[Originally written March 9, 2026]
The Green Party is probably feeling quite good at the moment.
After a fiercely contested campaign in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Green candidate Hannah Spencer won with nearly 15,000 votes – 41% of the total, and a substantial 4000 votes above runner up Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate.
With this victory, the Greens have taken their MP total to 5, gained their first national representation in the North of England, and, by a substantial margin, have snatched one of Labour’s traditionally safest seats.
Looking beyond Gorton and Denton, this campaign was vital as a trial run for the upcoming slate of local elections. On May 7, Britain will see nearly 5000 council seats up for elections, across over 100 councils, districts and devolved parliaments. These elections have become a political landmark in recent months, with commentators predicting a potential knockout blow to Labour as their declining support is tested on a nationwide scale.
Currently holding just over 900 sitting councillors, the Green Party has a chance to seize control of local authorities across the country. Recent polling that puts the party ahead of Labour and just two points behind Reform suggests that leader Zack Polanski’s promise to “replace” Labour might materialise within months.
Still, the party would be wise not to count their chickens before they hatch. Success in Gorton and Denton provides a foundation for future campaigns, but a nationwide push across 100 constituencies will prove a different beast.
In Gorton and Denton, Polanski’s revamped Green machine was tested for the first time, to considerable success.
The Greens are not known for their strong support base in the North, and while the 2024 election saw a significant 10pp swing to the party in Gorton and Denton, this still left them a distant third, well behind Labour’s comfortable 51% outright majority and sandwiched between Reform and the Workers Party. Heading into February, the party knew it had to put down some real roots.
So the Greens mobilised. Campaigning days brought up to 2000 volunteers out, with national leaders and veteran campaigners joining fresh-faced 20-somethings and bitter ex-Labour supporters. Buddy systems were utilised to upskill newer canvassers, and a horizontal-leaning structure (save for some general campaigning tenets and materials coming from the national party structure) delegated significant responsibility to local volunteers.
The party took itself beyond their standard safety areas. Campaigners stood outside mosques talking to Gorton’s sizeable Muslim population, handing out leaflets in Urdu and gaining support from groups like The Muslim Vote. Meanwhile, influential Green Party politicians like Caroline Russell joined canvassers in Denton, breaking into standard Reform territory.
One lead campaigner told The Mancunion that the breadth of outreach was initially “daunting”, but that the party was finding unexpected support in these previously unreached constituencies.
The community-focused approach was crucial to the party’s success. The significance of the Muslim vote has been discussed to death, but perhaps more interestingly, the large margin of Spencer’s victory suggests that a sizable chunk of late undecided voters ultimately swung for the Greens. This population skewed older according to pre-election polls, potentially indicating a dissolution of the relatively rigid Green/Reform age gap – or at least the capacity for a strong campaign to overcome it.
May’s local elections will see the Greens lean into this model of campaigning even further. With thousands of seats to contest, central social media campaigns can only relay the Green brand as a whole, and aside from a few particularly photogenic councillors, most candidates will have to rely on local media, in-person canvassing and community outreach.
A consistent demand of the campaign’s internal messaging, repeated at the election watch party by co-leader Rachel Millward, was for volunteers to take this campaigning experience forward into May’s elections. The party hopes that, with a new generation of Green campaigners now active in the North, the lessons and experiences from this election can diffuse into similarly untested constituencies.
G&D has given the Greens a blueprint for local campaigning within the current electoral climate. As new campaigns ramp up across the country through Spring, we’ll see how effectively they follow it.
Over February, the party honed its campaign messaging down to two main focal points: beating Reform and Hannah Spencer. Let’s take these one at a time.
With the Conservatives hovering at 17%, Reform’s seemingly unstoppable run through 2025’s various local elections has positioned them as the main force on the British right, and although Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain has started gathering momentum as Reform faces charges of moderating their platform, Farage probably isn’t losing much sleep over them just yet.
Beating Reform has thus become a rallying cry across the left-of-centre, and both Labour and Greens have claimed to be the only party capable of uniting the progressive vote. This messaging was omnipresent from both campaigns during the election, with Greens and Labour each cherry-picking data to push the other party out of the race.
Green leaflets prioritised attacking Reform’s platform, while social media posts, conscious of the vast “undecided” vote leading up to the election, emphasised the role of tactical voting, buoyed by official endorsements from tactical voting organisations like Stop Reform UK, Stop the Tories and Tactical Vote.
For months, this narrative has been an uphill battle for the Greens. They have relied on momentum and extrapolation to make their case, but strictly speaking, Labour, with marginally stronger national polling and well-tested national infrastructure, have been better positioned to block Reform’s path. Not anymore.
The strength and breadth of the Greens’ ground campaign, and their ability to mobilise volunteers, pushed them far ahead of Labour in G&D, beyond any polling predictions. The results speak for themselves: the Greens can at last back up their claim of being the only party able to stop Reform.
Reform will almost certainly remain the most popular party in Britain by May, and corresponding anti-Reform sentiment will still mobilise progressive votes. With a successful high-profile fight under their belts, the Greens are in a stronger position now than ever before to win over progressive voters.
But alongside scary photos of Farage and warnings about NHS privatisation/racist rhetoric/Donald Trump, the bright smile of Hannah Spencer beamed out of Green campaign material. Leaflets, banners and Instagram posts raved about her working-class background, her job as a plumber, her local-ness (particularly next to Reform’s Goodwin, whose Mancunian claim was his time here at university, 20 years ago). She’s young, real, charismatic and earnest. She’s here to bring hope, not hate.
All of which works wonders for a single, highly publicised by-election. But when May sees 5000 elections on the same day, the party is going to need something beyond individual star power.
By no means was this messaging a mistake. Odd defections and minor victories notwithstanding, the Greens had not yet proved themselves as a viable electoral threat. Polling had stabilised after a post-Polanski boost; still lagging behind Labour and without a developed policy base, the Greens focused on affirming and campaigning on the image the party had already achieved, rather than developing or deepening it.
Spencer was an exceptional Green candidate for this role. She reflects the newfound class focus of the party, their surging youth popularity, and their attempts to reach out to previously unrepresented communities. She was a microcosm of Polanski’s vision for the party – a vision that, so far, seems to be resonating with voters.
But this is a vision in the abstract, one with pithy slogans and general principles, but few firm stances to draw on.
Current discussions of Green Party policy are dominated by Reform, Labour and oppositional media, all hand-wringing in unison over the terror of drug decriminalisation (frequently misrepresented as legalisation), pornography (?) and ‘open borders‘.
Victory in G&D has thrown the Greens into a different light: they’ve graduated from fringe weirdos not worth taking seriously, into what Goodwin described as “a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives”, “riding a very dangerous wave”.
With this attention, their policy platform is being thrown under the spotlight like never before – what little there is of it. The public knows the Greens stand for hope, social justice and wealth redistribution. But the party has yet to firmly plant their feet on policy details. A big tent approach helps to build momentum, but ambiguity leaves them open to bad faith attacks and honest scepticism alike.
Some lingering policy curiosities, such as drug decriminalisation, have been frequently mischaracterised and require a confident explanation of the reasoning and evidence that went into them. Others, like Polanski’s own anti-NATO perspective, contrasting with the party website’s wholehearted commitment to the alliance, beg for a firmer stance altogether.
Amongst these ambiguities, opposition will seize on the most sensational headlines, while the party will lack a coherent explanation, or even consensus, for members and voters to turn to. One recalls how Labour’s weakness and internal conflict over Brexit in 2019 cost them more than a few votes.
The horizontal, member-led structure that serves their canvassing efforts so well may hinder their potential here, at least in the short term. Green policy is reached by democratic consensus, and with the upcoming Spring conference taking place from March 28-29, the party will have two days to pull together a clear vision for Britain, and then a month to communicate that to the country.
This wouldn’t need to be a full-on manifesto – we’re still three years away from the General, and details on precise tax thresholds probably won’t make or break the party just yet. But where the G&D campaign could afford to lead with personality, Reform opposition and – let’s be real – vibes, May will be a different beast entirely. With 5000 seats up for election, the party cannot be united by vibes alone.
The Greens have proved themselves capable of winning an election. By May, they need a plan for the day after.
