I saw how the Greens channelled voters’ anger – and fused it with hope. That’s why they won in Gorton and Denton | Owen Jones

Starmer called the byelection a battle for the nation’s soul. This result shows Labour has lost that – and I think it will lose much more, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

It wasn’t even close. The scale of victory of the Green party’s Hannah Spencer in Gorton and Denton changes everything. For years, British politics has oscillated between snuffing out hope and stoking fear. The main parties converged around an economic model that irretrievably broke in the crash of 2008, then encouraged understandably furious voters to blame foreigners for the wreckage. In south-east Manchester, thousands of people just revolted against that wretched consensus.

The Greens’ campaign will be studied for years. Less than two years ago, they limped into third place in the constituency on just over 13% of the vote, with barely any ground operation to speak of. They started this contest with scant data and little local infrastructure, up against a Labour machine that had dominated the area for generations and, in 2024, secured more than half the vote and a majority north of 13,000.

So how did a party long dismissed as fringe upend political reality? I spent a good time in Gorton and Denton, and I can tell you. Like New York’s Zohran Mamdani, it maintained a relentless focus on the cost of living crisis. In Hannah Spencer, a local plumber, it selected a candidate who radiates authenticity. It paired hopeful, sharp-edged social media with old-fashioned shoe leather, galvanising thousands of activists to knock on doors – many for the first time in their lives. By polling day, the Greens had more volunteers than they knew what to do with. When I visited, I met lifelong Labour voters – many of them older working-class white people regarded as prime Reform recruits – defecting to the Greens. But in the final days, the party’s grassroots army noticed undecided voters suddenly flooding to their camp.

This was a vindication of the unabashedly populist strategy pursued by Zack Polanski since he became leader last September. Before him, the Greens often seemed to be running away from an open goal: drenched in twee middle-class sensibilities, chronically timid in their messaging, especially online. Polanski understood that class politics is not a relic but a necessity – that anger must be acknowledged and channelled, and fused with hope. To say that approach has been vindicated is an understatement.

What of their vanquished opponents? Reform selected the liberal academic turned hard-right demagogue Matthew Goodwin, betting that GB News name recognition plus a split progressive vote would deliver victory. That fewer than 29% opted for Reform’s toxic migrant scapegoating will alarm a party whose momentum already looks brittle. There was no shortage of working-class voters denouncing Reform as the Tory party 2.0 or condemning its bigotry. Contrary to media caricatures, most working-class people are not in fact knuckle-dragging racists.

And what of Labour? Throughout the campaign, it insisted the Greens were nowhere and that the race was solely between Labour and Reform. That was a falsehood; it is inconceivable its own canvassing did not tell it otherwise. Had the Greens not built such an overwhelming surge, that deception could have paved the way for a Reform win. A Labour minister openly briefed a Politico journalist that they would prefer such an outcome.

Labour did not simply lose; it disgraced itself. It has been accused of sending leaflets appearing to come from a tactical voting organisation that did not exist, which “recommended” voting Labour based on “a new prediction”. Labour attacked the Greens for their principled opposition to a failed “war on drugs” that leaves a multibillion-pound trade in the hands of criminal gangs and condemns many addicts to early graves.

Labour feared a Green victory would be existential. It is. Gorton and Denton ranked 127th on the Greens’ target list. If Polanski’s party can capture one of Labour’s safest seats, then no Labour MP can feel secure. And it is worse than it looks. Canvassers repeatedly told me they met voters – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – who were frightened into backing Labour to stop Reform. They would have voted Green had they believed victory possible. Next time, those people will.

The Starmer project rested on crushing the left. As a mere frontman for the most reactionary and personally toxic elements in his party, he secured power by assuring members he would preserve the radicalism they had voted for – and then buried it. They assumed they could get away with it, confident much of the media would applaud the destruction of socialists as sober statecraft.

But deceit is all Starmerism had – and events in Gorton and Denton show the vacuity of that. There was no animating vision, no reckoning with a broken economic order. What Starmer’s Labour did not anticipate was the re-emergence of the left beyond Labour’s institutional walls. It was comfortable competing with the Conservatives and Reform, aping their anti-migrant rhetoric. It did not regard the left as a legitimate political force: being devoured by the radical left was never in the script. In the end, its war on the left has consumed it.

Labour now faces a reckoning between a Blairite faction urging further defiance of an estranged electorate and others demanding a frantic pivot to win back disillusioned voters. Even if the leadership desired the latter, the parliamentary party is crowded with too many cynical careerists to make it credible. In my view, Labour cannot be saved: it must be replaced. Gorton and Denton suggests that is possible.

A warning, though. The smear campaign against the Greens will now reach unprecedented heights. It will come from an unholy alliance of Reform, Conservatives, Blairites and large swathes of the media. And much of it will be racist.

From my conversations, there is no question that Gaza is one element in the Greens’ victory. That is because most of our political and media elites willingly decided to facilitate a genocide. The Labour government continues to supply Israel with crucial components for F-35 jets, which have butchered so many Palestinians. This moral collapse has changed many people – both Muslim and non-Muslim. The ultimate red line has been crossed, they have concluded, and there is no compromise to be had with the complicit.

But the Greens’ principled opposition to genocide is being demonised as religious sectarianism – as “whipping up hatred” among Muslim voters, as one Labour cabinet minister put it. The Reform party called the result “dangerous Muslim sectarianism”, with Nigel Farage taking from the Donald Trump playbook by claiming that the election was stolen. A party led by a gay Jewish man is being smeared as the political vehicle of dangerous, angry Muslims. For the sake of the country, this campaign must be defeated. Spencer showed how that could be done: in her victory speech, she called out “the politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society”. Instead, she emphasised the “common ground” shared by Britons of diverse backgrounds.

But in the here and now, take in the moment. For so long, politics has been about fear, about scapegoating and punishing the impoverished and the struggling. Now something else has reared its head. It’s called hope.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist