By Election Results: Greens' Gorton and Denton victory reshapes politics as broken Labour suffers in by election results
Hannah Spencer's Green Party triumph in the Gorton and Denton contest — part of the by election results — has been cast as a turning point for British politics by Sir John Curtice. The scale of the win, and the electoral dynamics it exposed, have amplified questions about party coalitions, leadership and voting systems.
Hannah Spencer's historic win and the numbers that stunned pollsters
Hannah Spencer became the first ever Green candidate to win a parliamentary by-election, taking 40. 7% of the vote and outperforming poll expectations. That share put the Greens as much as 12 points clear of second placed Reform and represented as much as a 27. 5 point increase on the party's share in 2024. Before this, the Green Party had never won more than 10% in a parliamentary by-election, a threshold it reached in the Somerton and Frome by-election in 2023.
Labour's collapse in Gorton and Denton and the historical context
Labour fell to third place in a constituency the party had not hitherto lost an election in since 1931. The party's 25. 4% was a near halving of its 50. 8% share in 2024 and marked the 13th biggest ever fall in Labour support at a by-election. In Gorton and Denton itself, Labour's vote had already fallen by 16 points at the last election.
The result will prompt fresh questions among Labour MPs about whether Sir Keir Starmer should remain prime minister, though it would be a mistake to reduce the outcome solely to disappointment with his leadership and government since the 2024 election. Instead, the by-election confirmed the message of 2024 that two of Labour's traditional foundations have crumbled: less well-off working class voters and those from minority backgrounds, both numerous in the constituency, have drifted away.
Conservatives' worst by-election performance and Reform's rise
The Conservatives lost their deposit in Gorton and Denton after taking just 1. 9% of the vote, their worst ever by-election result. Reform finished second, and polls that correctly anticipated a close three-way contest had shown Nigel Farage's party leading the field in the predominantly white working-class Denton half of the constituency. With both Labour and the Conservatives running at 20% or less in the polls, the post-war Conservative–Labour duopoly looks markedly weakened as Conservatives struggle to fend off Reform.
By Election Results fuel debate over First Past The Post and alternatives
The Gorton and Denton by-election, which had been scheduled for Thursday 26 February, has intensified scrutiny of the First Past The Post system. The 2024 general election was described as the most disproportional ever, with Labour securing almost two-thirds of MPs from just over one-third of votes, and critics say FPTP is not designed for an era of multi-party politics.
Where three or more parties compete, candidates can be elected with the support of fewer than a third of voters, meaning the ballots of more than two-thirds are effectively ignored; with Labour, Green and Reform all contesting strongly in Gorton and Denton, it was said to be highly plausible that the ballots of a majority of voters would be ignored. That dynamic has produced a campaign dominated by tactical arguments, with both Labour and the Green Party urging voters they are the only route to 'stop Reform'.
Arguments for preferential voting and comparisons with Scottish practice
Campaigners have pointed to alternatives. Scottish local elections use the Single Transferable Vote, a form of proportional representation in which voters number candidates. In Scottish local council by-elections, voters can put their genuine first choice as number one and have that vote transferred to their number two if their first-choice has no chance and no candidate has achieved a majority; the transfer process continues until someone wins a majority. Proponents say preferential voting removes the need for voters to make tactical judgements about which party is best placed to defeat one they dislike.
Historic contrasts: Rochdale, Somerton and Frome, and what this means now
Aside from the exceptional Rochdale by-election in 2024, when Labour disowned their candidate and George Galloway defeated a second‑placed independent candidate, this is the first time neither Labour nor the Conservatives have been one of the top two parties in a by-election contest. The Greens were among the apparent beneficiaries of Labour's losses in 2024, and the by election results in Gorton and Denton have underscored how rapidly electoral alignments can change when working-class voters shift toward Reform and when seats with substantial Muslim-identifying populations moved away from Labour, in part because of Labour's initial stance at least on Israel's actions in Gaza.
