Hello, I'm Georgina Mumford, and I'm delighted to be joined today by co-founder of JL Partners, James Johnson.

Welcome, James. James, today we had the results of the by-election in Gorton and Denton. The Greens,

Hannah Spencer, came out on top with about 41% of the vote share with reform and labor lagging behind.

Just at a glance, what did you make of

these results? Was this something that was foreseeable or did it surprise you? I think it did surprise me.

The level of the green victory, I think, was bigger than anyone was really expecting. I think a lot

of pundits went into it thinking that Labour would have quite a good ground game and therefore

would they

would be able to close the deal or at least get into second place. In fact, even if that ground game

was there, it was not persuasive in getting voters to the polls and clearly the Greens had a better

impact, both in reaching into the Muslim community as well as actually getting people to the polls.

We can often assume that because it's been a Labour seat for so long,

that there's a really good ground operation,

actually in these really safe seats, they tend to get neglected.

So actually, because there's no need to fight them.

So I imagine actually that's one of the explanations

why the labour infrastructure really wasn't there.

So, yep, I think we can all be

surprised by the size of the Green win. I think it does tell us something about that, you know,

conflict on the left and how Labour is losing its votes to insurgent parties, not just the

Greens, on the left. And what does this mean for Labour going forward?

What are they going to have to think about now?

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