ONE swallow does not make a summer. Nonetheless, it is difficult to understate the significance of the Green Party victory in the Gorton & Denton by-election, their first ever by-election win achieved with a handsome majority that few predicted.

Their candidate and erstwhile Trafford councillor, Hannah Spencer, defied practically every poll that declared the contest too close to call between the Greens, Labour and Reform, romping to a comfortable 41 per cent share of the vote on a barely diminished turnout from 2024 of 48 per cent.

Spencer’s nearest rival, Reform’s Matt Goodwin, was over 4,000 votes behind, while Labour’s Angeliki Stogia trailed a poor third, taking fewer than 10,000 votes.

Those on the ground during the campaign might argue differently, with hundreds of local volunteers out leafletting and door-knocking — and as many as 1,000 on polling day itself — reporting huge numbers of people declaring they would be supporting the Green candidate, including many that had switched from Labour barely four weeks earlier.

These ground reports from canvassers and campaigners in the streets called it more accurately than the national pollsters — just as they did with the general election of 2017, when the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party captured popular imagination in a manner that the opinion polls had been blind to until the last moment.

Spencer has earned well-deserved plaudits for the conduct of her campaign. Just up the road in Bury, the newly elected MP has provided enthusiastic support for the local trades council’s popular campaign seeking to renationalise water utilities, and bring eye-watering utility bills back to manageable levels. These issues are important to local people, and Spencer knows it.

The Labour Party, in stark contrast, has not lost in the area since 1931, and finds itself once again soul-searching following another catastrophic collapse in support, down to just one in four voters from having carried half of them just two years ago.

The decision to block Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, selecting instead the corporate lobbyist Stogia, has backfired as widely predicted. There is, of course, an increasingly familiarity to this pattern of collapsing Labour support, evident even during its general election win: it is worth remembering that Starmer’s ostensible landslide victory was achieved on the back of the lowest vote share of a governing party in British history.  

The writing has been on the wall for Labour for some time.

Crucially, Labour’s platform as “the only party capable of defeating Reform” has been shattered, and one cannot help but wonder that a Reform victory here would have suited them better than a Green one. Such is the level this government has degenerated to.

Then there is the elephant in the room of Starmer himself, whose 2026 goes from bad to worse and who is running out of cards to play. A Cabinet reshuffle perhaps? Speculation will surely reach fever-pitch as to whether he will even remain in charge come the local elections in May.

Reform went into this contest on a crest of momentum, relentless press and media attention, carried by a populist message light in substance and heavy in rhetoric, ably abetted by the Starmer government desperately committed to out-Reforming Reform. Nigel Farage’s characteristically bitter assessment when things don’t go his way — that Spencer’s victory was achieved not thanks to her enthusiasm and basic decency before voters, but due to “sectarian voting [can you hear the dog-whistle again?] and cheating,” is not insignificant: this hurt.

In hindsight, the Greens’ victory in Gorton & Denton is not so surprising.

The appetite for real and fundamental change that Corbyn’s Labour captured in 2017 still exists and is widely prevalent across the country. Even the misdirected swell of support for the neo-Thatcherite Reform, which has successfully presented itself as a break from Westminster’s more-of-the-same austerity and war (while simultaneously stuffing its front bench with failed Tory government B-listers ensuring it will deliver exactly the same thing in new packaging), is predicated to some extent on this desperate appetite for something, anything, different.

The Green Party has managed to successfully distil some of that same energy. The by-election result perhaps stands as an encouraging barometer of wider public opinion. Or perhaps not. But one way or another, significant issues remain. A turnout of less than 50 per cent of eligible voters is increasingly the norm in parliamentary elections, and remains an abysmal indictment on the legitimacy of our parliamentary system, returning unpopular government after unpopular government in the process.

The Green Party too carries significant political baggage, from its position on women’s sex-based rights, to its position on Nato and the EU, that will prove problematic at a national level. A cursory reminder that much of the goodwill and support that Labour built in 2017 was squandered in 2019, thanks in no small part to its (Starmer-led) betrayal of the Brexit referendum result.

Fundamentally an electoral vehicle, with no link to the trade union movement that, even in its dilapidated state, remains the beating heart of organised labour, the Green Party alone cannot be expected, let alone trusted, to deliver the sweeping, urgent and significant structural changes our society is in desperate need of.

To achieve this will require significant, continued and organised commitment in our workplaces, in our communities, our trades councils and housing associations, schools and universities, even in our families.

Gorton & Denton shows that not all hope is lost. But we have a huge amount of work to do yet.

Dan Ross is north-west district secretary of the Communist Party.