“This is indeed just a by-election and it’s never worth reading too deeply into these results.”
The words of Heidi Alexander Labour’s Transport Secretary doing the morning press rounds but was it, or is it the start of something a lot bigger into the political world?
Well probably a bit of both.Ex Labour voters switched to the Greens as both a protest and to stop Reform getting home in an almost carbon copy of what happened in Wales last year( Just swap the Greens for Plaid Cymru)
Labour though made mistakes, the biggest perhaps being its failure to choose Andy Burnham as its candidate-Some say Andy would have won but others are not so sure
The Green leader Zak Polanski said he punched the air when he heard Burnham wasn’t standing but once on the ground in Gorton and Denton realised that even the King of the North would not have overcome the hatred to the party that has been in charge of this part of the world for a hundred years
The Greens weren’t stupid either in this campaign latching onto the anger of the Muslim community over Labour’s uncertain stance over Palestine, a fact picked up by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch who said that
”Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them.”
There wasn’t much Green in their campaign, indeed the environment barely got a mention
But could Labour have won? They certainly believed they could right up to the eleventh hour, over 1,000 activists were apparently on the streets on election day
However they suffered from some overwhelming errors,a campaign filled with some awful messaging, not least that the choice was between them and Reform
Then the attack on the Green’s proposal to legalize drugs and finally the appearance on Monday of Kier Starmer on the campaign trail, something rarely seen by a serving Prime Minister and seen as a desperate last ditch attempt to drive home the campaign
So what comes next? The local elections across Greater Manchester must be worrying for Labour councillors in wards where they have never had to worry about votes-Now they will be attacked from two sides, the so called white working class who will be drawn to Reform and from the professional and student class who will vote Green
As for the national party with no real challenger to Kier Starmer at the moment it will rumble on towards those May elections, probably with a few announcements meant to signal changes in direction but lacking the energy at the centre for real change
