The Greens Are Still Relevant. They Just Need a Strategy

Por Harriet Williamson — Novara Media

Labour has held on in former prime minister Keir Starmer’s vacated seat of Holborn and St Pancras – a constituency the party has never lost since its creation in 1983 – with Green leader Zack Polanski coming in second. Camden council leader and Starmer ally Sagal Abdi-Wali won 45% of the vote, down 3.75% on Labour’s 2024 general election result, while the Greens more than tripled their vote share, taking 33%.

There are certainly some reasons for optimism among Green supporters this morning, while Polanski is asked on the mainstream media round if he’ll now be standing down as party leader until all our ears bleed. (Answer, no he won’t.)

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The Greens took more of the vote last night than their combined 2024 vote share with Starmer’s nearest challenger, the independent and former South African MP Andrew Feinstein. The local campaign group born out of Feinstein’s challenge to Starmer on his record on Gaza, the Camden People’s Alliance, endorsed Polanski this time around.

While turnout was down on the last election – 2024’s “loveless landslide” – at 39% compared to 54%, we saw a 13% Labour to Green swing.

Ultimately, around 3,000 votes separated the victorious Abdi-Wali (12,292) and Polanski (8,928), and prime minister Andy Burnham can breathe a sigh of relief that the first major electoral test to his premiership is won.

There’s no doubt that Abdi-Wali benefitted from the ‘Burnham bounce’. She might be smiley and local, but her council carries an appalling record on housing in the borough – a brief she was directly responsible for as Camden’s former housing lead – and she was tainted by her association with Starmer and the Starmite project that, according to a valuable two-part Tribune deep-dive , birthed her candidacy.

There was something vaguely nauseating about Abdi-Wali campaigning on a message of “hope” for the people of Holborn and St Pancras when on top of being council leader from May of this year, her party has always held the seat – including with a sitting prime minister. If Labour was going to bring hope to this constituency, it would’ve done it already.

But Abdi-Wali, ‘ming-vased’ by her party , received remarkably little mainstream press scrutiny throughout the campaign ( remind you of anyone? ), as the – allow me a moment to adjust my chic tinfoil hat – political-media class closed ranks against the Greens.

The drop in last night’s Lib Dem vote share alone can be taken as a suggestion of negative mobilisation against the Green party, who’ve weathered months of bad faith attacks after the political and media establishment swung back into action following a Polanski tweet around the Golders Green stabbing.

Polanski’s personal approval ratings continue to show the strain, with the Green leader dipping four points below Nigel Farage on -28 in a More in Common poll on Wednesday. The same pollster also has Westminster voting intention for the Greens on 8% , while YouGov shows 11% – down from a March high of 21%. It’s unlikely that a deluge of negative attention and the resurgence of an antisemitism narrative over the Greens’ recently-passed ‘Zionism is Racism’ conference motion will have helped matters, either.

While the result of this hotly-contested byelection was ultimately closer than the bookies’ odds (16/1 on Polanski yesterday) made out, Gorton and Denton this was not. The terrain has changed, and the Greens have not yet adapted quickly or robustly enough with it. Burnham in Number 10 requires a different approach for the party to the one that worked under Starmer’s toxic premiership.

But in her acceptance speech this morning, Abdi-Wali accepted key parts of the Greens’ electoral programme – public ownership of water and addressing the housing crisis. Polanski’s party is reshaping Labour in the face of everything the political and media elite can throw at it.

There’s no question of Green irrelevance, only of Green strategy. In my book, that’s a reason to be hopeful.

Fonte: Novara Media