Green Party wins UK by-election in blow to Labour, PM Starmer

Progressive Greens win closely watched election in one-time Labour stronghold, while right-wing Reform comes second.Published On 27 Feb 2026A candidate for the United Kingdom’s left-wing Green Party has comfortably won a closely-watched election for a vacant parliamentary seat, delivering an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in one of its former strongholds.Results announced Friday showed the Greens’ Hannah Spencer, a 34-year-old councillor and plumber, had won 40.7 percent of the vote in the by-election in Gorton and Denton, a constituency in Greater Manchester that has been considered a secure Labour seat for almost a century.In an outcome that analysts said pointed to the fracturing of the UK’s traditional two-party politics, the hard-right candidate for the populist, anti-immigration Reform finished in second place.Labour, which had won more than half the vote in Gorton and Denton at the last general election in 2024, finished a bruising third.The Green Party has positioned itself as an alternative to Labour, arguing that the governing party has moved away from some of the values it once championed.The Greens, and their party leader Zack Polanski, have been vocal in their condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and their support for Palestinians. Many Labour voters have been infuriated by the government’s ongoing diplomatic support for Israel through the carnage it has wrought in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.Political scientist John Curtice called the result a “seismic moment” that signalled that the “future of British politics looks more uncertain than at any stage” since the end of World War II, the Reuters news agency reported.