Holborn and St Pancras byelection: Polanski is an utter failure

Labour has stormed home in Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras, easily holding off a challenge from Green party leader Zack Polanski. Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali secured 12,292 to Polanski’s 8,928, with the Tories coming in third on 1,922. A few disparate thoughts below.

It’s time for Polanski to fuck off now

The electoral reality of what happened in London last night pales in comparison to the moral reality. In all likelihood, the result would have been the same regardless of what happened with the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion at the Green party conference earlier in the week. But the combination of these two events - one about leadership, the other about electoral success - provides a clear conclusion. Polanski has to go.

In the year or so that Polanski has been leader of the Green party he has removed any sense of seriousness or good judgement from the organisation. But he could, to his credit, point to significant polling progress and to electoral success.

That is no longer the case. The Politico poll of polls tells the story of his polling.

Under his leadership the party increased its vote significantly but it has been in decline for months and this result confirms it. Nor is this just a Burnham bounce, although that’s undoubtedly part of it. The Green decline was already underway before Burnham became prime minister.

The Green party leadership will now make all sorts of excuses. They will say that the result was tight and suggests the Greens are making headway. That’s not true. In fact, the Green vote is weaker than it first appears. In the 2024 general election, the Greens were competing for the left-wing vote with Andrew Feinstein, a radical film-maker and author from South Africa. He finished second, with 7,312 votes to Labour’s 18,884. This time around, Feinstein did not run.

Putting the Green and Feinstein votes from 2024 together gives you a better impression of the left-of-Labour position. In 2024, it got 29.3%. This time around, Polanski monopolised the left-of-Labour position and secured 32.8%, an increase of just 3.5 percentage points.

On the face of it, that seems understandable. Holborn and St Pancras is a very safe Labour seat. It’s always been Labour. Perhaps it always will be. But things are not quite as simple as that. Until recently, we’d have expected the Greens to probably win this seat. After all, that’s why Polanski ran in it.

Labour struggles to defend its seats from left challengers when it is in government, as this post by Peter Kellner outlines. The average swing against Labour in these circumstances is 24%.

We are now at that point where sensible Green members must come to their judgement. The party will not thrive under this leader. Honestly, they should not have flirted with him in the first place. He had no intellectual substance, no real commitment to green issues and no sense of moral seriousness. He’s a simple-minded populist for the social media age. But having done so, this is the moment at which the party should conclude that he is not even credible on an electoral level. There is no reason left to keep him.

Once he is gone, this period will be considered an aberration. This party used to have Caroline Lucas as leader, for heaven sake. Someone who was thoughtful, charismatic, conscientious, principled, multifaceted, profoundly progressive and highly intelligent. It is used to a higher calibre of person and it can damn well return to having that calibre of person once it undoes this current period of ill-advised experimentation.

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Polanski richly deserves this failure

This last week has been a moral atrocity.

Polanski’s biggest flaw is not the Zionism motion itself, or his individual policies, or his lack of leadership - although every single one of those things disqualifies him. It is that he is a populist.

This is not a slur. It is how he himself defined the approach. When he secured the leadership he said he wanted to “reclaim” populism from the right. He then went on to demonstrate how you might do this, by adopting a people-vs-the-elite frame, but filling it with progressive imagery.

This is always wrong, no matter whether it is left or right wing. It is false, as a basic way of seeing the world. The elites-vs-the-people framing is a lie. There is no one homogenous ‘people’ and there is no one singular ‘elite’. The moment you adopt this form of reasoning, you encourage conspiracy theories, because your whole framework for viewing the world is inherently conspiratorial. The people are all-good, so how can we explain our problems? Well the shadowy behavior of the elite, who invariably control the media and the levers of power.

So - surprise, surprise - out the conspiracy theories come. Those creeping tentacles of conspiratorialism, out in the open, plain for all to see. Some Greens told the Statesman that Starmer had timed the byelection so that Polanski would come under double assault in one week through the conference and the election campaign. This is what happens once you ingest conspiratorial thinking: no idea is too stupid for your brain to hold.

It’s completely unsurprising that the party has crumpled into anti-semitism. You can have conspiracy theories without anti-semitism, but it’s relatively rare. Usually, when this sort of thinking takes over, anti-semitism will find its way in. The old story of the Jews in history - hidden away, full of money, handling the secret levers of power - is too common and seductive to be resisted for long by minds that have become adept at this type of thinking.

What we saw this week was effectively a repeat of the Jeremy Corbyn years. One by one the party’s newfound campaigners came out, to excuse the Zionism-is-racism motion, or misrepresent it, or sidestep it, or enter into tortured definitional or historic debates, or simply to dissemble. Each excuse more craven and self-interested and desperate than the last.

The whole thing was bullshit. If the promoters of the motion wanted simply to criticise the behaviour of the Israeli government, they could have just written it that way. It’s not hard. It’s very fucking easy in fact. You do not need a PhD in rhetoric to criticise a murderous racist government run by some of the most heinous and immoral leaders of our lifetime.

If they wanted to make the delicate but entirely respectable point that Zionism itself serves to radicalise the Israeli government because of its ethnic dimension, they could have written that too. But they don’t want to do that. They want to say something lurid and vicious and divisive and tribal. Something which extends past any legitimate argument you might have into the much more satisfying emotional world of treating Jewish people like shit. That’s the reality. We should judge people not by the most generous interpretation of their writing, but by their actions. And in this case, they acted to be as brutal towards British Jews as they could get away with.

It felt like Corbynism 2.0 because, in many cases, these were literally the same people. This rump of hateful puritans, moving to whichever party is stupid enough to host them, monomaniacle in their obsession and impervious to any notion of restraint or moderation. Unless they are removed, they will fuck the Green party the same way they fucked the Labour party.

There is nothing progressive about them. They undermine and discredit progressive movements. There is nothing compassionate about them. They behave with hate in their heart and act only to raise their own sense of moral self-worth.

But it also felt like Corbynism 2.0 because the thought process is the same. Corbyn adopted a left-populist position in which the people are all good and the elite all bad. Naturally, this meant that he could only explain bad press reports by reference to some kind of conspiracy. The same is happening now online, brains melted by the crude binaries of Polanski’s narrative frame.

This is why he should go. He has brought a primitive political structure to a party with a long and proud heritage. He has created the intellectual conditions for conspiracy theory and anti-semitism to take root. Most seriously, he has gone fucking AWOL when the threat reared its head, prevaricating and blathering away when what was required was a strict, firm, moral response. I mean, he fucking abstained on the motion. What a fucking coward.

Starmer, for all his many faults, at least demonstrated how you do this: zero tolerance. Once the poison has taken root, you have to adopt a harsh policy to handle it and clean things up. If the party did this now, it could be dealt with relatively easily. If it allows the problem to take root over the next couple of years, they will make it much harder. And god knows how many progressive British Jews will be made to feel afraid and unwelcome in the meantime.

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We need a strong Green party

What’s gutting about this is that we need a strong party to the left of Labour.

On the face of it, that shouldn’t be true. A weak Green party allows Burnham a monopoly over progressive voters, reducing the chance of a tit-for-tat battle between Labour and the Greens that right-wing parties can use to slip through the middle. This is particularly beneficial because Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now effectively partners. The types of seats they target are so distinct that they no longer get in each other’s way. But the right, as we saw during Badenoch’s speech this week, are bitterly divided between the Tories, Reform and Restore.

Things aren’t that easy though. As Stephen Bush argued this week, voters may well look at the two blocs - progressive and reactionary - and evaluate each party by what they think of others in their group. More pressingly, a toxic Green party could be damaging to Labour in an election, allowing the Tories to raise the alarm that Burnham would be in the pocket of Polanski in the event of a hung parliament. Most seriously of all, it would make it impossible for Labour to form a coalition with the Greens.

A strong Green voice also makes sure that there is a threat to Burnham from the left. Without it, he can fixate, as Starmer did, only with the Reform threat to his right.

All of these things are bad, and all of them are perfectly avoidable, if you didn’t have a bunch of useless tankie cunts passing anti-semitic motions. The Greens were on the verge of being involved in the serious business of politics, with decent enough polling in the right historic circumstances to potentially establish a foothold in government. Now they are pissing it away.

And quite apart from any electoral consideration, progressive voters deserve a party that is willing to speak openly and without embarrassment about progressive values. Labour will not unequivocally stand up for immigration. It is continuing a campaign against trans people. The Lib Dems are marginally better, but too embarrassed and lacking in confidence to show any kind of resolution on these issues. The Greens had the freedom and the incentives to do so. And now - boom - the only credible and unapologetic progressive voice is once again taken over by anti-semitism. Abysmal. A fucking embarrassment.

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The Burnham bounce is real

It’s best not to conclude too much from a seat like this. Holborn and St Pancras is weird. As Rob Ford pointed out in this very good primer:

“The seat has exceptionally high shares of twentysomethings, single person households, full time students, graduates, middle class professionals, social renters, private renters, residents born abroad. It has exceptionally low numbers of car owners, home owners, white residents, old residents, working class residents, and families with children. Eighty percent of the England & Wales population live in houses; ninety percent of the Holborn & St Pancras population live in flats.”

But even just as a local it’s a weird constituency, which includes two really rather disparate bits of London. The south of the seat includes places like Holborn & Covent Garden, King’s Cross, Bloomsbury and so on. Hardly any normal people live there. It’s very rare to meet a Londoner who lives in central. The north part of the seat includes places close to where I live - Camden Town, Haverstock, Kentish Town - where people do live and commute in. I’m not going to say it’s normal exactly, but it is more normal than central London.

You don’t want to conclude too much about national politics on the basis of a seat like this. It’s too unusual. But the fact remains that under Burnham, Labour has now won in Makerfield and Holborn, bringing together two seats on very different sides of the culture war divide. Burnham has proof of concept for his appeal. The party is now comfortably leading in the polls.

The basic picture is now quite settled. Some people want to call this a honeymoon. I think that is to understate the appeal of Burnham. Barring a sudden financial shock or an unforced error, this should remain the state of play for some time. This byelection provides further corroboration of that idea.

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This is a beautiful, beautiful place

During the election campaign, Abdi-Wali was subject to precisely the kind of attacks you would expect. Her family came to London in the early 90s, fleeing war in Somalia. She moved to Gospel Oak, just round the corner from where I lived until just recently. She rose to become the chair of Camden Council. Now she is the local member of parliament. That is a fine, beautiful story of which we should be proud.

But that, of course, is not the reaction on the far-right. When her name was first mentioned, Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusef wrote that a Somalian was being “foisted” on the people of the area. “Do you understand what’s happening?” he added. I can’t imagine how much racist abuse she was subject to online during the campaign, but I imagine it was considerable.

This is what she said during her victory speech last night:

“I want to talk about the experiences that I have had over the last few weeks. In Camden, our diversity is a strength and our cohesion has been too hard won to take for granted. Since I was a child I’ve watched people across Camden work to build communities where difference is not something to fear but something to value. We cannot allow that work, built over generations, to be causally undone.”

As so often, I felt a great swell of pride in my city and my local area.

You very rarely hear a good word said about London. Broadcasters seem increasingly embarrassed to admit they’re based here. The Tories and Reform hate it as a kind of cultural aberration. The Burnham government likes to use it as a scapegoat. The lies told about it by the far-right online have spread around the world. Wherever you go now, you will meet people who instinctively ask of this really very safe city: ‘London, isn’t it dangerous?’

Despite this constant denigration, a central fact remains. London is the greatest city on the face of the earth. It is the single greatest living experiment in multicultural living. Travel to Paris or New York and you will find a great metropolis with people from all over the world, but you will also find a much greater degree of racial separation. London’s multiculturalism is granular and diffuse.

I am proud of precisely that aspect of the city which Abdi-Wali refers to: That in this place, you will not face the abuse or discrimination you will elsewhere. In this place, diversity is considered beautiful. Here, you can be loved and find belonging no matter who you are, no matter where you’re from. This is why they hate it. They hate it because it is beautiful, and it works, and that success provides a comprehensive refutation of their worldview.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My i paper column this week was on the Kemi badenoch conference speech. You can read it here. Our Origin Story Revisited episode was on Ayn Rand, the lunatic author who defined US libertarianism. You can listen to it here. And I also did a podcast with my pal Roland Smith, talking about liberalism, identity and Brexit. You can listen to it here.

This week I watched the Standard of Living, the new play about John Maynard Keynes by James Graham, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I will undoubtedly get more joy out of this than most people because I am infatuated with Keynes. Perhaps for a civilian it would be a bit dum-de-dum-de-dum, a series of vignettes compromising a life, rather than a focused treatment. But I thought it was well done, succinct and very funny, touching, and with a firm understanding of what made Keynes a great man and a great economist. I had a wonderful time.

It is important to mention that I went to a restaurant called Fowl beforehand and had what I think would be one of my top ten chips experiences. All the food was good, but the chips. Fucking hell. They put chicken salt on them, but there was also some kind of lime thing going on. It was special. The burgers were good too, but the chips were something else. Also a strong recommendation on the smashed cucumber salad, which is a sentence I have never written before nor ever thought I would write.

Right, that’s it for now - fuck off cunts.