THE Gorton and Denton by-election is the first major electoral test of a new Green Party: one that is now best-placed to represent the new politics of class in an age of permacrisis and insecurity. The party’s meteoric rise under its new “eco-populist” leader Zack Polanski has crowbarred open the political space for the left. And it has done so because the Greens are a clear rupture with the politics and institutions of Labour and social democracy that have become a barrier to building a genuinely popular, mass party of the left.