Labour reactions to the Greens’ win in Gorton and Denton
JVL Introduction
Mike Phipps of Labour Hub has peformed a valuable service in collecting together a host of critical Labour voices in the immediate aftrmath of the Greens’ triumph in Gorton and Denton.
For completeness sake, we also link to the immediate reaction from the Party’s bunker in Downing Street.
Politics Today reposts the letter sent by Keir Starmer to all Labour MPs putting the Greens success down to opportunistically capitalising on “an endorsement from George Galloway to win over enough voters to push them over the line”.
So the poor, stupid ignorant “people of Gorton and Denton now have a representative who is more interested in dividing people than uniting them”.
But, Keir assures us:”We have to learn lessons from that, and we will.”
And, don’t forget, his dad was a toolmaker.
If you go to the Labour Party website you will still find this lead item: NEW POLL: Only Labour can beat Reform in Gorton and Denton.
RK
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Sat 28 Feb 2026. Read the original here.
Reactions to the Greens’ win in Gorton and Denton
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Great article by Owen Jones in the Guardian.
He says that the Green Party did well to get 13% in the general election as there was not much of a campaign. He also says that Labour’s scare tactics did work to a certain extent:
“Canvassers repeatedly told me they met voters – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – who were frightened into backing Labour to stop Reform. They would have voted Green had they believed victory possible. Next time, those people will.”
So, it looks like Labour managed to avoid a defeat on an even bigger scale.
He also says this which is very encouraging:
“When I visited, I met lifelong Labour voters – many of them older working-class white people regarded as prime Reform recruits – defecting to the Greens.”
Yes Tony, it was a very good article, and it was encouraging that Comments on it were largely supportive rather than full of the usual howls of outrage whenever The Guardian publishes one of Owen’s articles!
From the very beginning the New Labour project was corrupt and corrupting. Starmer is hopefully the end product, but it’s very difficult to see how Labour as a progressive political force will survive what Starmer and Labour Together have done. The scale of the McSweeney/Mandelson/Blair destruction of socialism is so deep rooted in the Party apparatus ….
“And, don’t forget, his dad was a toolmaker.”
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In fact, Keir Starmer’s father was not a toolmaker (he even lies about that). He was, rather, the owner of a small toolmaking company, Oxted Tools, which employed two or three people: https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2025/11/19/starmer-toolmaker/ Nothing wrong with that, in my opinion – but quite a lot wrong with lying.
At a surreal gathering last night at Kings Place –part of Jewish Book Week with Simon Schama and a strange woman called Tanya Gold who, having just covered the Gorton and Denton by-election– Gold got to smear, insult and mischaracterise the Greens to the unanimous approval (bar mine) of the full hall. She named the Greens more than once as anti-Semitic, never once mentioning the name of its new, now-famous leader, a Jew who reclaimed his Jewish name from his parents who had anglicised it! And whipped up a hostility in the hall to the Greens, reinforced by one of the audience who, in his comments said, “if the Greens get in we’re screwed!” Really! Reform was not mentioned once the whole evening. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism was so complete that in his opening remarks Schama spoke of the war in the Gulf (this one, today’s one) as “our” battle, not once acknowledging that that might be a contentious view.
Called In Gaza’s Wake the event never once referenced the slaughter in Gaza (I put my hand up, but was not called); and we (JVL types) were branded ‘neo-Bundists’ offering a fig-leaf to anti-Semitism…
Steven Taylor- agee completely, but there are still plenty of MPs and cabinet members fully aligned along that particular axis of evil (McSweeny/Mandelson/Blair) and at least one of these despicable people, Streeting is angling to replace Starmer. I think the Labour Party is gone for good, and as a one time passionate supporter, I think it cannot go soon enough.
The Labour Party is unsalvageable. After two years of complicity in genocide it is clear that the vast majority of the parliamentary party are either enthusiastic racists, cynical opportunists, or cowards lacking any shred of moral fibre. There are perhaps a couple of dozen at most who don’t quite fit into one of these categories – let’s not quibble about the details. On the other hand the parliamentary party is now irretrievably and constitutionally divorced from its rapidly diminishing band of vacillating and demoralised party members. The sooner Labour is electorally crushed and disappears the better the prospects for socialist ideas to be expressed and to prosper, whether in parliamentary representation or through organised mass extra-parliamentary pressure.
Mike Phipps’s resumé in the final two paragraphs above shows that he appears incapable of grasping the above. Almost a year ago he displayed the same wishful thinking in a Labour Hub piece also published by JVL.
https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/article/a-deception-without-precedent-in-british-politics/
In my detailed critical comment beneath that piece, I used exactly the same description as above of the composition of the parliamentary party, and noted that “this is a party of mafiosi which is now wedded to oligarchic capital and is as grave a threat to humanity as either of its two ‘rightwing’ rivals”. Unfortunately there were many at that time, including Mike Phipps, who could not grasp this. After a further year of complicity in genocide and the Starmer gang’s rapid erosion of freedom of speech, fortunately there are now somewhat fewer, but to judge by this article there are still far too many.
I am unconvinced that they would have won if Andy Burnham had been allowed to stand; it might have been a tighter race but there are too many things that Labour has got wrong in their desperate attempts to win Reform voters over to Labour. Starmer’s response is at best tone deaf. But I, for one,; am not mourning the demise of Labour….