HANNAH SPENCER’S resounding win for the Greens in Gorton and Denton is a slap in the face for Reform, the writing on the wall for Starmer-Labour and good news for the whole left.

Polls indicating it was neck-and-neck misled us: the Greens, with 41 per cent, left Reform (29 per cent) and Labour (25 per cent) far behind. The polls being out are themselves a sign of changing times: modelled to reflect prior voting patterns, we’ve seen them caught out before when vote surges come from unexpected quarters, as with Corbyn’s Labour in 2017.

Green leader Zack Polanski says there are now “no no-go areas for the Green Party in England and Wales.”

Whether he is right about Wales, where it was Plaid Cymru that gave Labour and Reform a drubbing in Caerphilly, his point carries weight: the Greens romping home in a northern constituency with a big Muslim population doesn’t just upset the calculations of Labour machine politicians. It would have been unthinkable for most of the socialist left in the recent past.

Spencer’s 12-point lead means sour grapes from Reform — whose leader Nigel Farage says the result is a “victory for sectarian voting and cheating” — are just that: the Green victory cannot be denied.

It’s still ominous. His claim there are questions “about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas” is outrageous, and given council authorities say no complaints of “family voting” were raised before polls closed, Labour’s indulgence of this Islamophobic smear is shameful.

Baseless assertions of stolen elections come straight from the Donald Trump playbook.

Combined with regular insinuations from Reform (including from its Gorton and Denton candidate Matt Goodwin) that non-whites are not really British, delegitimising the process feeds far-right extremism. It has also motivated attacks on voting rights aimed at disenfranchising black voters in the United States and from the last Conservative government here.

Something Starmer has failed to reverse. And so we come to Labour.

“Blame for Labour’s defeat lies squarely with Keir Starmer and his clique,” says Socialist Campaign Group of MPs secretary Richard Burgon.

Yes — locally, since their decision to block Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to prevent a leadership challenge hit their vote hard.

That decision reflected the wider anti-democratic Labour Together culture that has gutted a once vibrant mass party, and followed many similar stitch-ups. People don’t like their local candidates being imposed by fixers in London. It has an electoral cost.

Worse than the stitch-ups is the agenda they serve: ensuring Labour in office is a pliant servant of finance capital, upholding inequality, privatisation and war.

Labour is collapsing because it stands for privatised companies poisoning our water supply, not for public health or the environment.

Because it stands for managed decline of public services groaning under the cost of channelling profits to outsourcing crooks and PFI-imposed debt.

Because it tells us Britain can’t afford pay rises while banks and transnational corporations flaunt record-breaking profits in our faces every year.

And because it dances to the tune of a megalomaniac gangster in the White House threatening a new era of total war on multiple fronts.

The signs were all there before the Epstein-Mandelson scandal highlighted the utter depravity of the Labour Together clique and the horrific consequences of the party’s sordid relationship with the “filthy rich.”

Starmer claiming Labour now stands against the “extremes of right and left” is the tired mantra of a political caste totally disconnected from the people of this country and incapable of bridging the gulf. Labour needs to discard both him and its entire current orientation to have a hope of recovery.

That may already be a pipe dream. From Caerphilly to Gorton and Denton, the safe seats are toppling; those who care about social justice, anti-racism and peace are discovering they have other options.