But if he’s a hero abroad, Sánchez is more often cast as a villain at home — an opportunist who has clung to power at the expense of Spain’s national interest. Sánchez has been the Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) since July 2014 and in office since June 2018. In that time, he’s survived Covid, the economic shock that followed, and the rise of the hard Right. Britain in the same period has churned through five prime ministers — including one who lasted just 49 days — and the economy has stagnated alongside its sewage-filled rivers.

What makes this period of stability even more surprising is that for the majority of Sánchez’s time as PM, he has governed in coalition. Since his re-election in 2023, he has presided over what sections of the Spanish press term a “Frankenstein government”. Whether it’s truly monstrous depends on your political affiliation — and perhaps your appetite for the gothic — but stitched together it certainly is.  To pass laws, PSOE has been forced into a coalition with a Left-wing alliance of smaller parties called Sumar, a verb which means “to add up”, though “make up the numbers” might be more apt. But even with their support, Sánchez falls short of a majority. So he must also go cap in hand for votes from separatist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia that want independence from Madrid. It’s the alliance with these groups that’s proved particularly controversial. Unpopular concessions to the separatists have followed, including, most bitterly of all, an amnesty for the organizers of the illegal 2017 referendum on Catalan independence. Outside Catalonia and the Basque Country, support for independence is tiny and the subject provokes anger, even from liberals. Try saying “let them decide” in a Madrid bar and watch how the mood changes.

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So, many predicted this hodgepodge government couldn’t last. Yet it has, and Sánchez is winning admirers for the striking clarity of his values. So how on earth has he done it? 

For one thing, the Spanish system makes it hard to remove prime ministers. A government can only be toppled through a “constructive vote of no confidence”. That means opponents must agree on a replacement before they can bring the leader down.

Sánchez is also being helped by the fear of the hard Right, according to Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University of Madrid. “Many parties back Sánchez not because they want his policies, but because they want to prevent the alternative,” says Simón. He’s referring to the emergence of the hard-Right party Vox, which has reshaped Spanish politics and coarsened the discourse, especially around immigration. In recent election campaigns, you occasionally hear the line Si te gusta el jamón, vota Vox — if you like ham, vote Vox — a charming refrain that left many wondering whether they really liked ham after all. The prospect of a coalition between Vox and the center-Right Partido Popular (PP) also helps explain Sánchez’s staying power.

But part of the answer lies in something that is almost alien to British politics, with its entrenched two-party structure, but which seems increasingly likely to define Britain’s next election: the politics of the bloc. Until recently, Spain looked very much like the UK — dominated for decades by just two political forces, PSOE on the Left and PP on the Right. That system cracked open after the 2008 financial crisis and fractured further with the rise of Vox. Sánchez has proved remarkably adept at navigating this new, uneven terrain. He cannily framed the 2023 election as a simple choice: vote for him, or get Vox. And for all the anger over his Faustian pact with the Catalan separatists, he has avoided giving them what they really want: a legal independence referendum.

The question for Britain is whether something similar may be happening at home. The recent Gorton and Denton by-election offered one of the clearest signs yet of the fragmentation of the two-party system. Together, Labour and the Greens took more than two-thirds of the vote, suggesting that in parts of the country a progressive bloc already outweighs the conservative one — music to the ears of those hoping a progressive alliance may finally be taking shape.  

A recent More in Common survey asked which parties voters would tactically block, and found that 38% of Britons would vote against Reform. Green voters were the most likely to say they would vote tactically against Reform, a view also shared by Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters. Britain’s electoral system may make formal coalitions less likely than in Spain, but informal dealmaking may already be beginning to take shape to prevent the alternative. Although progressive voters appear warm to the idea of cooperation between Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, the party machines are, for now, dead against it. Starmer’s sharp criticism of the Greens’ “sectarian” campaigning in Gorton and Denton hardly suggests he’s looking to them as a future bedfellow. And given the amount of energy he’s spent stamping out any whiff of association with the Corbyn-era Left, an alliance with the Greens of Zack Polanski would, surely, feel like the end of days.

Nevertheless, the comparison runs deeper than just voting patterns. Spain, like Britain, is a union state where the tensions pulling it apart feel familiar to anyone versed in Scottish or Welsh politics. A couple of years ago I invited my delightful Basque neighbors over for a drink. When I asked about their politics, they said they’d rather not say. It just “divides people”. As the penny dropped, I wondered briefly if this amiable couple were really cut out to be separatists. We changed the subject — Gibraltar, if I remember correctly — and got on with the rest of a pleasant evening. But in a very real way, it’s this ability to accommodate such differences that makes Sánchez’s coalition so striking: it forces the separatists to engage with the practicalities of governing, rather than just heckling from the sidelines.

“Sánchez has a remarkable political instinct,” says Simón. “His leadership style is extremely flexible and adapts quickly to changing circumstances.” Sánchez once ruled out an alliance with the separatists — until it became politically necessary. That flexibility can make him seem like a cynical operator, disguised as the handsome new doctor in a telenovela. But while the bloc holds, it also allows him to assert its values with apparent conviction. Sánchez excels at giving his base the signals it wants to hear. Time and again, he uses his power to claim the political banners that define his bloc: feminist legislation, defense of migrants, and forthright criticism of Israel’s military action in Gaza. 

And now his four-word rebuttal to Donald Trump. No a la guerra is not only a masterclass in clear communication, but a calculated callback to the Spanish Left’s opposition to the Iraq War. That conflict left a deep scar in Spain and brought down José María Aznar’s Right-wing PP government. Days before an election, ministers blamed the Basque separatists ETA for deadly train bombings, rather than the actual culprits, Al-Qaeda. 

Sánchez understands that in a multi-party system you can’t afford to be Diet Coke — you have to appear to be the real thing. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is so preoccupied trying to prevent the drift of Labour voters to Reform that he struggles to communicate his values at all. On Iran, he seemed to plant the exact flag that progressives, still wounded by Britain’s own bitter experience in Iraq, so desperately wanted to see. But then he hoiked it from the ground like a caddy at Mar-a-Lago, leaving everyone to wonder if a flag had been planted at all. Still, he says, “we will not be drawn into the wider war.”

To be fair, Sánchez is on safer ground with his anti-war stance. A recent poll showed more than two thirds of Spaniards are against the war in Iran. In the UK, opinion is foggier — a YouGov poll found 49% opposed and 28% in favor, with the rest unsure. But Sánchez made his call at the outset of the war, before any polling had been published. Why? Because he doesn’t need to hedge his bets. He knows exactly what his bloc wants to hear.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Sánchez is more adept at dealing with the reality of multi-party politics. Spain’s two-party system started to fracture long before Britain’s. During the protests that hit the country following the 2008 crash, pork products again entered the political arena as the public branded politicians chorizos, todos, or “a bunch of crooks”. From the anger emerged the new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, that shattered the old duopoly of PSOE and PP. 

The Right derided Podemos’s unconventional pony-tailed leader Pablo Iglesias as a “perroflauta” —  a brilliantly compressed insult for the Spanish breed of crusty found on town square benches with a dog (perro) and a recorder (flauta), and a repertoire consisting mainly of Manu Chao. But among Spanish progressives, excitement was through the roof. Many — including a friend of mine with three houses — joined the cause. A new energy swept through the Left, anticipating the early days of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in the US. Long-dismissed socialist ideas suddenly felt fresh, especially to a younger generation that had never heard them from the mouths of mainstream politicians. Within a few years of its creation, Podemos had won millions of votes and dozens of seats. 

Like Ciudadanos, Podemos has now faded. However, the blocs these parties helped create remain, and it’s between these sides that the political battle is now being fought. On the one side, you have Sánchez’s socialists and their regional allies; on the other, the conservative parties of PP and Vox. 

Of course, the comparison of Spain and the UK has its limits, not least the different electoral systems. And bloc politics is far from ideal. As Simón points out, it has some big drawbacks: increased polarization and making national agreements far harder to reach.

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But both Spain and Great Britain are dealing with fragmented politics and Sánchez is the master of the bloc. Far from being unstable, his coalition has proved more durable than Britain’s recent majority governments and forces him to take clear positions that resonate with his base. Across Europe, politics is now reorganizing around competing visions of migration, identity and the state. For a country where a night out rarely begins until midnight, Spain has arrived uncharacteristically early to the bloc party. British politicians may soon discover that survival depends less on commanding a majority than on mastering Sánchez’s delicate art of holding the bloc together. 

For Starmer in particular, if he can’t find a way to appeal to his own base, he risks looking less like Hugh Grant’s PM and more like a lonely teenager on a big stage clutching a sign that reads “Vote for Pedro”. 

In the intervening years, with his bombastic style, and even his body language, Farage contributed to a fundamental reordering of British politics. The Clacton MP is sharp and his enthusiasm for a pint conveys an everyman bonhomie. More profoundly, though, he channels something lying deep within the national psyche: merriment. It’s no surprise, then, that his personality has so easily translated into a huge following on TikTok.

And as his star has risen exponentially, so too has his party’s — on current form, it looks likely to form the next government. All the same, what fueled Farage’s rise may not last forever. Reform’s political brand — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — used to be all conviviality and connection, but as the party has expanded, that merriment is increasingly being replaced by something else: whinging.

If anything, Matt Goodwin’s campaign to win the Gorton and Denton by-election was characterized by a complaining doomerism, failing to say much — if anything — that was positive about the seat, let alone the country. This constant focus on national decline undoubtedly bears fruit when building a popular Substack or YouTube channel. But if you’re trying to win over voters who can’t name the Home Secretary, you need something more hopeful. And even four days after his defeat, Goodwin was still at it. Nicknamed “Badloss” by some of his critics, he was relentless in his complaints that Britain’s electoral system was just as bad as Lebanon and Sierra Leone. Not that many people noticed, though. Let’s face it, if you lose by more than 4,000 votes, and proceed to say you were cheated of a deserved win, people are bound to switch off.

Indeed Goodwin’s failure, and Reform’s immediate response — imagine Donald Trump’s conspiratorial “Stop the Steal” campaign delivered with the hamminess of a Carry On film — is all the stranger given the Gorton result was objectively strong for both man and party. Pushing Labour into third anywhere in the north west is no mean feat. Goodwin simply lost to a strong candidate, Hannah Spencer, in a difficult race. So as the smoke cleared in a testing by-election, Reform sounded like losers.

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Spencer, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different as she shrugged off the negativity thrown her way by both Labour and Reform. A Bolton-born plumber, she focused throughout on bread-and-butter issues: stopping fly-tipping, cleaning up litter, fixing the housing crisis and sprucing up high streets. During the campaign she even completed a plastering qualification. As she stood to deliver her victory speech, focusing less on ideology than daily hardships, Goodwin will have known that these were subjects that would appeal to his target voters: the Greens were no longer the po-faced identitarian liberals who like to tut at your package holiday. At that moment, Reform must have realised that its pitch as the only credible alternative to the uniparty was lost.

But what happened to Reform’s mojo? Whether you blame the veteran Tory influx, Goodwin’s performance anxiety, the outsourcing of strategy to consultants — it is clear that the party has lost its “aura”. This seemed pretty clear when I was canvassing in Gorton, and was repeatedly and politely told by party canvassers that they weren’t permitted to speak to journalists. Nor was Goodwin particularly keen on individual interviews. Yet this is a mass party and, managed correctly, its membership should be its greatest asset. Suddenly, the party machine feels preachy, with a very New Labour feel. Warm ale is out; a pint of control freakery, please.

This relinquishing of authenticity by Reform has started to be reflected in polling. At the weekend, as the Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members in England and Wales for the first time, FindOutNow placed them in second place; on Monday, Lord Ashcroft’s survey put them at third, just three points behind Reform, with almost 90 seats.

Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the center, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high.

Traditionally, many of the party’s would-be supporters figured a vote for the party would be a vote for environmentally friendly policies. When Caroline Lucas was the party’s sole representative at Westminster, the Greens were able to push climate-related issues into the political realm in a remarkable way, from fracking to net zero. It only took one MP.

As the party has increased its MPs to four, the modern Greens have made the political weather on everything from renationalization to Gaza. Today, its MPs function as committed campaigners on strongly held policies at a national level — as well as effective constituency representatives at a local one. This understandably appeals to many of those voters disappointed by the traditional parties.

It helps, too, that Green supporters care about such a range of issues — from electoral reform to rewilding beavers to rent caps to closer ties with Europe. Some simply want to exert pressure on the Labour Party to move further Left. This broad, semi-coherent theory of change sees the party as an expression of social movements as much as an electoral vehicle.

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One downside is that the party risks becoming too successful. The uncomfortable truth is that too many first-place finishes mean the Greens will need to offer more than a grab-bag of progressive causes. For now, though, such problems remain in the future. My suspicion is that few Green voters expect Polanski to be the next prime minister. Many may not even want such an outcome, preferring the party to be a junior coalition member in a progressive government. Indeed, when I interviewed Polanski last week, soon after the Gorton and Denton result, he merely expressed an ambition to lead a party of several dozen difficult MPs in Parliament.

This, incidentally, is also why anti-Green scare tactics, from both Labour and the Right, will ultimately fail. It’s easy to make radicalism feel like an existential threat when it risks actually leading a government — as with Corbyn. That isn’t the case with Polanski. Certainly, comparing a by-election win in Manchester with Iran’s Islamic Revolution strikes most Britons as unhinged. In any case, it’s hard to present an organisation as much of a danger when all its MPs can fit in the back of a London cab.

Ironically, this anti-establishment vibe is also what is most winning about Polanski’s Greens. The party and its leader manage to couple radical purpose with fun — which, in a strange way, is reminiscent of Farage at his best. While I had to grab a few hours of sleep after Thursday’s result, Polanski stayed up all night. The following evening, he appeared on The Last Leg, full of verve and enthusiasm. This relentless energy is invaluable in politics.

Tramping around the sodden streets of Levenshulme a few weeks ago, with all those houses proudly displaying Green party placards in their front gardens, it was strikingly obvious that Reform’s success had opened the door to new possibilities for the Left. After all, if we are suddenly predicting that Nigel Farage can go from YouTube to No. 10, something previously viewed as impossible, then what’s so outlandish about the Greens overtaking Labour?

In terms of what is politically possible, Nigel Farage has — again — done more than blow the bloody doors off. Only this time it won’t all be to his own advantage.

Having finished a poor third in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Prime Minister is again blaming voters — this time for falling for the Greens’ divisive sectarianism. Even as oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapses after the bombing of Iran, jeopardizing vital imports, it is impossible for light from the outside world to penetrate the passivity of his consciousness.

But the realities that have crushed the British political class render the outcome of last week’s by-election a bigger event than the cataclysmic mismatch of Starmer’s ambition and his utter unsuitability for political office. The four political forces that destroyed Labour in Gorton and Denton originally materialized during Tony Blair’s second term, and neither Labour nor the Conservatives has ever really recovered.

The first of these, and the overriding one, is the deterioration in Britain’s economic performance. In her victory speech on Friday morning, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, said that she did not think “it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life”. Once “working hard … g[o]t you something … a house, a nice life, holidays. But now, working hard, what does that get you?”

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The coming rare earths war

By Helen Thompson

It was apt language. As the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, foresaw two decades ago, the years of “NICE” – Non-Inflationary Continuous Economic Growth – are long over.

Rising Asian oil consumption driven by China’s economic transformation ended the relatively benign world economic conditions that prevailed between the mid-Eighties and the early 2000s. As oil and gas production in the North Sea declined, Britain was particularly vulnerable in the emerging energy world.

From 2004, Britain became a net energy importer. To manage a structural energy-shaped trade deficit without dependence on volatile international capital flows, a state needs a strong export base. But Britain had a de-industrialized economy and was already running a sizable trade deficit. The past five years of high gas prices have accentuated this weakness. Without coal or hydropower, and with a declining nuclear sector, Britain is highly dependent for electricity on importing natural gas. Amplified by policy and network charges, our industrial electricity prices are the highest of any G7 economy. This burden has decimated the chemical sector, and contributed to Britain registering a record trade deficit in goods in 2025. A report by the CBI and Energy UK, published this month, reported that 40% of manufacturing firms have cut back investment because of high energy costs. Without some relief, NICE retreats ever further into the past.

The second force at work against Labour in Gorton and Denton was the penetration of British politics by the Middle East. Across the coalition mobilized by the Greens, Gaza hurt Labour, just as the Iraq War helped lose Labour 11 seats to the Liberal Democrats at the 2005 general election — including Manchester Withington, one part of which is now in the Gorton and Denton constituency. A year later, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was the inciting incident for Tony Blair’s early departure from office.

As strong support for Israel was part of the New Labour project, that internal party coup was a symbolic moment. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Starmer’s attempt to replicate Blair’s playbook in opposition, by staging a confrontation with the Left of the party, centered on suspending Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism. But as progressive politics since Iraq has been bound to objecting to Israeli and US policy in the Middle East, Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks casts a very long shadow. A Labour government cannot sit in the position New Labour did when there was genuine hope of a two-state peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians without shedding votes to its Left. Nor can it chase those votes without the risk of embroiling Labour again in the antisemitism crisis of the Corbyn years.

The third long-standing force punishing Labour in Gorton and Denton is the graduate debt borne by the millennial and early Generation Z urban precariat. Labour has had problems with university tuition fees since 2004, when, having ruled out any change to university funding in its 2001 manifesto, Blair’s government legislated for English universities to charge up to £3,000 a year: from 2006-7, students would pay by loans, rather than the previous means-tested upfront charges. Labour’s majority on the bill was five, with Scottish Labour MPs delivering the necessary votes, even though the fee regime would only apply in England. While it was the Liberal Democrats who took the political blame for the next hike in tuition fees, in 2012, it is the young graduate voters wishing to identify with Labour who bear the brunt of this fee regime — and which has, with higher inflation, resulted in higher interest loans.

If this cohort were not already resentful enough, the Chancellor’s last budget froze the threshold for repayment for three years to patch up the fiscal gap caused by the welfare debacle in the summer. Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s presumption that these voters have nowhere else to go has been blown apart by Zack Polanski’s leadership of the Greens. Indeed, with graduate urban millennials having constituted the social base for Corbyn’s movement-based Labour party, the Greens are now the very version of Corbyn’s Labour that Starmer thought he had slain — this time with the right generational leader for the cause.

The final force at work is the one that delivered Reform 28.7% of the vote in inner-city Manchester. Quite simply, Labour can no longer be the party of the working class. For two decades the party has tried to face both ways or, more precisely, danced one way and then, shortly after, the other, on those issues that have alienated much of the working class from both main parties. Blair’s second government was sufficiently complacent about these voters to eschew transition arrangements for the right to work in Britain of EU citizens from eastern Europe, even as it was sufficiently worried about rising Euroscepticism to offer a referendum on the constitutional treaty. Since Shabana Mahmood became Home Secretary, Starmer’s government has moved quite decisively on migration and asylum, but she cannot win the argument in Labour that she is right to have done so.

Come May, whoever will be leader of the Labour Party has two forms of nostalgia on offer: try to restage the Brexit referendum, as is Starmer’s obvious aim; or take up Polanski’s tacit offer of a “progressive” alliance as a backdoor return to the domestic and foreign-policy Corbynism. Each is an attempt to escape from the realities that face Britain: a deindustrialized economy highly dependent on inward international capital flows that cannot offer high earnings, or home ownership, to those many millennial or Generation Z graduates, and the decline of Europe in a world of great power competition between the United States, China, and Russia.

Britain cannot reset relations with Europe by dint of one faction in the political divide using the issue as identity politics. Treating the EU as a means to bash the Conservatives, while simultaneously opting out of anything in EU membership that was too demanding, was one of the ways by which New Labour opened a path to Brexit. Either British politicians accept what is required to integrate with the EU and find a way of persuading a broad coalition of the electorate of its merits, or they have to work out a serious alternative European strategy that engages with US, Chinese, and Russian power.

However deeply a set of British voters cares about what happens in the Middle East, Britain cannot influence US or Israeli policy. Starmer’s unwillingness to let the US use the Diego Garcia airbase or RAF Fairford for the initial attack on Iran made no difference at all to the outcome. Grandstanding with Washington, and then equivocating afterwards about the Iranian regime’s fate, is no strategy for deciding what approach to take to the US-China-Russia competition in a world in which the Trump administration is laying assault to China’s energy vulnerabilities and bidding to reopen Russia for US oil companies.

Under Polanski, the Greens have an answer to the geopolitical question Starmer evades: break with Washington and leave Nato. But the corollary of that for any European state has to be accommodation with Russia over Ukraine, closer ties with China in the tech and resource war, taking more responsibility in the Red Sea, and ending energy dependency on the US. The first two are not appealing to at least parts of the progressive coalition, the third to any section of it, and the last would presently be impossible without a reset with Russia.

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Where energy is concerned, there is a Green vacuum. In the 2019 general election, a Green New Deal to achieve an alternative energy system that realized net zero carbon emissions during the 2030s was the centerpiece of Corbyn’s Labour. Polanski calls himself an “eco populist”, but any such ambition was near entirely missing from the Greens’ campaign in Gorton and Denton.

Whatever the attempted distractions, energy is where the underlying material reality of the British political crisis can no longer be avoided. If the next election is heading for an identity and generational contest between Left and Right coalitions, in which the Greens and Reform define the stakes, Net Zero as an energy strategy will be a consequential substantive divide. As much as it was driven by climate change, Net Zero 2050 was a bid to solve Britain’s problem of foreign energy dependency and the burden that creates for a deindustrialized economy. But as a legal commitment, Net Zero constrains policy-making in the energy world as it is, and insulates decisions from voters’ worries about the cost of living. Britain cannot substitute wind and solar for gas on an hour-by-hour basis without grid-level storage, and it cannot electrify much of present hydro-carbon consumption without subsidies for electric vehicles and a housing stock better suited to heat pumps.

The fantasy that the British economy can grow faster without a realistic energy policy is causing another round of deindustrialization. Britain can prioritize Net Zero for climate reasons or it can have an energy strategy. It has been another of the deceits of Starmer’s administration that there is no choice to be made. Already, former Labour ministers and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change are calling for drilling in the North Sea to be kept going for as long as possible. Now, as the fallout from Iran spreads through oil markets, those demands will intensify. There is no escape from choosing. Accelerated by events that no British government can meaningfully influence, the next act of our political crisis will likely force the long-coming energy reckoning. If, come the summer, the Labour leader, guided by Gorton and Denton, follows the Greens, the party will push what remains of New Labour, however unpalatably, to the same side as Reform in a battle over Net Zero.

There will be no putting Labour back together again, any more than there has been a remaking of the Conservatives after their humiliation in 2024. There never was a way back to the old version of NICE, any more than there was a way to reinvent the entire energy base of Britain within three decades. What is still required is a path forward informed by the real world within and beyond.

Despite Labour’s propagandizing that the result was on a knife-edge, and the polls suggesting a three way split between the Greens, Labour and Reform, it wasn’t even close: Spencer won 60% more votes than the hapless Labourite Angeliki Stogia. Reform was a distant second to Labour’s disastrous third. (The Tories didn’t even keep their deposit.) Yet this was never Farage-friendly territory: too young, too inner-urban, too diverse. It was not Matt Goodwin’s to lose. But the ruling party has been cannibalized from two directions in a safe seat, its coalition riven in a way that defies repair.

Divorces are rarely amicable. This one least of all. Labour’s fractured base is represented perfectly across this Mancunian constituency. In Denton, to the east, the old, now very much post-industrial white working-class; and to the west, in Gorton, the Muslim and ethnic minority vote, living cheek-by-jowl with the declassé elements of Britain’s urban liberals. Here was the tripartite alliance of the contemporary Left in all its glory, fused together awkwardly just like the constituency itself, with a motorway in the middle. Labour has not lost an election here since 1931. Yet today, each of its tribes has found its own reasons to despise Starmer’s Labour: a project that was never comfortable in its own skin.

Perhaps it needn’t have been this way. When candidate selection for the by-election took place in the distant days of Morgan McSweeney, the party saw fit to block Andy Burnham — a man pollsters have consistently shown to be the most popular Labour politician in the country. Someone who might have united the disparate factions. But despite the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s epic support in the area, he was blocked from running to “end the leadership psychodrama”. The humiliated party may regret that move as Starmer, in the coming days, shifts from “dead-man-walking”, staggering on until May, to simply “dead man”.

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Labour has presented voters with a heaving table of grievances from which they’ve filled their plates: Palestine, small boats, winter fuel, Shabana Mahmood’s punitive asylum proposals, proposed disability cuts, the cost of living, Labour’s repeated tendency to excuse proximity to paedophilia on the part of their factional allies. Each of these might have been carefully designed to alienate a completely different member of the famous “the Labour family”. And so the party is being consumed like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp.

There will, of course, be no kiss between Reform and the Greens when they reach the middle: the space between Faragism and Polanskism is a cultural chasm. Once the Labour family was united under a social-democratic banner. Now, two sides face each other with a mix of bemusement and horror. The Greens have proved they can hegemonize the Left vote, and Reform the Right, each offering a brand of unapologetic, insurgent, abrasive politics that eschews the old model of median-voter triangulation in favor of brash authenticity.

And what can tired old Labour do, an Edwardian party saddled with a late-20th-century politics, facing the archetypal entrepreneurs of our peculiar age: the unfiltered, un-focus-grouped model of political communications delivered in short-form vertical videos by men-with-an-iPhone without the mediating influence of the “MSM”. Farage mastered the medium, Polanski has merely tweaked the message — ditch and switch the easy panaceas; mass deportations become a wealth tax; net zero goes from national self-harm to national salvation. In Gorton, if not Denton, this noisy brand of “eco-populism” has been brilliantly effective.

Yesterday, on the ground, Green activists seemed ubiquitous. Levenshulme was a sea of Vote Green posters. A swarm of young enthusiasts asked for cars to honk in support outside the Lidl. Next door, an Afghan flag flapped outside a newsagent. Residents walked down a high street as diverse as any London borough, while a Labour van blared a warning that the Green Party would “teach our children to use drugs including crack and heroin and let our daughters be used for prostitution”. Dirty tricks, perhaps, or simply an exaggerated reflection of the ecologists’ foray into an extreme form of Left libertarianism at odds with the socially conservative instincts of Gorton’s Muslims?

The Green bloc marries ultra-liberal young gentrifiers to often deeply conservative British South Asians. But these quirks — even amid claims of “family voting” breaches in polling stations — don’t matter right now. What matters is vibes, signals and the loose cadences of political affiliation. As the cause of labor has wilted, the bobos and the brothers can get behind the cause of Gaza. The Greens have now staked their claim to the mantle of Britain’s foremost progressive party, with their first seat in the North, in a safe red citadel, trouncing Labour’s always-dubious claim that “only Labour can beat Reform”. Labour is no longer the “stop Reform” tactical option in our fragmenting system. They weren’t in Caerphilly last year, and they weren’t in Gorton and Denton last night. For the Greens now find themselves the acceptable home for the virtuous, the over-educated, the bien pensant opinion-havers. They’re the nice party, for nice people, not the génocidaires or crypto-fascists (notwithstanding the internal tensions over the trans question). “I think everyone should have a nice life, and clearly other people do as well”, Spencer said during her victory speech. That may as well be used as the next manifesto’s epigraph.

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By Jonny Ball

Just before the polls closed yesterday, I found a disgruntled Labour member from outside the constituency. They were despondent. Who would they have voted for if they lived in the area? “Green, obviously. I’m not a monster”, they say with a self-deprecating laugh. It’s a reaction instructive of many people’s complicated relationship with their own party: they stay only out of habit, pining after a Reformation of Labour’s “broad church” that may now never come.

When the historian George Dangerfield wrote his interwar classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England, he blamed the decline of the once-great Liberal Party on “three wild strands”: “hysterical” proto-feminists, demanding women’s suffrage; “unreasonable” organized labor, demanding a greater share of the national income; and the Irish, demanding Home Rule. Today, with Labour seemingly in its death throes, the party established to represent the labor interest faces its own three strands of rebellion: problems far more structural than the Suffragettes or John Redmond.

The working class no longer has the manufacturing industries or trade unions that bound it so tightly to Labour politics, even as they balk at the repeated importation of low-wage workers from abroad. The educated middle classes find their children locked out of the housing market with stagnant wages, and are wedded to the mores of very online contemporary cultural progressivism. And, finally, the biraderi culture that once guaranteed wins for Labour, with its tight ethnic and clan-based voter-blocs, has broken down. The tripartite Left alliance is over.

Perhaps social democracy was merely a 20th-century phenomenon, a force for the era of mass production lines, trade unions and the Cold War. Starmer certainly can’t save what’s left of it, and Gorton and Denton makes it uncertain that even a politician with skills, charisma, and determined force of will can either. No contenders on the Labour benches have the communicative abilities or political dexterity to put a broken cross-class alliance together. Hannah Spencer might cheer that “we do things differently” in Manchester — but this city’s future could soon be the country’s too, with the death of Labour England writ large.

Once a safe seat — Labour won 50.8% of the vote 18 months ago — today, such things have evaporated. This by-election was called after its MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned on the grounds of ill health (he is 51). He was previously suspended from Labour for writing in a local MPs WhatsApp group: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you.” As a paradigm of our fracturing democracy, it can’t be bettered.

Polling currently has Labour coming third, and Reform or the Greens winning, because blood will have blood. Last year, Reform took nearby Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by just six votes: and they didn’t have the help of the Greens, who this week are standing Hannah Spencer, a plumber with dancer’s legs, golden trouser suits and soaring, raging cadences. She begins most speeches with references to herself, because this is the era of politics as personal journey. Reform has Matt Goodwin, an academic-turned-broadcaster who vibrates like a tuning fork, trying to project the kind of wracked reasonableness that used to be native to Tory wets. He is helped by the presence of Advance UK, a Christian Nationalist party to the right of Reform, because they make Reform look like humanists.

But this feels less like a by-election than the frenzied, and thoughtless, herald of a coming war: extremists meeting themselves. To mirror it, this is a constituency in two halves. The west — poorer, nearer Manchester, and with a large Muslim population — is a forest of Green Party signs: 30% of this constituency is Muslim. The Muslim Vote campaign (“Peace in Palestine, Equality in the UK”) has endorsed the Greens: social conservatives will vote with trans advocates to punish Labour for Gaza. To the east, white working-class Denton is all Reform-leaning voters and Union Jacks. And here, in the Red Lion pub, unofficial Reform HQ, they sing karaoke with alcohol-fueled nostalgia. They seem to think in ballads, as if these songs were their politics. A large man rises, and sings:

Home is a love that I miss very much
The past has been bottled and labeled with love

But no one is listening.

An aged veteran talks about betrayal as he slowly gets drunk. He won’t let me record him or even take notes. “You know how I feel,” he says, in mitigation; and it’s true that a lot of people here talk as if they have read the same Facebook posts. The talking points — immigration; stupid Net Zero; the death of British culture — are identical. He shows me a photograph taken after a military parade. It is of him, and three friends. One went home from the parade, he says, and hanged himself. His drinking partner, a woman in her sixties, tells me: “We [the white working class] don’t matter.” She says this very deliberately, hitting the table with the side of her hand. She repeats it — “We. Don’t. Matter.” — and every time she says it, she hits the table. Then, in a blink, she is crying. “You don’t know my story. I’ve taken it from men. I’ve brought up three kids. I’ve worked every day. I’m not represented.”

The hustings in St Andrew’s Church, in Levenshulme, are sullen and angry. Ten candidates are here, including a representative from the Communist League, which feels oddly appropriate — if we are re-enacting the Weimar Republic, let’s do it right — and an Asda cashier standing as a Libertarian who behaves like he has won a prize. Only Sir Oink-A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party is missing, as if it is too trivial for him. But it is hard to mock politics when it feels so joyless.

The candidates sit by a sign that says, “Fishers of Men”. The audience leans Green, but there are three Terfs in the front row supporting the Conservative candidate Charlotte Cadden, a former police detective who is skilled and sensible and looks exhausted.

They give opening statements which, consciously or not, evoke home. Green (Hannah Spencer): “I’ve probably fitted a toilet for some of you.” Labour (Angeliki Stogia, interpreting JFK): “I came here from Greece over 13 years ago, and I found a city that did not ask where I came from.” Liberal Democrat (Jackie Pearcey): “This is a great place to live. I’ve lived here long enough I’ve even managed to pay off the mortgage.” The response to Labour is tepid. Between, the “Dear resident, Fuck your bins”, message, the cost of living, and Gaza, her support has shriveled to a nub.

This constituency has common problems but despite this, and possibly because of it, they decide to talk about Jews for 40 minutes. This by-election deals in fairy politics: the theoretical, the fantastical, and the mad. Jew hatred is only one of many harbingers of collapse to choose from: and Gaza is a continent away. The first question: what is the candidate’s response to the rise of antisemitism since October 7, 2023?  Cadden, the Tory, replies: “I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community.” Goodwin finds it “utterly depressing”. Spencer blames “divisive politics and politicians who spread hatred and vile stories about individual groups”.

None of them has anything valuable — that is, analytical — to say about antisemitism, other than they don’t like it: they speak to air. But when a man asks: “Do you agree with the majority of genocide scholars that there’s a genocide in Gaza?” that air turns febrile. Jackie Pearcey says it comes, “pretty close”. Spencer says, “We do not need to wait a decade, or however long it takes for a tribunal to tell us that what is happening in front of our eyes is a genocide.” Angeliki Stogia, trying to hold the seat for the governing party, says in her tiny, gentle voice “it is heart-breaking”, and cries.

The SDP candidate Sebastian Moore, a ruddy boy, says, slowly and with genuine curiosity, “I don’t know if our politics has always been like this. Maybe people that are slightly older than me can tell me. What’s happening in the Middle East, whether I term it a genocide or not, has no bearing on the tragedy that is unfolding there. So, no, I’m not going to answer your question.”

There are heckles, particularly towards Goodwin, and, among some candidates, an overarching contempt for each other. Goodwin accuses Spencer of misrepresenting his tax policy; Spencer accuses Goodwin of misrepresenting her drug policy.

Real politics is soporific here – you can sense the room flagging. But the trans question, or rather statement — the Government is transphobic — ignites it again. Spencer says, inevitably, “I think I was here when the Levenshulme Pride took place!” The Liberal Democrat says she believes that, “trans people are people”, though no one is suggesting they aren’t. She is addressing a void. As we stare into it, Goodwin says he must leave: “I’m meeting pub landlords after this, whose businesses are being completely decimated by the current government.” He is laughed at, though I cannot see the joke.

The next day, outside the Green Party HQ, I meet a Muslim who has driven from Birmingham to campaign for the Greens. He says he joined the Party two weeks ago: “it is [the] first time that I’ve actually joined a [political] party.” He has been in the UK for 64 years. But only recently, he says, has he been asked “‘Am I English?’ ‘Am I British?’ ‘Do I belong?’. You know what they’re saying, but they’re not saying it. You not only fear the color part, but you also fear the part that you’re a Muslim and therefore an Islamist or therefore,” he speaks very slowly, and tiredly, “a terrorist. I have six grandchildren. For my grandkids, the times are desperate. Or will be.”

As I leave, I see a handmade sign: it reads, “Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering. Hannah Spencer, MP.” She is, I see, a bewitching candidate. And as I walk around this constituency and talk to the voters fleeing Labour, this election feels like it is playing in the realm of fantasy. It is not really about racism, though it is everywhere. It is about home, and where it is, and who has one, and who doesn’t. Real politics — the management of competing needs — is hard. Labour asked for a decade to fix the state, but patience has already gone. Instead, voters fall to magical thinking: that voting Green will help Palestinians; that voting Reform will recover the Empire; that you will, one day, find home.

The next day, Advance UK pitch their stall opposite the Red Lion in Denton, in an empty square. A woman tells me, “I’ve got brown skin, but I’m British through and through.” Her parents were immigrants from Jamaica. “I’ve got red, white and blue flowing through my blood.” Illegal immigrants, she says, have homes. They are staying in five-star hotels and swimming in pools, “whereas our guys [are] on the streets. People are getting angry. They don’t want to pay for people in hotels. They don’t want to pay for their tennis lessons and their trampolining lessons.”

Her fantasy is that Reform is, “controlled opposition. They’re paid to do what they do by whoever.” By whom? “I’m not saying. We need change,” she goes on happily, “but Nigel [Farage] is not the one to bring it. His right-hand man is Zia Yusuf. This is a Christian country. We shouldn’t be led at all by a different religion.” I ask her if she thinks there shouldn’t be Muslim, or even Jewish, MPs. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have any different religions, but not in high government positions.” I think of the woman at the bus stop, saying things can’t get worse, and watch Goodwin roll down the street on his Reform bus, which is as clean and empty as a new house. He waves a sign and promises, through his loudhailer, to rid us of Keir Starmer. His promise, if elected, is this: “This seat will never be ignored again. It will never be neglected, and it will never be disrespected.” Dreamland, again.

In the Queen Vic pub opposite, an angry young man points at his teeth. They are also a metaphor. “I need five fillings,” he tells me. “I’m fucked.” It will cost £3,995 privately, he says, and he cannot find an NHS dentist. He has a good job — he is an engineer — but suggests that perhaps, instead, he should become an illegal immigrant? “Do I need to go to France and throw my ID in the fucking bin?” he asks me. “Money shouldn’t be free,” he goes on, “I work seven days a week. Labour wants to tax the air that you breathe. Are you mad?”

Reform is “guaranteed” to win here, he says, from behind his reluctantly political teeth, but in truth it could go three ways. The Greens could edge past Reform, but the Muslim-LGBTQX coalition cannot hold long-term. Labour could still run through the middle, though in such reduced numbers victory will be considered defeat. By-elections are runes: they show us how angry people are, and these are the angriest I have met since Covid, and significantly more hopeless. “The Greens are fucking mad,” he says. “They will do heroin but not eat meat. If you’re a straight white man you’re a cunt. The white person is demonized more than anyone.”

Here ends centrist politics, at least for now, because hope in incremental solutions has gone. If you believe these runes, Reform will be the next government. And if Reform should win the next General Election?

“I’m not convinced governance will be so much of an issue,” Goodwin tells me. “Public opinion will be a challenge. We are living through managed decline, right? And so, the public appetite for change is enormous, but public patience is extremely limited”. He has told Farage that he thinks they may win the election “because we’re just the other guys, right? We’re not Labour, we’re not Tory, we’re just the other guys.” And so, he thinks, “there may not be a honeymoon period at all. There may not be a significant period of support in the polls. It may just sort of prove to be very febrile and very volatile. I’m convinced it will be much more like Trump 2 than Trump 1, and we’ve got so much that’s planned. The untold story about Reform is how much legislation is already drafted and prepared.”

Here, though, the voters do not know that; I am not even sure they care. In the Queen Vic pub, when I ask what will change under a Reform government, an older, red-bearded man, speaks for the first time. “Nothing,” he says. But he will vote for them all the same.

In the event of Farage entering No. 10, we now know Robert Jenrick would become the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Richard Tice, meanwhile, will ascend to Deputy Prime Minister — as well as overseeing a new department of Business, Trade and Energy. Given the party’s plans for migration, which would mark a break with the post-war trajectory, it’s little surprise that Zia Yusuf, the party’s logistical supremo, will shadow home affairs. Suella Braverman’s focus, meanwhile, is education. 

Glossy press conferences in London may be part of Reform’s reality. But so too, increasingly, are the efforts of the party’s membership. It’s one thing to read headlines declaring Reform has overtaken Labour to become Britain’s largest party, or seeing Zia Yusuf share a viral graphic on social media. It’s quite another to observe hundreds of party activists making voter contacts and collecting data — the meat and veg of political campaigns. 

And that’s exactly what I saw on a rain-lashed Saturday in Gorton and Denton a few weeks ago. Some of those Reform activists, slogging through the mire, came from far away: I met one group freshly arrived from Shropshire. Others were from the seat itself, or elsewhere in Greater Manchester. Across all of those conversations, I was reminded of an important shift. Reform, for all of its brand recognition among opinion-makers — not to mention the fact that its candidate, Matt Goodwin, is a TV presenter — is now a mass party.

In races like Gorton and Denton, there is typically only one party campaigning in such a fashion. During the Corbyn years, the Labour hope was that deficits elsewhere — such as a generally hostile media — could be countered by mass canvassing, social media and in-person conversations. That approach yielded impressive results in 2017 before failing two years later. Before, and since, the Liberal Democrats mastered the art of flooding constituencies come by-election time. In the twilight years of the last government, they were the bane of the Conservative Party. 

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And yet, in Gorton and Denton, I saw something new: not just the rise of Reform as a serious national force, but three parties fighting a strong “ground war”. Labour remains a mass party, just. And besides the emergence of Reform as a genuine expression of popular politics, there is now also the Greens. Walking up a residential street, a little past six in the evening — as several St George’s flags fluttered from lampposts — it was hard to miss the party’s campaign HQ. From a distance it seemed reminiscent of a kebab shop: narrow glass shopfront, fluorescent neon sign, people packed inside.

But rather than jolly punters in search of a late-night doner, here were dozens of activists arriving to collect leaflets for delivery. That isn’t normal — most certainly not for a party which, until two years ago, boasted a solitary MP. Zack Polanski’s outfit, as with Farage’s before the last election, should not be discarded as a social media confection. There is real substance beneath the viral TV appearances.

But while the Greens and Reform are both mass parties, the similarities end there. Because for the latter, not only do connections flow down to activists and members, but also up to powerful figures in the media and civil society, like Jim Ratcliffe, as well as much of the disintegrating Tory party, especially donors. Left populism — think Bernie Sanders or AOC — seeks to juxtapose plutocrats against the people. That’s a powerful frame Polanski has adopted, with the Green leader — in his first speech on the job — contrasting a “nation of neighbors” against the billionaire class. The extraordinary thing about the gauntlet Reform has thrown down to the Left is an ambition to be both. Its members are as likely to own an Audi Quattro as a horse.

Multiple motivations drove Farage’s announcement yesterday. One is to signal how Reform is no longer a one-man band, with different figureheads responsible for discrete areas of policy. The bigger point, though, is experience. Remarkably, there are more politicians from the Liz Truss government in Farage’s top team than in Kemi Badenoch’s entire shadow cabinet. That is no accident. If Reform wishes to form the next government, it must perform the political alchemy of being both the party of change, while having familiarity with the apparatus of the state. After all, how else could it hope to change things? 

While rarely mentioned by its progressive critics, this is Reform’s greatest vulnerability. Polling last year revealed that a looming concern among the party’s “soft considerers” is they have no experience of running the country — even when those same respondents agreed with Reform across multiple policy areas. Though most agree that Farage’s insurgents are driving the national agenda, almost half the public believes the country would go from bad to worse with the former MEP in No. 10, not least because he has no experience in government. To take the top job having never been the Leader of the Opposition or served in a Cabinet would be without precedent in the modern era. It’s almost impossible to imagine.

So it is little surprise that while a frankly astonishing 42% of the public think Reform “understands the problems facing Britain”, they are still more likely to perceive Labour as “fit to govern”. The more data you see, the more Farage’s strategy of embracing former Tories — like Braverman and Jenrick — makes sense. Despite the personal popularity of both figures among the Reform membership, their admission to the party’s ranks at Westminster is intended as a signal to the wider electorate. Having built a mass organization, Reform is now trying to look like a party of government. 

It would be naive not to foresee a tension emerging here. Indeed, that has already come to the fore. Last week, Rupert Lowe, formerly a Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, launched a political party of his own: Restore Britain. Restore is the fully-leaded version of Reform, with one critical addition: its politics are, for better or worse, more heavily inflected by online discourse. Lowe’s virtuoso social media game is a big reason why the party has allegedly attracted tens of thousands of members in under a week, with Lowe himself announcing on X that it had overtaken the Liberal Democrats. But that strength is also a weakness, with the former businessman’s online superfans not necessarily reflective of the wider public. According to one poll, just 8% of voters even know who Lowe is. Perhaps Farage’s greatest strength over the years — whether it was judging public sentiment for a second Brexit referendum, or here — is to appreciate that Twitter (and now X) isn’t real. Besides being more fun, it turns out that going to the pub is a better gauge of public sentiment. 

Could a fragmenting radical Right, partly fueled by Reform’s pursuit of elite credibility, come back to bite Farage? It’s too early to say, but that by-election in Gorton and Denton could provide a clue. Standing for Advance UK, yet another Reform offshoot founded by a one-time Farage acolyte, Ben Habib (reputedly recognized by just 4% of voters), is Nick Buckley. A local campaigner around homelessness and anti-social behavior, Buckley was awarded an MBE in 2020 for his services to young people and the community in Greater Manchester. Intriguingly, his campaign seems more interested in attacking Reform’s Matt Goodwin than either the Green or Labour candidates, with Buckley even attacking academics who enter politics (Goodwin is a former professor of political science). 

Speaking on Tuesday, Farage sounded like one of the Gallagher brothers as he castigated Lowe, insisting that the two had never even been friends, and that the former Southampton chairman is someone defined by crises and needless confrontation. That enmity was tinged with a certain recognition, though. Of all the parties on the Right seeking to steal a march on Farage — from Advance UK to UKIP and the Heritage Party — it is Restore which presents the greatest challenge. 

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It is an inescapable fact that British politics increasingly resembles a proportional representation (PR) system, on both the Left and Right, only without the voting system. Hours after the Reform announcement yesterday, a new poll from YouGov put four parties — Reform, Labour, the Conservatives and the Greens — between 17% and 24%. Suddenly Lowe’s wrecking project feels like it could make the difference, while the need to win wavering Tories becomes ever more critical for Farage and his friends. 

For more than two decades, I’ve heard the arguments against electoral reform. A first-past-the-post system guarantees strong mandates, I was told as a student of A-level politics. It provides stable, competent government, I was informed a few years later as an undergraduate. Most important of all, as I learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it means — in contrast to the Continent — that the extremes can never define the center. Increasingly, none of this makes sense, and it feels curiously similar to the cope pumped out before the Brexit vote in 2016. Nobody believes this stuff anymore, least of all those with any power. If anything, our first-past-the-post system seems to contribute to the abiding sense of permanent dysfunction. 

Lord Hailsham was right when he said that the Westminster system can lead to a form of “elective dictatorship”. It’s just, in the case of contemporary Britain, we persistently concentrate power onto two parties incapable of running the country. They are both, ideologically and in terms of personnel, exhausted. Farage’s job, as witnessed on Tuesday morning, is to convince enough people that he offers a genuine alternative. But it’s a sign of the times — and an important one at that — that the radical Right could be balkanizing before it’s even achieved power.