Yesterday’s Holborn and St. Pancras by-election was the latest in this year’s trilogy of high-stakes by-elections. In June was Makerfield, when Andy Burnham successfully ran for Parliament to displace Keir Starmer as prime minister. But the vote that secured the path to his premiership came four months prior, in Gorton and Denton, when Labour’s National Executive Committee blocked Burnham from running. The Greens were victorious, pushing Labour into a distant third place. Had Reform, which came second, won that seat, the Starmer electoral strategy would have limped on: able to continue to tell itself that the path to 2029 victory lay in flipping mythical Labour-Reform swing voters. The NEC would not have reversed its decision to allow Burnham to run in June, and the Parliamentary Labour Party would have remained paralysed, seemingly incapable of acting to remove Starmer. Prime minister Burnham – and Labour’s leftward lurch – is a direct consequence of Zack Polanski, and the shock he delivered to Labour’s left.
If the Green wave crested at Gorton and Denton in February, the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election was framed as the rocks into which it risked crashing. At a surface level, critics have been vindicated by a Green loss, Polanski achieving 33% of the vote to Abdi-Wali’s 45. In one sense the Greens are a victim of their own staggering success: swelling to a peak of 22% in the polls early in the year, and pushing Labour and the Tories into third and fourth respectively. Burnham’s resulting rhetorical commitment to a break from neoliberalism goes beyond what even Jeremy Corbyn ever said as Labour leader. The effects unleashed within the volatile electorate (of which around 30-40% reliably vote for precisely what Burnham is promising) were predictable, hitting the Greens hard in the immediate term. It is commonly assumed, however, that Burnham’s honeymoon will not last forever as the gap between rhetoric and reality widens over time. One wonders how the result might have panned out a year from now. Or indeed, in just a couple of weeks, after a budget trailed to contain some of the proverbial “difficult decisions” which forever plague our ruling class.
Holborn and St Pancras, a seat that has been held by Labour since its creation in the early 1980s, was not an obvious target seat for the Greens. Had a by-election taken place in some of the capital's other constituencies, such as Hackney or Lewisham, Polanski could have started recruiting parliamentary staff from the moment it was called, but he was never likely to win in Holborn. Nevertheless, in the face of the Burnham bounce and the damp squib of the Greens’ Manchester mayoral election earlier this summer, Polanski was compelled to recapture the initiative and throw his hat in the ring.
As a result, this by-election was the latest in a series elevated to the highest reaches of national politics. This one, however, has been subjected to a misreading. The prevailing narrative surrounding the poll was the question of whether the Greens would meet electoral oblivion. Could this be the end of Polanski?
In the mouths of opponents, the question took the form of wish fulfilment; politicians and pundits who spent the last year on studio sofas pining for the days that the Greens were friendlier, more serious, less angry, actually cared about the environment, or whatever else. The barely veiled subtext to all of these complaints was that they preferred the Greens when they languished at about 5% in the polls. For Polanski to be discussed as even having a political career to “end” is a new problem for a prominent Green, and a good problem to have, attendant upon the greater power and platform he has earned the party. At previous elections, the party’s leadership figures would often dutifully achieve a commendable fourth or third place, and carry on in the full expectation of running again next time in hope of improving their result; the future of their so-called political career was never called into question. Nor was it for Nigel Farage, who tried, and failed, to run for Parliament many times.
The future of Polanski and the Greens were not, however, the real stakes of this election. Instead, it was the future of the country. Given that Polanski was a necessary precondition of prime minister Burnham and his political programme, the ability of Labour (and the political class in general) to tell itself that the Green pressure from its left has been alleviated gives political space for Labour to revert to type: triangulation, capitulation and feeding the far right.
A Green victory would have benefitted the 30-40% of the country who want a proper break from Thatcherism: full nationalisations, wealth taxes and redistribution, rent controls and price caps. Burnham’s ambition is now compromised without an ascendant Green Party pushing him further, while the political centre of gravity has swung towards the most right-wing composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party in our lifetime. We now find ourselves in something like the alternative timeline in which Reform won in Gorton and Denton. Evidence of this will shortly present itself. The decision to approve new oil and gas drilling, for example, was reportedly delayed until after the by-election. If the government now gives it the green light, we will be given a decisive indication of its complacency regarding the electoral threat from its Green left.
Such complacency would be misplaced in the long run. In reality, the Greens remain in strong electoral contention. Yes, the party will have dared to dream about running Labour much closer. But to come within a few thousand votes of winning one of the safest Labour seats in the country, when Burnham is at his peak and the Greens arguably at their lowest ebb, is not the decisive vanquishing of Polanski of which his gleeful gravediggers are boasting. In 2024, the Greens won just 10% of the vote in this seat. Today, Polanski achieved a Green swing of 22% to triple the party’s vote share. In dozens of constituencies, a swing of that size would have resulted in a Green MP.
On the other side of the coin, Labour’s majority in the seat has been reduced by more than 6,000 votes, at the height of Burnham’s bounce. Labour will overlook that and be rightly pleased with this result. But it would be a mistake for the party to conclude that the threat from its left has been eliminated. If Labour reverts to isolating and ignoring the Greens, it will only strengthen Polanski’s position by the next general election.
