Green Party Defeats Labour in U.K. Special Election, in Blow to Starmer

The result marks the first time the Greens have won a British parliamentary by-election and signals the frustration of left-leaning voters with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The Green Party won a special election on Thursday for a British parliamentary seat in northern England, where left-leaning voters sent Prime Minister Keir Starmer a searing message of dissatisfaction.

Hannah Spencer, 34, a plumber by trade and a member of the area’s local council, won the seat in a district called Gorton and Denton, southeast of Manchester, England, with 14,980 votes, or about 41 percent of the vote, according to results announced early on Friday morning. She will become the Green Party’s fifth lawmaker in the British Parliament.

Mr. Starmer’s Labour Party came in third, behind Reform U.K., a right-wing populist party that campaigns against immigration. It was a remarkable setback for Labour, which had represented the local area for generations.

Reform received 10,578 votes, or about 29 percent, while Labour received 9,364 votes, or about 25 percent, underscoring a wider fracturing in British politics.

In a brief victory speech just after 4:30 a.m. local time, Ms. Spencer credited her decisive win to her focus on cost-of-living issues, inequality and the environment. And she chided — without naming them — politicians who attempted to divide people along race and ethnic lines.

“I can’t and won’t accept this victory tonight without calling out the politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society,” she said. “My Muslim friends and neighbors are just like me — human.”

Her party leader, Zack Polanski, told the BBC that, by electing the Green candidate, voters showed that they wanted “an alternative to this failing Labour government.”

Mr. Starmer had argued that only Labour was positioned to stop the rise of Reform, which has led national polls consistently for almost a year. In Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Starmer said, “Anybody who wants to stand against that hatred and division should vote Labour.”

But many left-leaning voters appear to have ignored that appeal, and in the election on Thursday, they gave their support to Ms. Spencer, a charismatic candidate who brought social media savvy and energy to the Green campaign.

Reform’s failure to win the seat, where its supporters campaigned hard, will have been a disappointment for the party. Its leader, Nigel Farage, an ally of President Trump who has turned the insurgent party into a powerful force in British politics, blamed the outcome on “sectarian voting and cheating,” without providing evidence.

The result matters for Mr. Starmer’s party because the communities of Gorton and Denton have been Labour strongholds for decades. Filled with a mixture of working-class voters, students and university graduates, and home to a large ethnic-minority population, they are the kind of places that helped make him prime minister.

It also casts a spotlight on the decision, taken by a powerful committee of the Labour Party which is controlled by the leadership, to prevent Andy Burnham, the popular Labour mayor of Manchester, from running in the contest.

Some critics say they believe that Mr. Burnham, a former cabinet minister, would have won the district but was blocked by allies of Mr. Starmer who feared his ambitions as a potential rival to the prime minister.

At Longsight Market in southern Manchester on Thursday, Maurice McCullough, 86, said he believed Mr. Starmer “has done some good things, but he’s very weak.” And he voiced disappointment that Mr. Burnham had been prevented from joining the race: “I think Starmer is a bit frightened of him, of being usurped.”

Nuala Lockett, 24, had come to a polling station inside a church in Denton with her partner. She had previously voted for Labour, she said, but on Thursday she voted Green for the first time because she had been impressed by the party’s campaign. “I have only just moved to Denton but everything I have seen about what they stand for, I like,” she said.

Mr. Starmer entered Downing Street in the summer of 2024, after the Labour Party ousted the Conservatives in a landslide election. The next general election does not have to take place until 2029.

Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, described it as a “difficult and disappointing night” for Labour but said that people should not over-interpret the result. “I think people are impatient for change,” she told Times Radio. “Just because we had the result that we did last night doesn’t mean to say that the party can’t recover from this.”

Special elections in Britain, as in the United States, often draw relatively few voters, though the turnout in this election, just over 47 percent, was close to that in this seat at the 2024 general election. Because of Britain’s “first past the post” system, whoever gets the most votes wins, even if they are far from a majority of the ballots cast.

With just one seat up for grabs, these special elections, or by-elections, rarely change parliamentary math in a significant way. But the outcomes can send shock waves through politics, destabilizing losing parties and galvanizing the winners.

Opposition parties have achieved many by-election victories over the decades by mobilizing public dissatisfaction with the government of the day. Last year, Reform snatched victory from Labour in Runcorn and Helsby, a district in the northwest of England, by just six votes.

The next political test for Mr. Starmer will be large-scale elections on May 7, when voters will select lawmakers for the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and choose local council members across parts of England.

Some political observers say that Mr. Starmer’s rivals in the Labour Party are waiting until then to decide whether to challenge him for the leadership. If Labour does poorly in May, as polls suggest, Mr. Starmer could be ousted and a new Labour prime minister installed.

Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics, said that few people expected Labour to do well in the May elections, an outcome that could galvanize frustration with Mr. Starmer inside his party.

“Even if the Archangel Gabriel were to appear to run the Labour Party between now and May the seventh,” Mr. Travers said, “they’re going to do badly in the local elections.”

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