It was a historic moment for the Greens. But on the night of the party’s first-ever parliamentary by-election win in the Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, there was one thing missing from Hannah Spencer’s victory speech: the environment.
Under the new leadership of Zack Polanski, the party has become a leftwing threat to Sir Keir Starmer’s government. But traditional campaigns about saving the planet have been pushed to the margins as the Greens target Labour’s strongholds.
Spencer’s speech in the early hours of Friday gave a strong flavour of how the Greens intend to fight the next election, with an agenda focusing on the cost of living.
“We are working to line the pockets of billionaires, we are being bled dry,” the 34-year-old plumber said in a powerful victory speech that spoke to the frustrations of many of her new constituents.
Spencer’s only reference to the environment came when she talked about the hardships of life in parts of suburban Manchester. “I saw how much harder life is when things around you are broken: the litter, the fly-tipping, the dirty air,” she said.
For Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves, the need to prove that centrist, fiscally prudent economics can deliver for working people is becoming increasingly urgent.
Joe Twyman, co-founder of Deltapoll, said: “Being drawn to the Greens is not about specific issues but about wanting a viable leftwing alternative, and the thing about not being in power is that they can promise whatever they like without having to deliver it.”
The result in Gorton and Denton shows how the self-described “eco-populist” Polanski has transformed the Green party and bolstered its electoral prospects. The party had never won more than 10 per cent of the vote at a by-election in its history.
It has also sent chills through Starmer’s Labour Party, with Labour strategists having warned this week that a Green win would be the worst possible outcome. Some Labour MPs and union bosses have already called on the party to make a pivot to the left to halt the flow of disaffected voters moving to the Greens.
Polanski, who is Jewish and gay, took a winding path to become party leader. He joined the Liberal Democrats at the ebb of their popularity in 2016, then switched allegiances to the Greens a year later and became a member of the London Assembly, Greater London’s elected body, in 2021.
After studying drama at Aberystwyth University in Wales, he moved to the US and then to London to work in community theatre. He also worked as a hypnotist and got into hot water after telling an undercover reporter he could increase the size of her breasts.
He was elected as the new Green party leader in September last year, vowing to channel a leftwing form of populism to attract Labour voters.
Under Polanski, the party has announced economic policies including a 1 per cent wealth tax on people whose assets exceed £10mn, increasing to 2 per cent on assets over £1bn. He has said his party would offer a basic income to family farmers and would stop the Bank of England paying interest on reserves held by commercial lenders — an idea also backed by Reform UK.
His more controversial policies include the legalisation and regulation of all drugs, and he has drawn criticism for arguing that Britain should expel US forces from British military bases and leave Nato to extricate itself from the influence of President Donald Trump.
On migration, Polanski has walked back a previous Green policy on “open borders”, but argued instead for replacing the Home Office with a more humane “Department of Migration”. He has argued that if the UK expanded safe and legal routes for asylum seekers to come to Britain, small boat crossings would all but disappear.
The question now is the extent to which the Greens can capitalise on their victory in Gorton and Denton to gain more ground at local elections in May.
In London, where the party has considerable strength, it has widened its ambitions to target more boroughs — not just Newham, Lewisham and Hackney, but also Islington, Lambeth and Haringey.
The Greens won four seats at the last general election but came second in 40 constituencies, 39 of which backed Labour. But the party was the second preference for 50 per cent of Labour voters in 2024, according to the British Election Study, suggesting their electoral ambitions could extend further.
Jane Green, professor at Oxford university, said: “It’s not an ideological transformation of the Green vote nationally, it’s the bloc acting differently, the left coalescing for the most viable candidate. It’s gone from educated liberals and young people to a broader coalition . . . the left bloc is unified against Reform and has come together behind the Greens.”
The total progressive vote, including Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, constituted 68 per cent of votes in Gorton and Denton this time, down from 78 per cent at the 2024 general election. But nearly three quarters of votes cast were for alternatives to Labour and the Conservatives, up from 40 per cent at the last election, in a sign of how fragmented the political landscape has become.
Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, said that Labour had neglected “wishy-washy hummus-eating Guardian-readers and is now paying the price”.
“It’s very easy now to see a scenario where all the dominoes fall: the Greens win a whole load of boroughs, divisions intensify in the Labour Party and Polanski goes into a whole load of those parliamentary seats at the next general election as racing favourites.”