some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England.
In the constituency, embittered Labour campaigners have started their slow march into an “inevitable defeat”. The wording comes from HQ themselves, who are briefing journalists they do not expect to win.
Losing Gorton and Denton could see the Greens overtake Labour in the national opinion polls. There are swathes of voters sympathetic to the Greens’ message, but doubtful of their electoral viability. A victory could change all that: boosted with a by–election win, Polanski could overtake Labour as the viable alternative in anti-Reform tactical voting.
As we head into May’s local elections, there couldn’t be a more inopportune time for this catastrophe to befall the Party. It’s expected they’ll lose their foothold in Wales, meaning Groundhog day for exhausted advisors who have repeatedly warned the leadership that Starmerism isn’t working.
Across the Senedd, leftwingers are moving to Plaid Cymru, while Farage marshalls the Right. All the while, Starmer gapes from the centre, mystified that endlessly repeating the same mistakes doesn’t lead to a different outcome.
A meeting between Burnham, Rayner and Ed Miliband last month confirmed something had to be done to save the party from a humiliating defeat, but this caucus of the soft-left needs time to find a candidate. Burnham isn’t an MP, Miliband didn’t win an election and the most viable option, Rayner, is still under investigation with HMRC.
Even if that were to conclude, backbenchers fear her current politics seem confused: she believes in the monarchy and the supremacy of the bond markets. Not forgetting after the disastrous watering down of the Employment Rights Bill, winning back union support would require some heavy-handed persuasion.
But it might help Wes Streeting, who concerned onlookers say is lining up a play for March, aided and abetted by the support of the Labour right and the very popular Shabana Mahmood. There’s also rumours that Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney is on the way out of favour. McSweeney won’t go without a fight, and that battle will likely end up with Streeting coronated.
By hyperfocusing on infighting and the looming threat of Reform, Starmer may have unwittingly capitulated to the Green Party. If he wants to keep the seat and ward off a leadership challenge, he’ll need bold, radical ideas — which almost no one is entirely sure he’s capable of conceiving.
