Labour holds former prime minister’s seat as Greens fall short in UK special election

Filed 3h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Waltz of the Carnies

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali won the Holborn and St. Pancras special election with 45% of the vote, beating Green leader Zack Polanski's 33% in the seat long held by former Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Greens still improved on their 2024 showing by 22 points, and the party's membership has roughly tripled to 220,000 since May, but Polanski remains outside Parliament.

Abdi-Wali thanked voters, cited homelessness as her motivation for running, and called for Thames Water to be nationalized. Polanski said he'd keep leading the Greens and credited new Prime Minister Andy Burnham's leftward shift with helping Labour, which has also pulled ahead of Reform UK in national polling.

Polanski is also managing a conference motion calling Zionism racism and backing a single state in historic Palestine, a position he says he personally opposed, plus questions about a party member linked in U.S. court filings to a convicted terrorism plotter. He said he'd only just learned of that connection and that the party is investigating.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Growing your vote share by 22 points and still finishing second is the electoral version of getting a raise the same week your rent goes up more. Burnham gets to take a bow for a seat he didn't run in, which is the oldest trick in the party-leader playbook. Polanski's bigger problem isn't the ballot count, it's that his own conference just voted for a position he has to explain away on every doorstep from here on.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Waltz of the Carnies · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0