Our Writer at Large, Neil Mackay, looks at the astonishing success of the Green Party in Manchester and what it means for both UK and Scottish politics.

This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

The Greens proved all their enemies wrong. Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, the media’s entire commentariat class, Centrist Dads, and every culture warrior on Twitter. 

And they did so facing what should have been insurmountable odds. In Manchester, the Greens were up against a Reform Party backed by super-rich donors. Elitists, you could say. Farage’s party was showered with money by the likes of Claudia Rothermere, wife of the Daily Mail’s owner Viscount Rothermere. 

The Greens faced a wall of vitriol from the rightwing press while Reform has been praised and cosseted. The BBC has treated Reform like a government-in-waiting, repeatedly platforming the party on clickbait shows like Question Time, while the Greens were basically blanked.

Put bluntly, the state of British journalism is so dire these days that anything Farage says is repeated verbatim as gospel truth whilst the Greens are dismissed as fools. 

Who’s the fool now? You’ll find them sitting in the editor’s chair in London newsrooms and TV studios. 

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The Greens didn’t just win the Gorton and Denton by-election. They romped home with 41% of the vote. Reform took 28%, Labour was reduced to third place on 25%. The Tories lost their deposit. The Monster Raving Loony Party’s Sir Oink-A-Lot got 159 votes, the Tories 706.

Reform’s toxic brand was roundly rejected. Its candidate Matt Goodwin is sulphurous, brimming with spite. He was up against a salt-of-the-earth woman. 

Reform claims to be the party which opposes the elite. The Greens' Hannah Spencer is a working-class plumber. Goodwin is an ivory towered academic with his own show on GB News, a channel jointly-owned by the hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall, whose net worth is said to be £875million.

A real party of the people Reform, eh?

The Greens offered hope, change and decency. There was no cruelty or venom in Spencer’s campaign, simply a focus on the bread-and-butter issues which matter to real people. She talked of the cost of food, the kids’ school uniforms, the price of heating, the inability to afford a holiday.

Spencer spoke of a broken system - not a broken country like Reform - and her desire to fix it. Goodwin and his party blamed immigrants and used race as a political tool.

“Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires,” said Spencer. “We are being bled dry.”

Her win finishes Starmer. Under the influence of culture warriors like Baron Maurice Glasman from ‘Blue Labour’, Starmer abandoned and abused the party’s leftwing voters and courted Reform supporters. 

It was idiotic. And it failed. Now the party has sunk to such depths it will never win back leftwing progressives; and the hard-right voters it tried to woo hate Labour and would never switch from Reform anyway. 

Starmer was depending on the most cynical tactic: that come the next election leftwing voters would return to Labour in order to defeat Reform as they would have nowhere else to go. Wrong. Voters now see the Greens as the true party of the left.

Meanwhile, Centrist Dads wander around like dazed soldiers on the battlefield flummoxed as to why the electorate has turned to leftwing and rightwing populism. The answer, Centrists, is this: look in the mirror. You failed the people and the people are sick of you.

The Tories and Labour are done. The duopoly has ended. When a relationship sours, it can seldom recover and the people have had it with the likes of Badenoch and Starmer. Voters want them gone. 

If either party had an iota of sense they would have seen this coming and legislated to change Britain’s voting system to proportional representation so they stood a chance at future elections. Their arrogance blinded them, now the clock ticks to their doom.

"The Tories and Labour are done. The duopoly has ended," argues Neil Mackay (Image: PA)

And as for social media, well, if you accepted the mood on Twitter for the mood of the nation, then the vile Goodwin would be waltzing into Parliament, and Spencer returning to her plumbing job. Twitter isn’t the real world. The sooner politicians like Starmer and Badenoch wake up to that truth, then the easier their future suffering will be.

What of Scotland? We cannot really divine much from a Manchester by-election in terms of Holyrood. But there are a few omens. First, we must ask why the Scottish Greens, with years in parliament, have never come close to replicating the successes of the English Greens. They need to get their act together and learn from their southern neighbours.

Secondly, there will be a Zack Polanski bounce for the Scottish Greens. Successes in England will rub off a little up here. With the SNP already tipped to take an outright majority in May, that likely means more Green MSPs and so a stronger pro-independence alliance at Holyrood. So expect calls for another referendum to return hot into the spotlight.

Finally, there is nothing to fear from Reform in Scotland - unless you’re Anas Sarwar or Russell Findlay. Reform will cannibalise the Labour and Tory vote, splitting unionist support and playing into the hands of John Swinney.

There’s much talk of ‘vibe shifts’ these days. Well, Manchester certainly shifted the vibe across Britain. The notion that this country is hypnotised by the hard right and incapable of embracing progressive politics has been smashed to pieces. The left is making a comeback, and it has got nothing to do with Labour.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics

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