Gorton & Denton win, Iran and a vindicated Green foreign policy

As Iranian political leaders are assassinated, girls’ schools bombed by US weapons and a wider conflagration of imperial violence saturates Iran and the easternmost side of the Mashriq, there is one major political leader in Britain calling for this escalation of war to stop. Green party leader Zack Polanski has called for a cessation of hostilities and the resumption of negotiations, lambasting Prime Minister Keir Starmer for “dragging us into another illegal war.” It is this impulse - against the intertwined nexus of war, racism, climate change and inequality - which is spearheading a political insurgency on the left of British politics.

And it is Greater Manchester that has found itself at the centre of this political earthquake. There are moments in the life of a nation when processes underway for decades make themselves felt in specific events that take on a much broader significance than they might in normal times. But there is nothing normal about our moment.

We are living through the perennial crisis times of one of the world’s oldest representative democracies, witnessing the establishment crumble between the space bred by deep-seated political polarisation. But this collapse of the orderly and ordinary does not just happen in Parliament. It also happens on the streets. The victory of Hannah Spencer, the first Green MP to ever win a by-election, is demonstrative of this reality.

Andrew Gwynne’s decision to resign as Labour MP in Gorton and Denton, ostensibly due to health problems, seemingly paved a path for Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to become a Parliamentarian again and realise his destiny as the chief challenger to Keir Starmer’s bankrupt national leadership. But the hostile environment towards even the faintest glimmer of left-wing politics within the Labour Party ensured that he was blocked from standing in the Greater Manchester seat.

Labour’s National Executive Committee voted by 8 votes to 1 to exclude Burnham. This decision, driven to both defend Starmer’s leadership and also open the way for a more suitable right-wing challenger such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting, jeopardised Labour’s chances of holding onto an area they’ve claimed as their own for over a century. The Gorton and Denton contest had shaped up to be a three-horse race between the far right politics of former academic and GB News talking head Matthew Goodwin running for Reform UK, Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, and Green socialist plumber Spencer.

As Labour’s authority has declined, cratered by the ruling party’s immersion in the Epstein files, its authoritarianism, its strategic inconsistency, its subordination to US imperial violence and its submission to the bond markets, the Gorton and Denton by-election had become a national event. If Labour held on, Starmer may have been able to buy himself a couple of extra months.

If Reform UK had won, it would be the second by-election they’ve stolen from beneath Labour’s feet and a sign that Nigel Farage’s outfit were going from strength to strength, able to compete not just in former Tory shires or rustbelt provinces, but in seats which encompass features of cosmopolitan cities too. Yet, the victory of Hannah Spencer, defeating Labour and Reform UK by over 4,000 votes, is a much bigger upset for establishment politics in this country. It was, as one Labour insider after another had warned, always the ruling party’s most feared outcome.

Spencer, a local Mancunian plumber with principled anti-racist and anti-war politics, celebrated the conviviality inherent to Greater Manchester, made it a staple of her campaign, and wedded it to a class politics neither Labour nor Reform UK are capable of. Encompassing working-class ex-Labour voters, the local Muslim community, students and graduates without a future, the recently-trained plasterer built a formidable coalition.

Her win shows us not only what kind of politics can deter the racist, law-and-order panics of Faragism, it also demonstrates a much more brutal reality for Labour: the party of government is in serial decline, now outflanked decisively on both its right and left flanks. This victory was based on the dynamism of Spencer’s candidacy, the fluency and radicalism of Zack Polanski’s leadership of the Green Party (now over 200,000 members strong), and the sheer scale of the eco-populist ground game, involving over a 1,000 people canvassing each weekend, hundreds during weekdays and almost 2,000 on election day.

A seat that was number 120 on the Green’s target list of constituencies has now been clawed away from the establishment by a mass political operation committed to, in Polanski’s words, ‘Making Hope Normal Again’.

However, this undermining of the managerial politics which has dominated Britain for most of my lifetime, where politicians represent corporations, landlords and big finance far more than they represent the constituents that elected them, does not simply play out in the Parliamentary arena. Manchester has been rocked by a growing fascist street movement as of late. Far right group Britain First has been emboldened in the wake of the racist pogroms which shook the country in the summer of 2024.

Last weekend’s vaunted Britain First march was a significant setback. Over 2,000 anti-fascist protesters outnumbered and blockaded the far right organisation from parading around the city centre, dissembling the Britain First rally, despite a large-scale police operation involving six arrests and several incidents of violent far right attacks on individuals.

This battle between the far right and anti-fascist locals typifies a growing dynamic in British politics. Progressive forces have to contend against a symbiotic relationship between the far right as a street movement and as a burgeoning electoral force that can compete for political dominance. The interplay between racist social movements demanding the removal of asylum seekers from hotels, and a Farage-led political ecosystem using its influential platform to echo these campaigns.

But the rise of fascism is rarely unopposed. The past few weeks of political activity in Manchester, of anti-fascist organising at scale and an unprecedented by-election canvassing operation, offer us a significant part of the antidote to this growing fascist illness.

Keir Starmer’s Labour seek to cling onto power by triangulating Reform UK’s anti-migrant, law-and-order agenda. They have repeatedly degraded the political culture by hiring vans plastered with Spencer and Polanski’s faces, warning that the Greens want to “teach our children to use drugs including crack and heroin and let our daughters be used for legal prostitution”.

The Greens insistence on a multicultural front against the far right, without eschewing its commitment to redistribution, social justice and peace, has shown an electoral route forward for left-wing politics. Under Polanski’s leadership, it is clear the Greens have hegemonized the left-wing, pro-Palestine electoral coalition that broke through in 2024. A vital recognition now that US-led imperial aggression permeates across the Middle East.

The combination of a street movement to stop the far right from intimidating multiracial communities with an electoral insurgency to stop Reform UK entering office is essential. But I would add that there are two missing ingredients from this emergent anti-fascist recipe. Firstly, successful movements against fascism in this country, such as Trinidadian communist Claudia Jones organising Notting Hill Carnival in the wake of racist pogroms in the 1950s, have often been energised by carnivalesque celebrations of the rich reservoirs of diversity which shape our communities. We need carnivals of conviviality today.

And secondly, developing an antidote to Reform UK means also getting the goods for working class communities. Ordinary people are tired of platitudes. Living conditions continue to worsen. Progressive politics must organise to get the goods for our people in the form of wage increases, price and rent controls, better infrastructure, improved political rights and a generous welfare state.

The politics of the far right thrive on people’s disillusionment with a mainstream politics that repeatedly fails them. To make Zack Polanski’s claim reality, and make hope normal again, it has to be grounded in working class people organising politically and socially to improve their lives. This is the key to spreading the Gorton and Denton magic elsewhere. And as Keir Starmer facilitates Donald Trump’s imperial violence by allowing the US to use British military bases to launch missiles on Iran, this magic is needed now more than ever.

Jonas Marvin is the author of forthcoming The Breaking of the English Working Class, due out for Verso Books in August 2026. He also co-hosts Life of the Party podcast and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.

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