The Irresistible Resurgence of Hope, After the Green Party Beat Labour and Reform in Manchester

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Although much of the world is now engulfed in chaos after the US and Israel launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran on Saturday morning, I want to turn back the clock to the day before the “war” began, and the resounding victory, in a crucial by-election in Gorton and Denton, in Manchester, of Hannah Spencer, a local working class plumber standing for the Green Party, who secured 14,980 votes (42% of the total votes cast) over Reform’s 10,578 votes, and Labour’s 9,364 votes (halving their vote from when they held the seat at the General Election in 2024), dealing a seismic blow to the domination of British politics by an entire political class — from Labour to the Tories and Reform — that functions solely through negativity, corruption, oppression and division.

At her victory speech, echoing what she stated throughout her campaign, she said:

I am no different to every single person here in this constituency. I work hard. That is what we do. Except things have changed a lot over the last few decades. Because working hard used to get you something. It got you a house, a nice life, holidays. It got you somewhere. But now? Working hard? What does that get you?

Because talk to anyone here and they will tell you, the people who work hard but can’t put food on the table, can’t get their kids school uniforms, can’t put their heating on, can’t live off the pension they worked hard to save for, can’t even begin to dream about ever having a holiday, ever. Because life has changed. Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry.

And I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life. And I don’t think that if you’re not able to work that you should still not have a nice life. I think that absolutely everybody should get a nice life. And clearly, I’m not the only person who thinks that. Because I’ve made clear my position and my commitment to working class communities, the community that I am from. People in their thousands told me on the doorsteps and at the ballot box, that what we are sick of is being let down and looked down on, that we are sick of our hard work making other people rich.

As she also said:

I can’t and won’t accept this victory tonight without calling out the politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society. My Muslim friends and neighbours are just like me, human.

And of course, to our white working class communities, the background that I have become so proud to be from, we know how it feels to be looked down on, maybe because we didn’t do well at school, maybe because we do dirty manual jobs, because we are shut out of places we should be in. To people here in Gorton and Denton, who feel left behind and isolated, I see you and I will fight for you.

Because whilst our communities may sometimes be labeled in different ways, the thing everyone seems to have underestimated here, especially over the last few weeks, is how similar we all actually are. How we have common ground, how we get along, how we stand up for each other. The cracks that were starting to show can be healed, and I believe that it is through offering people hope and a chance to do things differently and do things better.

The inexorable rise of the Green Party

Hannah Spencer won via a brilliant, down-to-earth, hopeful campaign, full of tolerance and inclusivity, in which she eloquently highlighted the savage decline in living standards for ordinary hard-working people, and accurately blamed it on the billionaire-led economy of persistent exploitation that is backed 100% by the main political parties — the scandal-wracked, value-free Labour government, the dying Tories, and their monstrous, far-right, hyper-racist replacement, the Reform Party, led by crooks and bigots.

Her victory confirmed the importance of representation by a local candidate, rather than someone parachuted in by party leaders in Westminster, but it was also part of a resurgent wave of hope driven by the Green Party’s inspiring leader, Zack Polanski, the gay Jewish Mancunian whose eloquence and energy has transformed the Greens from a political party easily but wrongly dismissed as solely obsessed with the environment (wrongly, because the man-made climate crisis is, to be blunt, the gravest threat humanity has ever faced), to a media-savvy party with a much wider appeal.

Polanski is skilled at forensically highlighting inequality, via the largely unfettered power of billionaires, vast transnational corporations and pliant, complicit politicians, as the source of all our ills — whether that be deliberately engendered poverty, the burning need for a wealth tax for the super-rich, the largely ignored climate crisis, or the western-backed genocide in Gaza, which is opposed by a majority of the British people, but supported by all the major parties.

Correctly recognizing that people respond to narratives rather than dull lists of manifesto promises — a reality which, sadly, explains much of the increasing and alarming rise of the far-right throughout the west — Polanski won the Green Party leadership promoting a deliberate platform of what he described as “eco-populism”, a populism of the left, and he has proceeded to demonstrate why that approach was justified.

Eloquent, indefatigable and energetic, he out-thinks his opponents in media or political showdowns, has sound answers to any question thrown his way, and, with the help of a savvy comms team, has created videos offering a message of hope that have understandably gone viral, helping to nearly triple the party’s membership to over 200,000 since his victory, and with polling showing that, amongst all voters under the age of 50, the Greens are the most popular party.

The well-deserved electoral suicide of the thoroughly discredited Labour government

In contrast to the Greens’ inexorable rise, the Labour government, which won a landslide victory just a year and a half ago — but only because voters had tired of the Tories’ increasingly incompetent rule after 14 years in charge, and also because of the vagaries of our unrepresentative “First Past the Post” voting system — has been committing suicide at a truly astonishing rate ever since.

For Labour, the Green victory in Gorton and Denton confirms that they are a dead government walking, and deservedly so. Ever since the Party first conspired with the media to remove Jeremy Corbyn as their leader, via an entirely fake antisemitism scandal — one which the malignant saboteurs also used to seek to the removal of all the party’s genuinely left-wing, socialist MPs and members — they have been a headless corpse, an empty vessel filled only with paranoia, authoritarianism and general contempt for the population as a whole, willing slaves to every vile transnational entity seeking control of what remains of our dwindling resources and influence nearly ten years since the Brexit referendum doomed us to become increasingly poor, isolated and irrelevant.

Foremost amongst these foreign entities, it transpires, is the Israeli government, which conspired with the Machiavellian Peter Mandelson, and his control of Labour’s worst right-wing instincts, to install the empty, pliable figure of Keir Starmer as the leader of a fatally compromised party. Under Starmer’s leadership, Labour then proceeded to offer unconditional support to the State of Israel as it engaged in the most monstrous, live-streamed genocide, inflicted on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

When the British people rose up in more significant numbers than at any time in living memory, and brave activists took direct action against an Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, whose factories are located on the British mainland, and who are directly contributing to the genocide, the government’s response, to proscribe the direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terrorist organization — confirmed the extent to which almost the entire Cabinet — nearly all members of the unaccountable Labour Friends of Israel lobbying group, and nearly all directly supported by donations from prominent pro-Israeli figures — prioritized Israel’s interests before those of their own country.

This treachery — treason, even — was just one aspect of Labour’s unsalvageable decline. Having ruthlessly sidelined or expunged every aspect of the party’s left-wing ideology, it transpired that they had literally nothing to offer the country that distinguished them from their discredited Tory predecessors, who, after Brexit, had burned through a succession of fantastically useless leaders — from Theresa May to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — drifting ever further to the right, and into increasingly hysterical authoritarianism, only to be replaced by a supposed Labour government that did exactly the same.

Tough on immigration, tough on the poor, and in slavish obeisance to deadly corporate rapists and insane tech overlords — including BlackRock and Palantir, to name just two particularly depraved examples — Starmer’s dystopian, dysfunctional government entered the by-election tainted by another grotesque scandal — the fall of Peter Mandelson, who had been deeply involved in the failed Starmer-led project through his protege, Morgan McSweeney, after the release of the Epstein Files laid bare his deep involved with the reviled paedophile and financier.

That scandal, still-unfolding, may yet prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the Labour Party, but while their fall in Gorton and Denton is to be celebrated, so too is the failure of the Reform Party to secure what they had hoped would be a significant indicator of future success — an indicator that, instead, was resolutely seized by the Greens.

The dogged appeal of the dangerous far-right Reform Party

The nominal popularity of the Reform Party, led by the thinly-disguised fascist and fake man-of-the-people Nigel Farage, is a deeply disturbing undercurrent of contemporary British politics. Somehow appealing to those who see themselves as disenfranchised, as well as those who are openly racist, Reform has regularly topped opinion polls regarding voting intention since May 2025, which, if replicated in a General Election, would see them taking over the UK with a sizable majority.

Watching the people of Gorton and Denton refusing to accept the fanatical, charisma-free southerner Matt Goodwin has already, I’m delighted to note, proceeded to dent Reform’s fortunes nationally, as polling today showed them on 23%, down from an implausible 35% in September, and with the Greens now just two points behind, on 21%, with Labour and the Tories trailing a distant third, each on 16%.

As well as the Goodwin effect, it is to be hoped that the scandals engulfing them are also playing a part in their decline; scandals involving, to name just two prominent examples, massive treasonous corruption — accepting bribes from Russia — and well-publicized revelations about Nigel Farage’s disgusting Nazism and antisemitism in his schooldays at Dulwich College.

It also seems plausible that their decision to be ever more emboldened in their extremism is alienating potential voters. With far-right US support, they have been aping Donald Trump and, amongst other horrors, talking out loud about imposing a massive deportation program in the UK, aiming to deport what it alleged in August, without providing any evidence, were 600,000 illegal migrants already in the UK.

Just a few days ago, alarmingly, the Guardian reported that polling of Reform members showed that over half of them want to go much further than the party’s carefully stated aim, expressing their belief that all “non-white British citizens born abroad should be deported or encouraged to leave”, which is nothing less than the revival of a long-cherished dream of Britain’s sickening fascists dating back to the days of the National Front — the enforced repatriation not only of recently arrived immigrants, but of anyone of immigrant descent (so long as they’re not white, of course) going back generations.

This ought to be unthinkable, especially as Britain has so successfully become a multi-racial society in which notions of racial purity are absurd, but it is just one strand of a sweeping would-be fascism that would, of course, be as deadly for the UK as Trump’s various toxic manias are proving to be in the US — and, on this front, aping Trump appears to be an increasingly toxic option, as his popularity plummets, in large part because of his brutal, invented “war” on migrants, hopefully striking a deadly blow to all the far-right movements in Europe, including the UK, who thought that he was a saviour rather than an ever more noticeable liability.

Despite their repugnant polices, support for Reform will continue to be pushed, however, and on a colossal scale, through the connivance of far too much of the mainstream, right-wing media, and through social media, with X being a particularly poisonous example, under the leadership of Elon Musk.

Musk, a white supremacist South African, is, disgracefully, abusing his platform to support and promote the far-right throughout Europe, including the UK, where he is seemingly in a bromance with the notorious fascist grifter thug Julian Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.

The incessant promotion of far-right lies and misinformation has led to a brainwashed minority of the British people being trapped in a permanent rage-loop of outrageous lies about the fake Great Replacement Theory, about London and other British cities being literal no-go zones for white people, and about grooming gangs who are all portrayed as Muslim, despite copious evidence to the contrary, and who, at the most extreme end of Britain’s consumptive racist hysteria, are luridly and groundlessly accused of sexually abusing a quarter of a million young white girls, to cite one particularly incendiary allegation that I stumbled across online.

Hopefully, however, as the Green Party’s positive appeal increases, the dark and dangerous negativity of Reform will continue to wane.

How to build on the hope offered by Hannah Spencer’s victory

For Labour, meanwhile, all its MPs must now think long and hard about their political futures. Most will undoubtedly be swept away when the next General Election occurs, even if that is as far away as July 2029, because their fundamentally corrupted party is unsalvageable.

Will the intake of 2024 accept that the gravy train they were promised will only last for one Parliamentary term, or will they act to save their futures? I know many admirable principled Socialist Labour MPs who may hold onto their seats, but some should undoubtedly start thinking about ditching toxic Labour and standing as independents, as happened with Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and others, who eventually established Your Party in response.

Sadly, infighting seems to have marred Your Party’s chances of doing what the Green Party is doing so successfully, but the independent left, whether affiliated with Your Party or not, still has a role to play in trying to keep Reform at bay — a process that also includes the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and the SNP in Scotland.

After last Thursday’s result, however, it’s apparent that it is the Greens above all who are an astonishing rising force in British politics, and that their positivity is a powerful antidote to Reform. I think we can all be assured that we will continue to watch them continue to grow in confidence and political credibility, but we are still, sadly, stuck with the problem of how, constituency by constituency, the threat posed by Reform can be nullified, given that no one with any power and influence wants to regulate social media, and no one can apparently rein in Britain’s sad preponderance of dangerous right-wing newspapers.

It would help if the BBC were to stop pandering to Reform as though they are a credible organization, rather than a rising fascist threat, but no one seems able to explain quite why those in charge at the BBC keep on promoting the toxic Farage and his crew of poisonous inadequates as though they were already in power — just as they did with Farage in the run-up the the Brexit referendum ten years ago.

Then again, perhaps Reform has already fatally shot itself in the foot, not only for the reasons outlined above, but also because, structurally, it is filling its ranks with failed Tories, and making it appear that its so-called bold vision for Britain’s future actually consists of little more than recycled Tory failures. No one in their right mind would want to be anywhere near the slimeball opportunist Robert Jenrick, but perhaps the biggest mistake is in welcoming Suella Braverman, whose trick is to be more racist than the most ardent white supremacists.

What she and Farage seem to have failed to realize, however, is that white fascists don’t want anyone of colour representing them. They want them on boats heading back to where they or their families came from; in Suella Braverman’s case, back to Mauritius or Kenya.

Despite all of the above, it would be inappropriate to end this analysis of the current state of British politics without returning to Hannah Spencer’s victory, and to the return of hope via the Green Party under Zack Polanki’s leadership.

Hope is increasingly rare, but it is necessary not just to turn back the toxic tide of darkness and racist filth that is a chilling reminder that the fascist horrors of the past can revisit us at any time without massive vigilance, but also because it makes a better future not only seem possible, but actually achievable.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.