My cat Pablo was so excited by the result of the Gorton and Denton by election that he woke me up at 4.30am to share the good news.

It was impossible to get back to sleep afterwards, but I will forgive him on this occasion. Hannah Spencer got 41% of the vote and vaporised Labour’s 13,413 majority. Not just that, she was more than 4000 votes ahead of the Tommy Robinson adjacent Reform candidate.

Labour’s campaign was beyond disgusting. I have long insisted that the most vicious, dishonest and malevolent people I have encountered in politics are on the Labour right. They excelled themselves this time, claiming that the Green Party wanted to force women into prostitution and give drugs to children.

The party which, as Salma Yaqoob points out, “exploited clan ties for decades for political advantage… they even boast about it” created some of the Islamophobic attack lines now being used by Farage. They combine this with false accusations of antisemitism, the increasingly deranged Paul Mason and the Daily Telegraph leading the charge on that.

Two things are remarkable about Hannah Spencer’s victory.

It seems to mark the end of British elections being essentially a ding-dong between Labour and the Tories. Labour members and supporters took Starmer’s 2023 advice “If you don’t like that, if you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave”. There is now a credible left electoral alternative, in fact one of the radio talk programmes repeatedly referred to the Greens as far left. This will come as a surprise to members in my branch who have been greatly exercised by the question of getting a tea urn for an event on Sunday. This is not normally a subject of protracted discussion on the far left.

The other thing was pointed out by James Meadway in an excellent article in the Morning Star. Citing Zack Polanski’s speech at the Green Party conference James writes:

 “he said the party would speak for the “plumber and the hairdresser.” When a Labour leader would have found a nurse or a teacher or a doctor to speak for, all safely counted amongst our six million unionised and public-sector employees, Polanski went for two occupations that exemplify the self-employed and the small businesses that make up the economy of daily life in Britain. It’s a striking contrast, since it tells us exactly why Labour are a party in fundamental decline and the Greens are presently cresting a wave.”

No Labour seat anywhere is safe now. I would add that it really is not obvious what useful purpose Your Party serves. No one can reasonably deny that the Greens are now the party of the radical left in Britain.