Bye bye, Labour – the next election could be Reform vs Green… and nothing in between

It is no wonder Labour rushed the by-election in Gorton and Denton, setting the date on 26 February, in the hope of catching opponents off guard. Keir Starmer knows that this is a vote that could decide the survival of the Labour Party.

That is not an exaggeration. If Hannah Spencer, the Green Party candidate, wins, she will show that the Greens can be an alternative to Labour on the left.

There are a lot of voters who are disappointed by Labour who would vote Green if they thought the Greens could win. In the past, that has not been plausible. Victory in Gorton and Denton could change all that.

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If, boosted by a by-election win, the Greens overtake Labour in the national opinion polls, Zack Polanski’s “eco-populists” could flip the left-wing bloc in the way that Nigel Farage is threatening to flip the right-wing bloc.

The next general election is a long way off, but Starmer’s strategy for it is already clear: to force the voters to choose between a Labour prime minister and Farage. This would rally Greens, Liberal Democrats and soft Conservatives behind the Labour banner in anti-Reform tactical voting.

But if the Greens replace Labour as the leading party of the anti-Farage tactical alliance, that strategy would lie in ruins.

Polanski could turn its logic against Labour, arguing that Labour voters must choose between him and Farage – that Labour voters should vote tactically for the Greens to stop a Reform government.

Just as Farage wants to replace the Tory party on the right, Polanski wants to replace Labour on the left, and the next general election would become “Reform versus Green, and nothing in between”, in the jingle coined by a friend of mine.

The stakes in Gorton and Denton could hardly be higher.

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The Greens have made a good start, selecting Spencer, a 34-year-old plumber who lives in the constituency, as their candidate. She is the leader of the five-strong group of Green councillors on the nearby Trafford council. Young, female, working-class and pro-Palestinian, she will appeal to the graduate, student and Muslim voters of Gorton, while Matthew Goodwin, the Reform candidate, is likely to do better among the white working-class voters of Denton.

According to Robert Ford, a politics professor at Manchester University who drives through the constituency every week to shop in the Burnage Tesco, there are twice as many voters in Greenable Gorton as in Reformable Denton. “The balance of electoral power splits about 2:1 in favour of the more diverse, graduate and urban liberal-heavy Manchester wards,” he says.

Labour, meanwhile, needs to hold onto as many of its votes as it can in both parts of the constituency. It starts with the advantage of a local party machine, and I am told that Andrew Gwynne, the steward and bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, whose resignation as the MP triggered the by-election, has built up good voter ID records, even though it was a safe Labour seat.

It does not, obviously, have the advantage of Andy Burnham, who is popular locally, as the candidate, but party managers hope that Burnham’s record as mayor and that of Manchester city council will still help them. They also know that the Greens tend to underperform in local council by-elections, possibly because a lot of young people tell pollsters they will vote Green, but fail to do so on the day.

But young voters could be Labour’s downfall if they do turn out, and there are signs that they are increasingly motivated to do so.

The anger at Rachel Reeves’s changes to student loan terms in the Budget is one of those submarine issues that has not yet had the attention in the media that it deserves – although Oli Dugmore of The New Statesman was on Newsnight this week, saying: “There would be a lot of cold pensioners without our generation’s taxes.”

Until we have an opinion poll from the constituency, it is hard to predict what will happen. Many Labour voters will want to protest against the disappointments of the government, but they won’t want to let Reform in by voting Green – unless Hannah Spencer is clearly ahead of whoever is the Labour candidate, to be chosen tomorrow.

One thing that is clear, though, is that Labour should be very afraid of the Green replacement theory.