LONDON — Up until around 3:30 a.m. Friday, the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton was one of the safest, most rock-solid parliamentary seats held by Britain’s governing Labour party.

But, in a spectacular blow to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s already dicey hopes of retaining the premiership, voters gave the far-left Green Party its first-ever win in a special election.

Labour — which earlier this week accused the Greens of “whipping up hatred” among Muslim voters after they called for the party to be “punished for Gaza” — was relegated to third place behind the right-wing populist Reform UK.

Reform’s controversial candidate, former academic Matthew Goodwin, told the BBC that the Greens’ win was a victory for “a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives.”

Labour, the Greens and Reform UK had been in a tight three-way fight throughout the campaign, and the result had been expected to be extremely close.

However, the Greens’ Hannah Spencer, who now sits as the party’s first MP for a constituency in the north of England, ended up with a comfortable victory. She tripled the party’s share of the vote at the 2024 general election, to win nearly 41 percent. Reform trailed a distant second with 28.7%, while Labour, which has held the seat uninterrupted for nearly a century, saw its vote halved to 25%.

Labour MPs were Friday describing the result as a “catastrophe,” with some calling on Starmer to quit, while others were urging a shift to the left to head off the potential threat posed by the Greens.

Pollster Luke Tryl told the Daily Telegraph that the result indicates that both Starmer and his deputy prime minister, former Foreign Secretary David Lammy, could face defeat in their north London constituencies at the next general election if the Greens are able to maintain their momentum.

‘Labour must be punished for Gaza’

Gorton and Denton is a demographically and ethnically mixed urban constituency in northwest England. The strong white working-class vote, large numbers of students and a significant Muslim population had once been reliably Labour. But the Greens began making inroads among young and Muslim voters at the 2024 general election — a process that has been turbocharged by Zack Polanski since he became the party’s leader last autumn.

Once the special election was called due to the resignation of the incumbent Labour MP, Polanski made clear the Greens would attempt to capitalize on their strongly pro-Palestinian line.

“We’ll want people on the ground to know our position on Gaza, that we’ve stood with the Palestinian people,” he told The Times. “Gorton and Denton has a large Muslim population. Of course, we want to speak to everyone, and it’s not just people who are Muslim who care about people’s freedom and people’s human rights. But I imagine that will certainly be an element in the contest.”

During the campaign, the Greens distributed leaflets in Urdu in which Spencer wore a keffiyeh, with the party urging: “Give the faltering walls a push. Labour must be punished for Gaza.”

A video, also in Urdu, showed Lammy shaking hands with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and Starmer shaking hands with Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister of India. The video, which was also reportedly translated into Bangla, Arabic and Pashto, also showed aerial footage of Gaza, as well as images of US President Donald Trump and ICE raids in the United States.

On Tuesday, a senior Cabinet minister told The Times: “The Greens are whipping up hatred and deliberately raising the salience of Gaza. They’re hammering us.” Referring to the leader of the far-left, anti-Israel Workers’ Party, the minister added: “It’s like fighting a by-election against George Galloway.”

Labour had also accused the Greens of striking a “grubby deal” with Jeremy Corbyn, its equally virulently anti-Israel former party leader. Both Corbyn’s new Your Party and the Workers’ Party chose not to stand candidates in the special election, effectively giving the Greens a free run.

While the Greens also sounded an economically populist message, attacking the “parties of billionaire donors,” independent observers have underlined that Labour continues to suffer electoral fallout from the conflict in Gaza. The Greens have repeatedly accused the party of being “active participants in the murdering of Palestinians,” saying it has failed to take tough enough action against Israel.

“Gaza is still a large part of what is driving the alienation from Labour,” The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, posted on X, while polling guru Sir John Curtice said the result showed “the constituency’s large Muslim population … are still out of love with Labour as a result of the party’s initial stance on Israel’s incursion into Gaza.”

United in Israelophobia?

In some quarters, the Greens’ success will raise renewed fears about the rise of sectarian, single-issue voting in British politics. Anger about Labour’s allegedly soft stance towards Israel among Muslim and youthful left-wingers led to the election of four “pro-Gaza” independents at the 2024 general election.

Allister Heath, editor of the centre-right Sunday Telegraph newspaper, wrote before the results were known: “Following a playbook pioneered by far-Left parties worldwide, the Greens, now led by Zack Polanski, are targeting a red-green coalition of white, woke ‘progressives’ and the reactionary subset of the Muslim electorate. These two groups may appear culturally incompatible, but they can be united not just by their support for socialism but also their often virulent Israelophobia, an atavistic prejudice that the Greens unashamedly pander to.”

If the result was a body blow to Starmer, who is suffering from near-record levels of unpopularity in the opinion polls, it was a triumph for Polanski. This was the first major electoral test of the party’s new leader, who is Britain’s most prominent and senior Jewish politician.

Polanski has taken the Greens — which managed to snatch two formerly safe, rural seats from the Conservative party at the last general election — sharply to the left since winning the leadership in September.

While his leadership campaign played to the party’s activist base, he has doubled down on his anti-Israel, left-wing populist message over the past six months. This week, he publicly indicated he would back a grassroots motion at the party’s spring conference, branding “Zionism as a racist ideology.” Nothing about the result in Gordon and Denton is likely to lead Polanski to change tack — in fact, quite the reverse.

‘Labour has treated Israel like a pariah’

Finally, the result will reignite speculation about Starmer’s future as prime minister and the direction of his government.

For the embattled Labour leader, there will be little respite. Voters go to the polls in municipal elections, and for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, in May. Ominously, those elections will include local councils in some of Labour’s urban strongholds, including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Last night’s result in Greater Manchester will have raised Labour’s fears of an impending further electoral bloodbath at the hands of the Greens.

Immigration, the cost of living, the economy and the NHS are, by far, the issues most British voters prioritize, not events in the Middle East. But it’s also undoubtedly the case that, in certain seats and among certain voters, the perception that Labour is too supportive of Israel has been causing the party difficulties, even before it entered government.

On taking power, Labour, scarred by the election of a handful of anti-Israel independents and despite winning a huge majority, began to shift its stance towards a markedly more hostile position. It reinstated funding for UNWRA, curtailed arms sales, halted talks on a free trade agreement, and, ripping up its carefully crafted manifesto policy, unilaterally recognized a Palestinian state.

None of this, however, appears to have sated the appetite of a small, but highly vocal and motivated, group of voters for whom opposition to Israel appears to have become an all-consuming passion. Moreover, whatever Labour says and does, it can always be outbid by populists to its left, such as the Greens and Corbyn.

As one Jewish communal leader source told The Sun newspaper: “Labour has treated Israel like a pariah and where has it got them? The anti-Israel obsessives will only be satisfied when you brand ‘Zionism is racism’ as the Greens are about to do. You can’t placate these people.”

Having failed to stand up to the anti-Israel lobby, Starmer’s government finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. And Gorton and Denton suggest that the squeeze is only going to get tighter.

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