Keir Starmer Richly Deserves This Defeat In Britain, Thursday’s Gorton and Denton by-election was a historic victory for the Greens. Labour prime minister Keir Starmer chased the Left out of his party, and he is now seeing its voter base collapse. By David Broder –Jacobin – February 27, 2026 News of the Greens’ victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election came at 4:30 a.m., but the losers’ excuses were already prepared. The Labour Party had suffered a typical defeat for incumbents but still run a “positive campaign,” reasoned its deputy leader, Lucy Powell. Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK insisted they had won the “working-class” vote, but had been outdone by “sectarian” “Islamists” and by Muslim men pressuring their wives’ choice. Some of this was a bit of a stretch. Labour’s supposedly “positive” campaign had prominently accused the Greens of encouraging schoolkids to take heroin. The party also photoshopped a fake tactical-voting organization, alongside poll charts telling voters it was in a “two-horse race” with Reform UK (thus cropping out the Greens, who ultimately won handily, with 40 percent support). Likewise hard to fathom was the supposed Muslim “sectarian” vote for a white, female candidate for a Green party with a gay, Jewish leader. Pundits on Sky and GB News nonetheless talked up such claims, while also insinuating that Muslims in Manchester simply aren’t working-class, or that Muslim women might have voted for a right-wing, anti-immigrant party if not for undue pressure from their husbands. The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer won by a more than ten-point margin, in a contest that was less neck and neck than it seemed. Incumbents do often lose by-elections, yet this one was called barely eighteen months into Keir Starmer’s government, and at a moment when his ruling Labour Party’s national-level support has collapsed. It was less an “upset” than a snapshot of the national trend, with Labour and the withered Tories outflanked on either side. Full at: https://jacobin.com/2026/02/starmer-uk-labour-greens-by-election
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