Holly Valance, Aaron Banks, Rod Stewart, Robert Jenrick, Derek Chisora, Christopher Horborne, Bonnie Blue, Suella Braverman, Charles Bronson, Tommy Ten-Names, Nigel Farage… your boy took one hell of a beating.
Holly Valance though? If you thought her singing was like auto-tuned auditory war crimes and her acting was like a hostage situation with lines, what could you possibly think about the Australian’s choice of British politicians?
I couldn’t care less either.
Labour’s red wall begins to fall under Starmer
Gorton & Denton has been a Labour fortress, in one form or another, for a hundred years. Indeed, the fortress was so reliably red it would make Stalin blush.
Yes, the trouncing of Farage and his crypto-racists was utterly delicious. This is a northern working class constituency and it was ripe for a Reform UK picking. But Reform was only ever in this position because Starmer’s genius centrist strategy alienated the left so hard that the actual fascists started looking like the “change” option.
Gorton & Denton wasn’t just a blip. It was the death-rattle of Starmerism, echoing through every red wall constituency. The only thing more humiliating for Labour would be if the detestable Starmer himself turned up in a hi-vis vest holding a “FOR SALE” sign.
This was the Green’s first ever Westminster by-election win, their first MP in the North of England. And it came with a massive 27% swing from Labour. This wasn’t a protest vote but a proper, majority-delivering “fuck you” with 4,400+ votes clear.
Hannah Spencer just turned a safe Labour seat into flourishing Green turf. Voters preferred a working class woman who believes in rent controls, public ownership, and not boiling the planet over a suit-wearing focus-group zombie.
A plumber just proved you can win big by actually giving a shit about people and planet, instead of donor dinners and three-word soundbites.
Is anyone really that surprised?
Labour is as extinct as a dodo in a coal mine
There is no longer such a thing as a safe Labour seat. The Green party can absolutely win anywhere.
Labour has spent decades treating its traditional constituencies like that one armchair in you gran’s house – faded red, smelling faintly of defeat for the other parties, and are pretty much guaranteed to stay Labour forever. Seats with more than half of the overall vote, misguided generational loyalty, the working-class heartlands, ethnic minority strongholds. Labour had the lot.
Safe seats? They’re as extinct as a dodo in a coal mine.
Labour under Starmer has spent the last couple of years triangulating so fucking hard they’ve almost become the world’s most boring spreadsheet.
Austerity-lite budgets, slow-walking on green investment, hateful immigration rhetoric, foreign policy positions that alienate the progressive youth and Muslim communities, and a general vibe of “we’re not Corbyn, honest!”
Disillusioned left-leaning voters – young people, urban graduates, eco-conscious super recycling types, those absolutely furious about Gaza or the cost of greed crisis – aren’t staying home anymore.
They are going to the Greens in droves, especially where the Greens have built serious local machines.
Starmer’s response was almost as embarrassing as the defeat itself. He muttered something about being disappointed and he will “keep fighting the extremes” despite coming third place in a seat that has been held by his party since before most voters were born.
In reality, Labour just got curb-stomped by the common sense left and the extreme right in the same graveyard. That’s not fighting, Mr Starmer, that’s being the pinata at a funeral.
Time to throw out that old armchair
The swing from Labour to the Greens was a biblical 27.5 percentage points. If this swing was replicated nationwide at a general election, Polanski would be finishing the night with more than 100 seats, and Labour wouldn’t just be facing a bad night.
They would be experiencing total extinction.
Labour is no longer the default party for the left because the party under Keir Starmer has spent the last couple of years systematically alienating every voter who ever give a shit about progressive values. Whilst the Greens have quietly built a machine that actually delivers on them.
The default left party isn’t the one that promises “change” in a shitty PowerPoint to Labour-friendly hacks and staffers. It’s the one that delivers it with a sledgehammer in hope.
Labour’s entire campaign strategy was “only we can stop Reform UK and Farage”. After Gorton & Denton, that lie is well and truly exposed and dead. Voters now see that a Green vote isn’t going to be a wasted vote of protest – it’s winnable, even in the reddest of red heartlands.
Labour’s red wall is now a crumbling ruin overtaken by aggressive green kudzu that grows faster than the excuses flying out of No. 10.
If Labour doesn’t drastically change course, and I am not expecting them to, the Green’s won’t just nibble at the edges, they’ll start carving off whole chunk. Anywhere.
Even your Gran’s armchair might not be safe anymore.
Featured image via the Canary
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