Green Party in shock new poll

This will cause growing panic in Labour and Reform HQ

This is a sensational poll for the Greens - and should cause panic for both Reform and Labour.

According to a new YouGov poll - the first since the Gorton and Denton by-election - the Green Party is now in second place, on 21%. That’s only two points behind Nigel Farage’s Reform - and an astonishing 5 points ahead of Labour, who are now in joint third place with the Tories, on 16%.

What’s happened here? What has been holding back many remaining Labour voters is the belief that they have to stick with their old party - otherwise Reform and the Tories will win.

But Labour just lost one of their safest seats in the country - Gorton and Denton. They’d won there with over 50% of the vote back in 2024, with the Greens a poor third at 13.2%. This time, the Greens won over 40%, with Labour’s vote halving, leaving them in third place.

And that result was even worse for Labour than it looked - because canvassers told me they kept encountering voters sticking with Keir Starmer’s party for fear of Reform winning. They would have voted Green if they knew that candidate Hannah Spencer could actually win.

That vote is beginning to sink in across the country - and Labour voters are now reassessing their loyalty. As they see polls like this, that will encourage even more of them to take a jump - and that then creates a reinforcing cycle.

But it says something that 16% of the vote is not Labour’s floor. It’s not actually clear what Labour’s floor actually is anymore. That’s because the Starmerite war on Labour’s left succeeded in its mission - at the cost of ridding the party of any coherent purpose.

It should have been obvious that this would happen. As I predicted in February 2023, when Labour had an astronomical polling lead:

While Starmer’s team behaves as though it’s 1997, Britain’s current state is more like 1974 – that is, in crisis and turmoil. If a Labour government offers only tinkering around the edges of the economy, and the lives of struggling households do not substantially improve, mass disillusionment may soon kick in. It remains the case that the most interesting ideas are bubbling away on the left: banishing them from Labour’s future is an act of self-harm. If a meek Starmer administration disappoints, a now cowed left may find an audience willing to listen. Starmer’s team is buoyant now, and understandably so: but history tell us where hubris leads.

And as I wrote a day after the general election result, when Starmerites were overwhelmed with triumphalism (or, rather, hubris):

Despite the excessive media focus on the Farageist insurgency, the left revolt is just as significant. If the Labour leadership was rational, it would acknowledge this disaffection and seek to reverse the rot. The party, after all, has secured the same share of the vote as in 2019, winning its landslide thanks to Nigel Farage dividing the right and the vagaries of our electoral system. The juxtaposition between its dominance of the House of Commons and the lack of enthusiasm it enjoys in the country will be increasingly felt.

But here’s a prediction. Those surrounding Starmer are too politically defined by their hostility to the left to learn from this. There will be precious little conciliation: quite the reverse. In the coming years, growing numbers of voters will be driven to the Greens and other leftwing formations. As long as leftwing forces in Britain build on this moment and find common cause – yes, a big but – then this could be a new beginning indeed.

The Professional Political Understanders did not see this coming. They are wedded to a view that the left are - unlike the right - politically illegitimate. They don’t understand the structural basis for the left’s existence. When Starmerism crushed the left, they saw that as sound politics - and thought that’s the last they would hear from the left. Their entire worldview has collapsed.

And what about Reform? They’ve clearly lost momentum, and are four points lower than Reform in the polling. Note this chart from pollsters More In Common:

This is their ‘negative voting intention’ chart - that is who Brits would vote against.

38% say they’d now vote against Reform - up 9 points. Coming second is Labour, on 34%. Just 7% say the same about the Greens.

That means Reform are building up a growing base of opposition against them. That will mean voters will increasingly coalesce around the candidate best placed to stop them. And if the Greens play their cards right, this could benefit them.

Without bursting the bubble, the Green surge will mean an escalating campaign against them by the entire political and media establishment. They better have a strategy to deal with it!