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Green Party Scores Upset Win in UK Election in Blow to Labour, Far-Right Reform
"Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires," victorious Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer said during her victory speech. "We’re being bled dry."
Feb 27, 2026
Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer on Thursday won an upset victory in a byelection in the Gorton and Denton constituency, delivering a blow to both Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the far-right Reform Party led by Nigel Farage.
As reported by the Guardian, Spencer, a local plumber, won by overturning a 13,000-vote majority that the Labour Party achieved in the 2024 general election.
In fact, Labour fell to third place in the Thursday election, winning 9,364 votes, compared to 14,980 votes for the Greens and 10,578 votes for Reform.
In her victory speech, Spencer emphasized major class divides in the UK, where she said people are working increasingly harder for fewer benefits.
"Working hard used to get you something," she said. "It got you a house. A nice life. Holidays. It got you somewhere. But now—working hard? What does that get you?... Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We’re being bled dry."
The Green Party said Spencer's victory showed it was now a viable force in national elections, projecting that it is "on track to win over a hundred seats at the next general election, if the historic swing achieved to win Gorton and Denton is replicated nationwide."
Green Party leader Zack Polanski hailed the election result and predicted "a tidal wave of new Green MPs" in future elections should current trends continue.
"When I was elected Leader of the Greens I said we were here to replace Labour and I meant it," Polanski said. "Hannah was a fantastic candidate and I know she’ll make a brilliant MP."
Starmer, who has pushed the Labour Party to the right on issues such as immigration and transgender rights during his tenure, reacted bitterly to the defeat in a letter he sent to other Labour MPs.
"The result in Gorton and Denton is deeply disappointing," Starmer wrote. "Instead of a Labour MP who can be a local champion delivering for Gorton and Denton alongside a Labour Government and a Labour mayor, the people of Gorton and Denton now have a representative who is more interested in dividing people than uniting them."
Starmer, whose job approval rating in polls is consistently under 20%, also predicted that "over the coming months, people will feel the benefit of the long-term decisions this government is taking."
Socialist commentator Owen Jones, a longtime Starmer critic, gloated over the result in a social media post in which he reminded followers of Starmer's past statement that left-wing voters could "leave" if they didn't like the changes he was making to Labour.
"OK, Keir Starmer, we did as you asked us!" he wrote. "Happy now?"
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It Isn’t ‘The System’ That’s Holding Visionary Activists Back From the World We Want
A new book by Mark Satin—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within.
Nov 10, 2024
As administrator of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, I have spent decades trying to usher visionary, regenerative, and decentralist ideas into the American body politic. So have many of my counterparts in organizations across the country. But sometimes I think we’re no closer to making a difference on a national scale now than we were in the 1970s. What is holding us back?
The usual answers are “capitalism” and the two-party system. But the more experience I’ve gained, the more I’ve come to believe that those are just excuses, and the real answer lies elsewhere.
Mark Satin’s new book—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within: We visionary activists have been so internally divided, and so driven by ego and unexamined personal pain, that we’ve never been able to harness the life-giving ideas of people like Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Hazel Henderson, David Korten, Kate Raworth, and E.F. Schumacher himself (all of whom turn up in Satin’s book) to a viable national political organization.
The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”
Satin’s book reads like a novel, and it is admirably, some may say shockingly, specific. It spends a lot of time on activists’ parental, collegial, and love relationships, not just on their political organizing. And Satin finds all of it wanting. (He is as tough on himself as he is on anyone, which gives the book a feeling of heartache rather than blame. And there is redemption at the end!)
To stick to the political organizing—the first part of the book tries to demonstrate that the New Left of the 60s was an inadequate vehicle for us. Satin shows in devastating detail that the leading members of his Mississippi Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee group were more interested in Black nationalism than in integrating the local schools. He shows that the older student leaders of his campus Students for a Democratic Society group were more interested in promoting socialism than in listening to the emerging ecological, decentralist, and humanistic-psychology ideas of younger students. And he shows that the leaders of the Toronto Anti-Draft Program (North America’s largest draft-resister assistance organization) were more interested in fomenting a Marxist revolution than in providing practical help to the resisters.
According to Satin, these and similar experiences led to the collapse of the New Left—and to the rise of thousands of independent feminist, ecological, spiritual, appropriate-technology, etc. organizations. In addition, two visionary organizations arose that aimed to synthesize such ideas and bring them into national politics.
The first of these, the New World Alliance, drew its Governing Council from a wide range of professionals, educators, businesspeople, and activists. It included three future Schumacher Society participants, Alanna Hartzok, John McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale. But it fell apart after four years of constant bickering over policies, processes, and fundraising, often caused (Satin seeks to show) largely by personal jealousies and rivalries. At one point, spiritually oriented Planetary Citizens president Donald Keys accused McClaughry of being in league with the Devil! Some of the scenes in this chapter are so tragicomic that they’d work as skits on Saturday Night Live.
The chapter on the U.S. Green Party movement, though, is pure tragedy. By the mid-1980s, America was yearning for a major third party. Amazingly well-connected people were waiting in the wings to help the Greens get off the ground. But, instead, the principal organizers of the Greens—a spiritual feminist, an anarchist, a socialist, and two bioregionalists—created an organization in their own narrow image. As Satin sees it, this was a classic case of the organizers and their cohorts preferring to be big fish in a small pond. The resulting Green “movement” then engaged in phenomenally ugly infighting over the next decade—what happened to three Green women is truly sickening to read—and the Greens emerged in the end not as a major beyond-left-and-right political party capable of spearheading a regenerative economy and culture, but as a minor far-left protest party.
In more recent years, Satin found hope in what he calls the “radical centrist” or “trasnspartisan” movement—people and groups that are more interested in fostering cross-partisan political dialogue than in providing Correct Answers. He felt this would be an excellent way to insert the views of visionary thinkers into the national dialogue—and to win support for all kinds of local and regional experimentation. But he notes that the track record of radical-centrist groups like New America and No Labels has so far been disappointing. They’re as internally divided as the Greens and a lot snootier. What Satin really wants, he confides to us, is a new political movement of committed listeners, bold beyond-left-and-right synthesizers, and savvy organizers.
A powerful conclusion urges visionary activists to live more like ordinary Americans, in order to decrease arrogance and deepen understanding. The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”
When E.F. Schumacher wrote his famous book Small Is Beautiful, he entitled his chapter about political economy “Buddhist Economics.” Later he must have had second thoughts about characterizing his ideas in such an oppositional way, for his later book, A Guide for the Perplexed, makes it clear that his ideas are consistent with the beliefs of all the great religions, including of course Christianity. When Satin argues that we visionary activists cannot move forward unless we (a). learn to be kind to self and others, and (b). listen to and learn from all engaged Americans, he is following in Schumacher’s footsteps. We should listen to him.
Mark Satin, Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (New York: Bombardier Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2023), 380 pages, $21.95 pbk, $12.95 eBook.
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Why I Regret My Antiwar Protest Vote in 1968
While I see many parallels with the choice we faced back then, I now think differently about how to register my opposition to war.
Nov 02, 2024
In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.
I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.
But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.
Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.
When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.
Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.
What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.
I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.
Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”
This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.
In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.
Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?
In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?
More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.
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