The Green Party may be jubilant about their triumph in Gorton and Denton, but some voters are already expressing buyers’ remorse. Waqas Khan, 40, owns Al-Mecca Butchers on Stockport Road, where a “Vote Green” poster hangs in the shop window. He has lived in the constituency for almost 20 years. He and his family had previously been lifelong Labour voters, but all switched to the Greens on Thursday.
Until informed by The Telegraph, however, Khan was unaware of the Greens’ plans to legalise drugs and prostitution and to remove restrictions on pornography. “I checked the manifesto before, but I didn’t see that. It seems they hid those policies,” he says. Khan, who is a Muslim, adds that he would not have voted Green if he had known and would have stuck with Labour. He is particularly concerned about drug policy. “We’ve got families in the area,” he says. “I’ve seen many kids here involved in drugs, selling and using, even the girls. That’s why I’m very disappointed.”
Waqas Khan is not the only local who voted Green only to be surprised by their other policies. Mahwish Kamal, 45, owner of the Himalayan Flowers shop down the road, where a “Vote Hannah Spencer” poster is in the window, says she switched her vote from Labour to Green because of the party’s pro-Gaza stance. “I’m not very happy with Labour about Palestine, and I like what the Greens were saying,” she explains. “That’s why I switched.”
She, too, was surprised to learn about the Green Party’s policies on drugs and prostitution. “Who supports these policies?” she asks when told about them. Informed it was the Greens, she says: “Really?” Like Khan, she adds that she would have voted Labour if she had known about the policies before Thursday.
The two voters are evidence of the jarring disconnect between the Greens’ tactics on the ground in Gorton and Denton, which have focused on Gaza and migration, and their wider policy slate, which includes liberal policies on drugs, prostitution, trans rights, abortion, assisted dying and other social issues that put them at odds with conservative religious beliefs.
Since he announced his candidacy for the party’s leadership last year, Zack Polanski has said he wanted the party to become a broader church.
“I really think the Green Party can appeal to lots of people both in rural and urban constituencies,” he told The Telegraph last year. “I’ll work with anyone who shares my values and wants to take the fight to Reform and challenge [Sir Keir] Starmer.”
On the evidence of their thumping win in Gorton and Denton, he is doing just that. The Green candidate, 34-year-old plumber Hannah Spencer, won with nearly 41 per cent of the vote, 12 points ahead of Reform and pushing Labour into third place on 25 per cent, in an area where they had not lost since 1931.
Turnout was nearly 48 per cent, relatively high by by-election standards and testament to a Green ground campaign that was particularly successful at rallying the large local Muslim population. Concerns around “family voting,” and what Nigel Farage has decried as a “victory for sectarian voting” and “cheating in elections,” do little to detract from the scale of the result. The win has put even more pressure on the embattled Prime Minister, who is facing renewed calls to stand down.
While the Greens are understandably buoyant about a result that exceeded their wildest expectations, questions remain about what exactly they stand for. The Green Party manifesto online dates from the 2024 general election, before Polanski was elected. Since becoming leader, he has focused on policies designed to pick up more traditional Left-wing votes. On the economy, he has called for a wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires, renationalisation of utilities and rent controls. On social issues, they are in favour of assisted dying, legalising and regulating all drugs, including Class A’s, decriminalising sex work and supporting self-ID on gender (meaning that everyone can choose which gender is recorded on their official documents). In recent weeks, the party has confirmed that its position on sex work hasn’t changed, while Polanski told the BBC that when it comes to drugs, “it’s about legalising and regulating”. Prostitution is considered haram (forbidden) in Islam, as are euthanasia and drug usage.
The Gorton and Denton campaign targeted the area’s Muslim population – 20 per cent of the population is of Pakistani origin – with policies on Gaza and immigration, as well as a controversial campaign video in Urdu that showed Starmer meeting Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, and Benjamin Netanyahu. It was enough to get many Muslim voters – potentially holding their noses, or simply unaware, like Khan, about some of the other Green policies – to vote for Spencer.
“I’d be very surprised if many Muslim voters in Gorton and Denton were aware of some of the Greens’ positions on areas such as abortion, assisted dying and the legalisation of hard drugs,” says Rakib Ehsan, senior fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange. “Their videos and campaign materials did not mention these policies.”
“I’m not sure many of those who voted Green would have been able to do so if they’d known about their policies in these areas.”
David Jeffery, senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool, agrees that there is a disconnect between the party’s wider progressivism and the tactics used in Gorton and Denton. “The Green Party’s social liberal progressivism is not shared by traditionalist Muslim voters,” he says.
“The Greens are used to being all things to all people. This could be a problem for them if there is a Green government or coalition and they have to make decisions which will be opposed in Muslim communities.” He adds that a more socially conservative pro-Gaza candidate, such as George Galloway, could attract the protest vote in future.
Perceived incoherence over policy is concerning for senior Green figures, too. One of Polanski’s ideas, reported earlier this week, is to grant amnesty to illegal migrants, stating that “immigration is not a criminal offence under any circumstance”. All migrants would be granted access to government services, including the NHS, from day one.
Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, says this approach makes it harder to enjoy the victory.
“I’m conflicted about the result,” he says. “On the one hand I’m in awe of the scale of the victory. On the other hand, I’ve been very despondent about the manner in which they campaigned, in particular their appeal to the Muslim bloc. The Green Party is hoovering up the pro-immigration position, but that is a fundamentally irresponsible political stance.
“You can’t have someone turn up and be looked after by the state while you have somebody next door – the kind of person who Hannah Spencer claims to want to support – unable to pay the bills or get a mortgage. That inconsistency is unfair in the broader sense. I think the Green Party are selling out all semblance of political policy and principle for a lowest common denominator approach, which is just to say: ‘We’ll grab all your votes from any direction we can get them.’
“It wasn’t a small victory margin, so they could have won it on our own terms, which is to say, here’s what we stand for, here are our political priorities, vote positively for the Green Party. The Green Party at the moment lacks a political philosophy.”
One policy area notably absent from the discourse around Gorton and Denton was the environment, the Greens’ original purpose. “People are voting for [the Greens] as a social welfare party, and on the looming climate calamity we say very little,” Ali says. “But people are still of the view that they’re likely to get a bit more [green policy], even if it’s greenwash, than with any other party. It looks to me like they’ve stopped campaigning on the climate because it’s going to put people off.”
As they celebrate a victory that has left the political establishment reeling, Polanski, Spencer and the rest of the Green Party may feel these are problems for another day. “It’s seismic,” says former leader and Green party peer Baroness Jones. “We are likely to do much better in the local elections and a future general election. We will hear much less on the doorstep about how the Greens are a wasted vote. We have a wide appeal.”
But a general election is a different proposition to a by-election. As the Greens grow in stature, the public will be paying more attention to what they stand for beyond a simple protest against the main parties. As Polanski moves the party away from the environment and further to the left on economic and social issues, voters may not like what they see. Waqas Khan, for one, may have contributed to their victory this week, but he will not be voting Green again.
