In the end, it was not even close. The victory of the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton bye-election is, I think that much abused word “historic.”
But history has different meanings. In five years we might look back on this as the “moment that Labour changed”; unlikely when I narrated the vomit draft of this at 10ish, and more so since Keir Starmer’s latest. – here
It might be the moment that the Reform wave peaked (possible, and I for one, hope it’s the case.)
But Owen Jones is right – there will be a lot of people shitting themselves right now.
(1) Post by @owenjones.bsky.social — Bluesky
They thought that they had seen “Corbynism off,” and they assumed that their takeover of the Labour Party (see Get In, and The Fraud meant that the “left” (progressive voters who are hung up irrelevancies like food on the table, clean air, justice and a habitable planet) had nowhere. They believed that the situation was therefore contained, that compliance with asset stripping, polluting, destroying the planet, that sort of thing.
We should remind ourselves that Starmer got the top job with Labour by pretending to be Corbynism without the Corybn.
To quote myself
“I think as well he is hampered, psychologically, by some dim (very dim) awareness that the words he used to get the Labour leadership in 2020 are now being spoken by people who actually mean them…
Starmer (dimly?) aware that he is revealed as a liar, an inadequate. Awks.”
Post by @marchudson.bsky.social — Bluesky
Those who believed their victory within the Labour Party meant “peace” in the class war forever were, well, insufficiently dialectic. There will always be policy entrepreneurs, political entrepreneurs, new openings, new actors trying to fill niches (or gaping ecosystems) (1) It seems to me that the Your party moment Corbyn etc, has passed because the Green Party began to fill the ecological niche under Polanski. And yes, I am as suspicious of Polanski as anyone else but cometh the hour, cometh the man, and cometh people like Hannah Spencer, Hannah the plumber,
The rest of this post is about the dangers ahead, or the responses to the Green Party.
The Legacy Media
The Telegraph (see the headline generator) will absolutely lose their shit.
Allister Heath Headline Generator
The result came in too late for the front pages of today’s papers, but Saturday’s Hate Mail, Express, Sun, Times, Telegraph will make for hilarious reading.
This is the very Beginning of a prolonged assault on the Green Party, or the continuation of the assault on the Green Party, which has been going on forever. One is reminded of the Leonard Coehn line “You loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried I just might win”.
We will see all sorts of articles, many unattributed smears “those close to”/”anonymous sources say” about where the Greens are getting their money, who they’re influenced by, who.
Doubtless as I type this/you read it hitjobs are being planned by junk-tanks by Policy Exchange (them of the famously transparent funding). There will be torrents of this shite, on the argument that if you can’t make people swallow shit, then you can at least drown them in it.
What is to be done
Mock them as shills for the billionaires. The headline generator thing is a good start
Remind yourself that legacy media is losing its grip (in every sense) and they know it and it is driving them insane(r).
Remember that every accusation is a confession.
Read up on who owns the newspapers/TV stations and share
Read up on the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model and share
[It will be interesting to see what the Morning Star says about it. I and the FT, I may have to buy these tomorrow.]
The Politics Gangs
Well, the Conservatives are semi-irrelevant. They lost their deposit. I can’t see Badenoch having the mental or political capacity to do anything approaching a pivot. The fact that she ignored the Rudd, Gauke, Greening, etc, effort tells you her direction of travel.
Reform will have to wonder if they chose the wrong candidate (almost certainly yes) and whether they – under Farage as a not a political party, but a company – have the capacity to keep their momentum as their time in office leading various councils becomes more and more of a millstone around their neck. We’ll see
All this talk about Labour and what it can or should “do”, strikes me as largely irrelevant, because even if the will were there, I don’t think it can. I think there are too few MPs with spines and hinterlands thanks to the selection pressures, (literally, selection pressures) of 2024
The Lib Dems I’ve ignored, presumably lots of Lib Dem voters voted green tactically. Would that be repeated in the general election? Well, no, maybe
We’ll see how Hannah Spencer is as a constituency MP, but the Greens now have enough experience to manage this, I reckon. Steep learning curve, obvs, but doable.
Green growing pains
The Greens face challenges, as well as growing pains. They will struggle to retain all their new members who will have various expectations, some manageable, others not. Do they have the absorptive capacity? They didn’t ten years ago, but times change.
The next problem is that there will be carpet baggers, people attracted to the Green Party simply because it looks like a possible route to political power not because they give even the smallest shit about the future of the planet.
I would imagine the Green Party will be getting more and more members as I type. wouldn’t surprise me if they become the mass party that Labour was under Corbyn.
Whether they can learn the lessons of what happened under Corbyn is another question. Is there even any agreement about what the lessons were?
“The Establishment.”
Finally, outfits like the security goons etc, will be sniffing around, looking for division (and creating it), looking for scandal (and creating it), passing on half truths, lies and smears to the media as “unattributable briefings” for them to amplify. Zinoviev letters as spam for the 21st century…
So it’ll be interesting times.
The difference is that Polanski is a better media performer than Corbyn. Also, I’m not convinced that labelling the only Jewish political party leader as an antisemite is really going to land the way that they will want it to because people are wiser to it, because Gaza and just Polanski is not going to be boxed and smeared and labelled like that. We’ll see.
So what other attack lines have they got? “Soft on NATO/oft on defence”. I’m not convinced that one will land either.
I think they have quite a problem And it will be a bit like that period with Corbyn, where they were throwing all sorts of mud and nothing would stick, until finally they found the anti semitism thing.
And so there’ll be an experimental phase where they fling as much mud as they can at the Green Party, generally, and individual councillors and MPs, and they’ll fling, and they’ll fling and they’ll fling, and then they’ll see, what if anything sticks.
The nightmare scenario for them, of course, is that nothing sticks, that they have cried wolf and have nothing positive to say, that they become ignored. And that is already happening, really.
And then you’re left with the more physical approaches, where politics gets left behind, and you get into the street fighting years, I don’t know how far off that we are.
marchudson.net 
Great news – i thought of you when this came through. Lets hope we get a green wave and dont sell out. Do you know how the Zionism is racism motion is doing? That would mark another big move away from the status quo.