UK Greens surge in bid for ex-PM’s seat amid Zionism controversy

Filed 49m ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

One-eyed Maestro

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: HatschiKa · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Voters in Holborn and St. Pancras cast ballots Thursday to replace former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali facing a tight challenge from Green leader Zack Polanski in a seat Labour has held since 1979. Projections put Labour at 40.4%, the Greens at 35.6% and Reform at 7.8%, a steep narrowing from Starmer's 2024 landslide.

The race doubles as the first big test for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, whose party's national polling has ticked up amid talk of a so-called Burnham bounce pulling voters back from the Greens. The Green conference's weekend vote equating Zionism with racism drew criticism from Jewish groups and some of the party's own lawmakers, complicating Polanski's closing pitch.

Also on the ballot: George Galloway, campaigning from self-imposed exile in Moscow and South Africa, framing the race as a referendum on NATO and Ukraine rather than, say, housing.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A party can hold a seat for nearly fifty years and still watch the ground shift under it in one bad weekend. Labour's problem here isn't really the Greens, it's that voters keep finding new places to park their frustration, and this week the parking lot had a controversial motion attached to it. Galloway running a London seat from two continents away is its own kind of commentary on how seriously anyone's supposed to take any of this.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: One-eyed Maestro · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0