The Green Party of England and Wales has won a stunning victory in the most pivotal UK by-election in years, establishing itself as a major political force and beating Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK into second place while the governing Labour Party suffered a humiliating defeat.

Held to fill the greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, which was vacated by a Labour MP who resigned over racist and sexist WhatsApp messages about his party colleagues, the by-election pitted the UK’s strongest far-right and left-wing parties directly against each other.

In the final result, the Greens’ Hannah Spencer won with 14,980 votes, beating Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin on 10,578 and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia on 9,364.

While they only have a combined 13 seats in the House of Commons, Reform and the Greens are increasingly dominating Britain’s political discourse. Thursday’s result – coming off the back of the highest turnout in any by-election since 1983 – will fuel their overlapping claims that the traditionally dominant parties are in irreversible decline.

A new left rises

In her victory speech, Spencer stressed the economic difficulties faced by everyday people “working to fill the pockets of billionaires”. She highlighted the Greens’ strong left-wing message of fairness for working-class people who have seen their neighbourhoods and life chances alike go into decline while working ever harder to maintain their standard of living.

“Everybody should get a nice life,” she said. “And clearly I’m not the only person who thinks that.”

Spencer also called out “politicians and divisive figures” who had scapegoated the area’s large Muslim population and attempted to turn white working-class locals against them.

“My Muslim neighbours are just like me: human,” she said.

Having won four seats at the last general election, its best ever result, the Green Party has surged in the polls since choosing a new leader, Zack Polanski, last September.

Polanski was originally a member of the more centrist Liberal Democrats but left the party in 2016 when he failed to make the shortlist of candidates for a pivotal by-election. Now an elected member of the London Assembly, he is highly popular on social media, where he projects himself as a cheerful and charismatic left-populist.

While not departing from the Greens’ baseline environmentalism, his most attention-grabbing proposals include withdrawing the UK from NATO, imposing higher taxes on the wealthy, and nationalising various utilities and services. He has also been a vociferous critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Greens’ meteoric polling surge under his leadership has eclipsed an attempted comeback by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose attempt to form a new left-wing political force named Your Party has been dogged by financial and organisational chaos as well as a rift between him and co-founder Zarah Sultana – who, like Polanski, is highly popular with the online left.

Having quit the Labour Party in 2025 over the government’s political direction and its stance on the war in Gaza, she now argues that the British government should “nationalise the entire economy“. It is unclear when Your Party will begin contesting elections.

Extremists on the march

Despite only returning a handful of MPs at the last general election, Reform UK has consistently led nationwide opinion polls for some time and achieved a wave of victories in local elections across England in May 2025. Pollsters estimate that the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system would have a high chance of forming a majority government if an election were held tomorrow.

However, it has suffered from a number of disastrous candidate vetting failures and a steady flow of defections and resignations by both MPs and local councillors, many of whom have left the party after making outlandish or racist public statements.

The party’s ongoing effort to refute allegations of extremism meant it was surprising when it decided to fight the Gorton and Denton contest with Goodwin, who has built a substantial personal following while espousing some of the most extreme views of any major party candidate in recent British political history.

Goodwin first came to public prominence in the 2010s as an academic studying the rise of right-wing populism, particularly Islamophobia. However, in the years following the UK’s departure from the EU, he has transitioned from a critic of right-wing movements to an outright advocate of far-right ideas.

With tens of thousands of followers on social media and Substack, as well as a show on right-wing TV channel GB News, Goodwin argues that immigration from non-European countries and cultures poses an existential threat to British and Western civilisation.

A leading proponent of the widely circulated right-wing claim that “London is over” due to rampant violent crime and the “displacement” of white British residents – claims easily disproven by abundant publicly available evidence – Goodwin has repeatedly advanced explicitly ethnonationalist conceptions of national identity.

In one particularly infamous interview last year, he opined that “Englishness is an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations” and argued that British citizens with recent foreign heritage – including former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak, who was born in Hampshire – cannot reasonably call themselves “English” in a true sense.

However, Goodwin himself and Reform are increasingly under pressure from even more extreme figures on the right, notably expelled Reform MP Rupert Lowe, whose recently founded party Restore claims to have 100,000 members and has attracted the backing of Elon Musk.

Lowe has promised to “remove millions of foreigners who shouldn’t be in our country, and chainsaw back the size of the state, vastly empowering the individual”. He has lately attacked Reform UK for its supposed moderation on “mass deportation” and racial difference in general.

In response, Goodwin – who among other things has promised to “slash welfare for non-Brits” – has retorted to Restore supporters’ mockery by accusing them of providing a haven for “white supremacists, antisemites, racists, and conspiracy theorists”.

Labour on life support

Meanwhile, the result in Gorton and Denton deals a heavy blow to the Labour government, particularly Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whom some pollsters judge to be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of modern British politics depending on the measure used.

Having fallen well behind Reform in the polls – sinking to as low as fourth place in some surveys – the Starmer government has lately been rocked by the release of the so-called Epstein Files, which revealed that its chosen ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, had not only continued a close friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein well after his first conviction but also passed him confidential information while serving as Business Secretary during the 2009 financial crisis.

The ensuing row forced the resignation of Starmer’s chief of staff, and the prime minister was briefly expected to face an immediate leadership challenge. However, the Gorton and Denton vote will be followed in May by simultaneous elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd, and many English local governments, all of which are expected to be disastrous for the Labour Party.

With the exception of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, whose attempt to stand in Gorton and Denton was blocked by the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, no candidate has so far emerged to directly challenge Starmer before the government has those elections behind it.