Labour has held the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, taking the seat with a majority of 3,364 — a result that Strathclyde University’s John Curtice said showed the party “are in a much better position than they were six months ago, but still not as popular as they were in 2025”.
Writing in the Guardian, John Harris reports that the Greens had a genuine chance of winning the byelection, but have since lost much of the ground they gained during Zack Polanski’s first year as leader.
Curtice characterised the outcome as echoing national opinion polls and reflecting two facts: that the Greens are in need of a period of contrition and reflection, and that Labour ought to be slightly less than ecstatic.
Harris writes that the Greens remain “a more significant player than historically they have ever been”, yet have surrendered ground won during a first year in which the serial failures of the local MP, Keir Starmer, delivered Polanski and his party a succession of political openings.
The Greens’ earlier success in Gorton and Denton, Harris notes, played a massive part in Starmer eventually leaving the political stage, and in the man he barred from being the Labour candidate snatching his job.
Polanski, Harris writes, appears largely unrepentant about the “Zionism is racism” motion passed at his party conference and confident he can resume where he left off. But the party’s claim that it tripled its previous vote share in the seat is very specious indeed, according to Harris, who cites the pollster Peter Kellner.
Kellner said: “the leftwing vote two years ago was divided between the Greens’ 10.4% and an independent, Andrew Feinstein’s, 18.9%. Together, they won 29.3%.” The true increase in the leftwing anti-Labour vote, Harris writes, is therefore only 3.5 percentage points, and Polanski has taken such a significant blow that his experience of the next few weeks and months could be very choppy indeed.
Harris spent two days in the constituency filming another episode of the Guardian’s Anywhere But Westminster video series and came away with a deep sense that politics remains in a state of unpredictable flux.
Among those he encountered were the young people of colour in the pinched neighbourhood of Somers Town — the urban village right next to Euston station — who were all voting Green and spoke of Gaza and the impossibility of living in the capital, and the woman in upmarket Primrose Hill who told him she no longer told people she was Jewish for fear of instant uproar and upbraiding about Israel, a country she had last visited 15 long years ago.
Most of all, Harris writes, he recalls Tom, a 24-year-old trainee teacher who reluctantly still lives with his parents and has no idea how he is going to hold down a job in his home city. A former enthusiastic Green member and activist who had every intention of voting for the party, Tom switched to Labour after the Zionism motion suggested a party perfectly happy to inflame the UK’s sense of division and polarisation.
A searing summer should have provided the Greens with another boost, and a real chance of another byelection win, Harris writes. Instead, Polanski — who endorsed the idea that Zionism is a form of racism eight days before his party’s conference began — now looks not just morally questionable but distinctly weak, with one central bit of symbolism being his absence from the Zionism debate and vote at that conference.
Harris, who lives in Frome in Somerset, notes that the 25,000-population settlement’s affinity with the Greens has been deepening for roughly the last decade, and that the party provides four of the six councillors representing the town on the new unitary council.
The rurality and climate-fear in the villages that surround Frome, he writes, chimes with Ellie Chowns’s seemingly out-of-the-blue election two years ago as the Green MP for North Herefordshire and Adrian Ramsay’s success in the East Anglian seat of Waveney Valley. Elements of the maverick, future-facing attitudes, meanwhile, waft down from Bristol Central, the seat held since 2024 by Carla Denyer, the former Green party co-leader.
What held those two elements together, and partly powered the Greens’ resurgence, Harris argues, was a mixture of radical, empathetic social democracy and urgency about the fate of the planet — an approach that also seems to have taken root in some of England’s suburbs.
With the possible exception of Bristol, he writes, wrecking the Greens’ successes in all those places would require binning that approach and accelerating exactly what Polanski has facilitated: not just a politics of no-surrender and provocation, but the entry into the party of embittered former Jeremy Corbyn supporters and assorted ultra-leftists, bringing with them a flimsy, pious gesture politics.
The party’s former leader Caroline Lucas and the longstanding Green activist Rupert Read are about to publish a mini-manifesto titled Climate Popularism: a guide to “breaking the grip of rightwing populism through a new politics of crisis resilience”, to be formally launched on 15 October.
Written before the antisemitism meltdown, Harris notes, it rather minces its words about Polanski’s project, but makes it pretty clear why things have now gone wrong. Lucas and Read write: “Some observers have wondered whether this new eco-populism has at times been a little too quiet about the ‘eco’ part. On the doorstep, at least, this may be an understandable strategy … [But] as recent heatwaves have made abundantly clear, the salience of climate impacts will make adaptation concerns a doorstep issue before long.”
Lucas and Read make the case for “centrally funded, locally appropriate action to adapt neighbourhoods, infrastructure and ways of life, to prepare for the broad, cascading impacts of human-triggered climate change”, and propose a domestic retrofit programme that would entail a lot of “secure green jobs”.
They also write about an “exhausted majority” tired of shrill politics and suggest the “depolarisation” of the climate issue in the face of plain facts — an approach Harris describes as the direct opposite of how Polanski operates — along with talk of a politics of “courage, hope, love of place” and, crucially, a decisive turn into the use of citizens’ assemblies.
That, Harris writes, is the kind of turn the Greens should undoubtedly take, but even if they do, they will now be starting in a deeply troubled and weakened state.
Burnham, he adds, still has no end of work to do. Many have long believed that the substantial presence in British politics of a radical party free of Labour’s pussyfooting around the climate crisis and the harsh realities of inequality was an absolute necessity, and the Greens’ fitful growth nothing but a good thing. Now, as the fallout from Polanski’s sudden crash only deepens, the party has a massive amount of self-questioning and reinvention to do — and whether it will even have the inclination is another question entirely.
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