The Green Party of England and Wales has been on the fringes of British politics virtually since its inception in the 1970s. It was not until 2010 that the Greens won their first seat in the House of Commons, the lower house of the UK Parliament.
But the party may move away from the fringes and into the mainstream, thanks to a by-election in a former working-class bastion.
The recent election of Hannah Spencer as the new Member of Parliament for Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester has highlighted a potential political shift among voters towards her Green Party. The Greens took victory in the Labor stronghold with 40.7%, while Labor came in third with 25.4%.
Why do we write this?
With the right-wing Reform UK party dominating the polls, the British Labor Party has been leaning towards the centre. But that appears to be alienating his traditional leftist base and opening the door for the Green Party to potentially supplant it.
As the Labor Party has moved towards the center to counter the growing popularity of the right-wing Reform UK party amid public frustration with mainstream politics, it has given the Greens the opportunity to occupy the political space of the mainstream left. The challenge will be whether they can leverage their success in Gorton and Denton to create lasting political change.
“Right now, the real trend among voters is this feeling of frustration and disillusionment with the two main political parties (Labour and the Conservatives). Can we still call them main political parties?” says Louise Thompson, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester. “All trends point to voters wanting something different.”
green dreams
Spencer’s public image as a triumphant political outsider – a young, entrepreneurial, enthusiastic plumber turned MP who never attended university – reflects the story the Green Party hopes to tell about itself, says Alex Prior, a professor of politics at London’s South Bank University.
“It’s a narrative that embraces local voters (in Gorton and Denton): blue-collar, working-class voters who want an alternative vision,” he says.
Spencer’s campaign relied on unashamedly left-wing policies in the Greens’ national manifesto, including the move to a four-day working week, the scrapping of the unelected British House of Lords, the dismantling of the country’s Trident nuclear weapons program and the easing of immigration restrictions. But he also ran on local issues like the cost of living, rent control and illegal dumping.
“Working hard used to give you something. It gave you a house, a nice life, vacations. It took you somewhere,” he said in his victory speech. “But now? Working hard? What does that get you?… Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires.”
That kind of politics should appeal to a significant portion of British voters, who, according to Ally Fogg, a writer, journalist and community media organizer who lives in Gorton and Denton and campaigned for the Greens, lean more left than the current Labor Party leadership.
“When the British electorate is asked: Should there be a billionaire wealth tax? Should the water industry be in public hands? Should the railways be in public hands? These are all big Green Party policies now, they’re hugely popular with a large percentage of the population,” Fogg says.
Labor Party rivals
Key to the Greens’ growth (the party now has a record five seats in Parliament) is Labour’s apparent fumbling with its traditional base. For more than a century, the British Labor Party has been the rallying point of the country’s left-wing political wing.
Chris J. Ratcliffe/Reuters
But under Keir Starmer, the Labor Party has moved towards the political centre, seen by many as an attempt to fend off the growth of Reform UK. More recently, the Labor Party has sought to reshape the country’s immigration and asylum laws, making asylum in the UK a temporary, rather than permanent, status and making it harder for those who move to the UK to gain citizenship.
Certainly, reform has seemed an electoral threat to Labour. The right-wing party came second in the Gorton and Denton by-election, winning 28.7% of the vote to Labour’s 24.8%. (Labour’s traditional centre-right rivals, the Conservative Party, won just 1.9%).
But while Labour’s rightward shift may attract potential reform voters, it alienated its own voters.
Elizabeth Harding says she felt the Labor Party, which she supported for years, was pandering to the right. He changed his vote to the Greens. “I’m not radical. I just want a decent life for people,” he says. “I think we need immigration. This is a multicultural area. I have friends of all races and religions, and I really hate these lies that are told and that agitate people.”
Nicola Chipman, who also voted Green after receiving Labor support all her life, says the Labor Party no longer seemed to share her community values. “I don’t feel like they’re promoting that hope that I think people need to feel right now. I understand that it’s a very difficult situation that they’ve inherited, but in my case, in general, I’ve had to walk away.”
Labor politicians echoed voters’ concerns in public statements. Labor MP Nadia Whittome wrote on social platform
Fogg says he encountered a lot of resentment among voters because they were taken for granted, by both the Labor and Reform Parties, who he believed assumed they had no other options for their anti-Labour vote.
“There was a large bloc of voters – something like 70% or 80% – who absolutely despised Reform UK, and there were 70% to 80% of voters who absolutely despised the Labor Party,” he says. “If you imagine that as a Venn diagram, (those blocks) intersected a lot, and the big chunk in the middle was the people who were willing to vote Green.”
Is growth sustainable?
But the Green Party must fight to maintain that momentum, especially if it hopes to show that the result in Gorton and Denton was not an outlier.
That includes showing that the Greens, traditionally linked to local environmentalism, can address broader national and international issues. It also means demonstrating that the party can attract voters on its own merits, rather than appealing only to those who are unhappy with the Labor Party and the Reforms.
However, that distinction is not always clear.
“One of the reasons people were so keen to vote Green is because they were keen to support our stance on Gaza and Palestine. Our stance on wealth taxes, billionaires… all those things managed to pass,” says Fogg. “But a lot of it was a relief from what the other parties were advocating. Is it a positive vote or a negative vote?”
