Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times on the Gorton and Denton election – This sectarian campaign should alarm us all:

At the last election I followed Adrian Ramsay, the Green candidate, on the stump in rural mid-Suffolk as he won a Tory seat by unifying opposition to pylons and polluting water companies. Remember when the Greens believed in consensus-building or talked about the environment?

That party is dead. Like a parasite moving from one body to another, the entryists who took over Labour under Jeremy Corbyn now have full control of the Greens. They won in Gorton & Denton by fighting the most irresponsible, divisive and sectarian campaign ever conducted by a party with claims on the mainstream. As one Labour MP put it: “They’re just like Respect — it’s like fighting a by-election against George Galloway.”

Except Respect was a one-gobshite band: the Greens are a national political brand with far broader potential. After last night there can’t be a Labour councillor or MP in a metropolitan seat who isn’t quaking — including most of the cabinet.

However touching Hannah Spencer’s victory homily about the cost of living, that’s not why she won. She wouldn’t be an MP without endorsement by The Muslim Vote, an umbrella group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and Mend (Muslim Engagement and Development), whose website notes it is “a powerful, united force of four million acting in unison”. In 2024 it helped to elect four Muslim “Gaza independents”, ousting three sitting Labour MPs. In Gorton & Denton it saw the candidate most likely to cede to its demands as Green.

Spencer certainly leant into her role, issuing a campaign video in Urdu which showed Keir Starmer shaking hands with the Indian PM Narendra Modi (Hindu-lover!), with Binyamin Netanyahu (Zionist!) in the background. She said the Manchester Arena bombing was not caused by Islamist terrorism but “divisiveness”.

Meanwhile, the Green leader Zack Polanski chatted on the hardline Islamist platform 5Pillars, which has hosted the former BNP leader Nick Griffin and has been accused of airing antisemitic conspiracy theories and describing homosexuality as “a crime against Allah”. Only after an outcry did Polanski, a gay man, pull his interview.

Yes it was nasty. We knew it was going to be nasty. But can the two sides of the Green vote – the young left-wing types enamoured of the Greens’ strong pro-trans stand, and the Islamists who hate all that stuff – stick together? It’s surely unsustainable.

And by-elections often throw up these strange results – with the press going into meltdown about the breakdown of our precious two-party system, and the imminent collapse of all we hold dear.

We shall see.