Greens trounce far right in key UK by-election, Labour fall to third place

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - LONDON — The Green Party of England and Wales has won a stunning victory in the most pivotal UK by-election in years, establishing itself as a major political force and beating Nigel Farage's far-right Reform UK into second place while the governing Labour Party suffered a humiliating defeat.

Held to fill the seat of Gorton and Denton, which was vacated by a Labour MP who resigned over racist and sexist WhatsApp messages about his party colleagues, the by-election pitted the UK’s strongest far-right and left-wing parties directly against each other.

In the final result, the Greens' Hannah Spencer won with 14,980 votes, beating Reform UK's Matt Goodwin on 10,578 and Labour's Angeliki Stogia on 9,364.

In an emotional acceptance speech, Spencer promised her supporters that "earning your trust starts now" as she celebrated a majority of more than 4,000.

Labour, which took the Greater Manchester seat with more than 50% of the vote in 2024, was pushed into third place behind Reform UK — a result which will increase the pressure on Sir Keir Starmer's leadership.

This is the second by-election since Labour's general election victory in 2024 and the party's second loss to a party with only a handful of sitting MPs.

While they only have a combined 13 seats in the House of Commons, Reform and the Greens are increasingly dominating Britain’s political discourse, and Thursday’s result – coming off the back of the highest turnout in any by-election since 1983 – will fuel their overlapping claims that the traditionally dominant parties are in irreversible decline.

In her victory speech, Spencer stressed the economic difficulties faced by everyday people "working to fill the pockets of billionaires" and stressed the Greens' strong left-wing message of fairness for working-class people who have seen their neighborhoods and life chances alike go into decline while working ever harder to maintain their standard of living.

"Everybody should get a nice life," she said. "And clearly I'm not the only person who thinks that."

Spencer also called out "politicians and divisive figures" who she said had scapegoated the area's large Muslim population and tried to turn white working-class locals against them.

"My Muslim neighbors are just like me: human," she said.

Having won four seats at the last general election, its best ever result, the Green Party has surged in the polls since choosing a new leader, Zack Polanski, last September.

Polanski was originally a member of the more centrist Liberal Democrats, but stormed out of the party in 2016 when he failed to make the shortlist of candidates to fight a key by-election. Now an elected member of the London Assembly, he is highly popular on social media, where he projects himself as a cheerful and charismatic left-populist.

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While not departing from the Greens' baseline environmentalism, his most attention-grabbing proposals include withdrawing the UK from NATO, imposing higher taxes on the wealthy, and nationalizing various utilities and services. He has also been a vociferous critic of Israel's war in Gaza.

The Greens’ meteoric polling surge under his leadership has eclipsed an attempted comeback by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose attempt to form a new left-wing political force named Your Party has been dogged by financial and organizational chaos as well as a rift between him and co-founder Zarah Sultana – who, like Polanski, is highly popular with the online left.

Having quit the Labour Party in 2025 over the government's political direction and its stance on the war in Gaza, Sultana now argues that the British government should "nationalize the entire economy". It is unclear when Your Party will begin contesting elections.

Reform UK has consistently led nationwide opinion polls for some time, and achieved a wave of victories in local elections across England in May 2025.

However, it has suffered from a number of disastrous candidate vetting failures and a steady flow of defections and resignations by both MPs and local councillors, many of whom have left the party after making outlandish or racist public statements.

The party’s ongoing effort to refute allegations of extremism meant it was something of a surprise when it decided to fight the Gorton and Denton contest with Goodwin, who has built a substantial personal following while espousing some of the most extreme views of any major party candidate in recent British political history.

Goodwin first came to public prominence in the 2010s as an academic studying the rise of right-wing populism, in particular Islamophobia. However, in the years following the UK's departure from the EU, he has morphed from a critic of right-wing movements and parties into an out-and-out advocate of far-right ideas.

With tens of thousands of followers on social media, Goodwin argues that immigration from non-European countries and cultures poses an existential threat to British and Western civilization.

A leading proponent of the widely circulated right-wing claim that "London is over" thanks to rampant violent crime and the "displacement" of white British residents – claims easily proven untrue by abundant publicly available evidence – Goodwin has repeatedly advanced explicitly ethnonationalist conceptions of national identity.

Meanwhile, the result in Gorton and Denton deals a heavy blow to the Labour government, in particular Prime Minister Starmer, whom some pollsters judge to be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of modern British politics depending on what measure is used. — Agencies