Rayner says byelection defeat shows Labour needs to be ‘braver’
Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM and a leading candidate to replace Keir Starmer in the event of a leadership contest, has posted a message on social media saying Labour has to be ‘“braver” in the light of the byelection defeat.
This result must be a wake up call. It’s time to really listen – and to reflect.
Voters want the change that we promised – and they voted for.
If we want to unrig the system, if we want to make the change we were sent into Government to make, we have to be braver.
A labour agenda that puts people first.
That’s what all of us across our movement need to rededicate ourselves to this morning.
Key events
Polanski said he did not expect people to agree with the Green party on everything.
One of my favourite phrases is, if you agree with us on seven out of 10 things, then vote for us, join the party.
If you agree with us on 10 out of 10 things, that’s a bit weird.
He also said he thought it was important for the national conversation that people did not agree with each other all the time.
Polanski says, even with Andy Burnham as Labour’s candidate, Greens could have won
Q: Would you have won if Andy Burnham had been Labour’s candidate?
Polanski said he and Spencer both changed their views on this as the contest went on.
He said, when Burnham was blacked, he “punched the air” because thought that meant the Greens could win.
But, as the contest went on, he became less convinced that Burnham would have won.
Having seen the anger out on the streets about the Labour party, Andy Burnham is still a Labour politician. And I would say, no matter how popular you are, no matter even if you have some of the right positions, I think people in this country are looking at Labour MPs or high-profile Labour politicians and saying, where are your red lines?
Polanski claims Greens have more members than Labour if Scotland included
Polanski said that, taking into account Scotland, the Greens have more members than Labour. He said:
When you look at membership numbers, we’re so close to 200,000.
By the way, 200,000 is Green party membership for England and Wales. It doesn’t include Scotland. If you included Scottish Greens, we’ve already taken overtaken the UK Labour party.
But Polanksi also admitted that the a current, up-to-date membership total for the Labour party is not available.
Polanski is the leader of the Green party of England and Wales. The Scottish Greens are a separate party.
Polanski accuses Starmer of trivialising serious issue with drugs policy attacks, saying public ‘more mature’ on this
Back at the Green press conference, Zack Polanski criticised Labour for the way it attacked the Greens over their plans to legalise drugs. He said drugs were a serious issue. He went on:
We have the highest death rate from drugs in the whole of Europe.
And Keir Starmer, rather than taking a public health approach or looking at harm reduction, thought it sensible to make cheap political attacks.
Now that’s all water under the bridge because Hannah’s sat here as the MP.
But I do hope this Labour government will reflect on how they’ve conducted themselves during this campaign, how they’ve taken some really serious issues, trivialised them and made them into cheap political points.
Whereas actually, I think the public are in a lot more mature and nuanced place than sometimes politicians who have been around for too long and … don’t have the courage to lead.
This is from Kevin Schofield from HuffPost UK quoting a Labour MP responding to what Heidi Alexander said earlier. (See 8.08am.)
Polanski and Spencer then took questions.
Q: What do you say to accusations you were playing sectarian politics?
Spencer said the Greens were doing what they always do, trying to unite people.
And she said she was proud of the fact that she united different groups.
We unite people on the shared common ground and the beliefs that we all have. I’m really proud here that our communities, our backgrounds, may be different sometimes, but we are genuinely united over that common feeling of struggling, and struggling together and sticking up for each other.
Spencer says this was the Greens’ 127th target seats.
That means there are 126 seats where the Greens could win on a smaller swing.
She says the party is on track to make “big gains” in the May elections.
Hannah Spencer says voters in Gorton and Denton have ‘rejected hate’ and embraced hope
Hannah Spencer starts with thanks to people who helped her to get elected. She says she is honoured, and promises to work “so hard” for the people who elected her.
I can’t wait to get started and work to influence policy that makes lives better for people like us, to bring down the cost of living, introduce rent controls, and get the litter and fly tipping off our streets.
She criticises Reform UK as a party “that dances to the tune of their billionaire donors” and Labour as a party that “stooped so incredibly low”.
She goes on:
I don’t want to dwell on it for too long, but I have been appalled at some of the divisive, dog-whistling campaigning from other parties.
I know in my heart – and everyone knows here – everybody here belongs, everybody deserves to have their needs met, everyone deserves a voice in our democracy.
And today, the people here in this constituency have sent a very clear message. We’ve rejected hate and embraced the politics of hope – not blind hope, hope that is rooted in an ambitious but very achievable plan to transform our country for the better.
Zack Polanski and Hannah Spencer hold press conference
Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, and Hannah Spencer, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, are now holding a press confernce.
Polanski starts by restating his claim that there are now no no-go areas for the Greens. (See 7.53am.)
He says there are 70 days to go until the local elections.
And the Greens have lots of other candidates like Hannah Spencer, he claims.
And he claims Labour is now facing an existential crisis.
Labour MP Brian Leishman calls for Starmer to resign
The Scottish Labour MP Brian Leishman has called for Keir Starmer to stand down. In a post on social media, he said:
The blame lies with Starmer & the people that surround him. Blocking Burnham was wrong & he did it for his own benefit.
The political idea that we should try & out-Reform Reform is wrong & been rejected.
Time he did the right thing for the country & the Labour Party, and go.
Leishman was one of four Labour MPs who had the whip suspended for a few months last year for disloyal conduct summed up, according to one unnamed Labour source, as “persistent knobheadery”.
Rayner says byelection defeat shows Labour needs to be ‘braver’
Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM and a leading candidate to replace Keir Starmer in the event of a leadership contest, has posted a message on social media saying Labour has to be ‘“braver” in the light of the byelection defeat.
This result must be a wake up call. It’s time to really listen – and to reflect.
Voters want the change that we promised – and they voted for.
If we want to unrig the system, if we want to make the change we were sent into Government to make, we have to be braver.
A labour agenda that puts people first.
That’s what all of us across our movement need to rededicate ourselves to this morning.
SNP claims Labour now facing ‘historic defeat’ in Scotland
Just as Plaid Cyrmu believe the Gorton and Denton byelection result bodes well for them in the Senedd elections in May, the SNP has welcomed it too. Scottish parliamentary elections are taking place in May too and the SNP is now quite confident about seeing off the Labour threat.
This is from Pete Wishart, the SNP’s deputy leader at Westminster.
This result is a resounding rejection of Keir Starmer’s Labour party – it is a rejection that will be repeated in Scotland come May 7th when voters here will get their chance to cast their verdict on a Labour Party that promised ‘change’ but has only delivered chaos.
A Labour party now defined by their broken promises will be fully deserving of the historic defeat Scottish voters are waiting to give them.
Here is a Guardian panel with analysis of the Gorton and Denton byelection result, with contributions from Polly Toynbee, Adam Ramsay, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Henry Hill.
And here is an extract from Polly’s assessment.
Labour’s prospects for May’s elections plunged even lower last night. A Green party that once seemed flaky will now often look like the safer anti-Reform vote if they can field more pitch-perfect candidates like Hannah Spencer: plumber, councillor, all-round good sort. Her honeyed victory words will soften many a Labour voter’s heart. She is a leftist without the bilious fist-shaking of the old sectarian socialists: “Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry … I think that absolutely everybody should get a nice life.” Nice. Byelections are often no guide to a general election three years away, but the trouncing of Farage may make this one historic.
Momentum, the leftwing Labour group, has issued a statement saying that the party needs a change of direction after the byelection defeat and that “control-freakery, top-down politics and political timidity” have all been problems.
Labour MP Jon Trickett says Starmer should ‘reflect on his position’ following byelection defeat
The Labour MP Jon Trickett has said that Keir Starmer should “reflect on his own position”.
Speaking to Times Radio, Trickett said:
My experience is that people are fed up with the fact that we aren’t delivering change. Now, it’s up to Keir Starmer to look in the mirror and make a decision about his own personal future, because obviously it’s important to be a prime minister, but it’s more important to deliver justice and fairness in a society that is really crippled by the lack of fairness and justice. Social equality has gone out the window. People are living in poverty or on the edge of poverty, millions of people. And they’re looking, they look for Labour for change and they haven’t yet seen it …
I think [the byelection result] signals a bigger change in the way that people see the country, its politics and its leaders, and Labour absolutely must reflect on this in a serious way. And that does mean, I’m afraid, that the prime minister needs to reflect on his own position.
When politicians say a leader should reflect on their position, they don’t mean that they should reflect and then conclude that it is right to say.
Trickett is on the left of the PLP, has never been a leading member of the Starmer fan club, and so in some respects these comments are not surprising. Many Labour MPs would say the same in private. But there have not been many Labour MPs saying this publicly.
Plaid Cymru welcomes Gorton and Denton byelection result as evidence ‘old guard’ parties are ‘slipping away’
Steven Morris is a Guardian reporter covering Wales.
The leader of Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth, has said the Gorton and Denton result shows the “old guard are slipping away”. By old guard, he means Labour and the Tories.
Ap Iorwerth is the favourite to become first minister of Wales at the Senedd (Welsh parliament) elections in May, ending 100 years of Labour dominance here, and the party will relish being in the spotlight for two days at their spring conference starting today.
When he speaks at the conference this afternoon, ap Iorwerth will claim the May election is a stark choice between Plaid and Reform UK, which polls suggest are coming second.
He will say:
We offer hope – hope that can overcome people’s fears of other political forces leading Wales down a dark path. Hope that things can get better for our health service, that our elderly relatives won’t have to wait so long for treatment or that the burden of childcare costs on our sons and daughters’ household budgets will be eased.
And hope that, finally, Wales will have a government willing to stand up to Keir Starmer, to Jo Stevens [secretary of state for Wales] and anyone else denying our nation the fairness it deserves.
The Gorton and Denton result has echoes of what happened at the Caerphilly byelection last year when Plaid won, pushing Reform into second place and Labour third.
There have been interesting comments, too, from the leader of the Greens in Wales, Anthony Slaughter, on BBC Wales. Asked if he saw Plaid as rivals or allies, he said: “On this issue in standing up to Reform, we are allies.”
Whether that opens the door for Plaid and the Greens cooperating at the Senedd elections – perhaps in a very loose way – so as not to split the progressive vote remains to be seen.
Heidi Alexander says Britons don’t want Polanski as PM, and Green policies won’t ‘survive contact with national electorate’
Alexander said that, when she heard Hannah Spencer’s victory speech (see 8.29am), she thought it was very similar to what she said when she was elected in 2024.
We are committed to delivering change for this country. We inherited public services that were on their knees, school roofs were collapsing, buildings were crumbling. People couldn’t get an NHS dentist and were having to pull their own teeth out. We saw high streets that are run down.
Now, I understand that when there’s a byelection and people are looking in their bank account at the end of the month and they’re still struggling to pay their bills and to make ends meet, they feel frustration with the governing party, they feel impatient. And I share that impatience about improving lives for the mainstream majority in this country.
She also insisted that the byelection result did not show there was a “mainstream majority” for making Zack Polanski, or Nigel Farage, PM. She said:
What I cannot accept is that there is a direct read across from the results of this byelection, where people voted for a Green MP in Gorton and Denton, and the outcome of the next general election, because I don’t believe that that result yesterday suggests that there’s a mainstream majority for Zack Polanski being the next prime minister, or for that matter Nigel Farage.
And I don’t think the offer of the Green party will survive contact with the national electorate. Let’s remember that they are a party that are soft on defence.
Heidi Alexander says it’s ‘offensive’ for Unite boss Sharon Graham to claim ministers obsessed with their ‘rich mates’
Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, was asked about Sharon Graham’s “rich mates” jibe in an interview on the Today programme. (See 8.39am.) You could hear the anger in her voice as she replied:
I’m sorry, but I totally find it offensive that I should be told stop listening to your rich mates – of which I don’t have many – because I spend every single weekend of my life knocking on doors in Swindon talking to people who voted for me to be their Labour MP at the last general election.
These are from my colleague Jessica Elgot on the byelection result.
The Green victory in Denton is the result which will have a far
greater effect on Labour than a Reform winThe blithe assumption progressives have nowhere else to go has been proved catastrophically wrong.
Can’t help thinking of this quote from a Labour minister, a year ago… pic.twitter.com/6DXtPJCO8I
— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) February 27, 2026
Labour MPs on the ground yesterday said previous Labour voters started going Green very late, and remonstrated with them on the doorstep about potentially letting in a Reform MP. One minister said they were repeatedly told off for not “sorting out” only one option against Reform
Until yesterday, Labour really thought the seat was very winnable according to their own data. In the end it wasn’t even that close. They just never took it seriously that their own past voters would vote tactically for another party.
And this is from Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, and former political editor.
Nick Robinson on BBC fairly said many will dismiss the Gorton & Denton result by pointing to a “large Muslim vote still motivated and angry about what happened in Gaza”. Many are wrong.
It is not just Muslims that are motivated by the treatment of Palestinians, and these voters are not just angry about what happened in Gaza, but about what is happening in Gaza.
Maybe this vote is not as big as the stop the boats lot, but Gaza is still a large part of what is driving the alienation from Labour. Little sign in the foreign office or No 10 of any recognition of this.
