Polanski defends leadership of Greens and says he will not step down after byelection defeat by Labour – UK politics live

Vivien Lichtenstein, the leader of the Jewish Greens, has called for Zack Polanski to step down as pressure increases on the Green leader to acknowledge anger within the party over a new policy which equates Zionism with racism and calls for the state of Israel to be abolished. Peter Walker has the story.

Here are some more responses to the Holborn and St Pancras byelection result from journalists and commentators.

From Patrick English from YouGov

Just to temper the chat a little bit around what will yes definitely be a morning of disappointment for the Greens… This was not a seat we would *expect* them to win. It is not like other areas in London where they did so well in May (Hackey, Lewisham, Waltham Forest).

From the politics professor Steven Fielding

For any governing party in modern times defending a seat midterm, this is a very good result. But it’s not so good Burnham should even think about holding an early general election.

From the New Statesman’s Ben Walker

Grns performed as Britain Predicts expects. But Lab outperform.

To what extent that is…

A greater willingness to tactically vote Lab to beat the Grns

And/or

A reflection of the Labour bounce in London …

needs some research. Will change a few dynamics either way.

From Adam Ramsay, a journalist and Green party member

I remember, not so long ago, Greens got c. 4% in a by-election, and my reaction was “well, at least it wasn’t totally humiliating”. The fact that some people think 33% in a longstanding Labour seat in the middle of the Burnham bounce is bad shows how far the party has come.

From the Economist’s Owen Winter

There’s a fine line between righteous anger over the war in Gaza and seeming obsessive/extreme. Big difference speaking to voters in Holborn and St Pancras compared with Gorton and Denton was how many felt the Greens had moved into the second category

From George Eaton from the Arguably Substack

Zack Polanski repeatedly declared that the Greens were “replacing” Labour and said he was “incredibly confident” of winning Holborn & St Pancras. Finishing 12.8 points behind cannot be spun as a “good” result.

Back to the byelection, and the politics professor Rob Ford has written an analysis of the results for Sky News. Here is an excerpt.

This was a strong performance for Labour on several metrics. The decline in Labour’s vote share, at just 3.7 points, was well below the average drop of 19.3 points across the four by-elections during Starmer’s premiership, where Burnham was not on the ballot.

The drop here was indeed smaller than the average drop in Labour support found during Tony Blair’s first term (11.1%).

The Labour to Green swing, at 13.1 points, was well below many of the swings the Greens achieved in the 2024 general election and this May’s local elections, and a pale shadow of the 26.5-point swing the party achieved in Gorton and Denton in February.

Andy Burnham has pledged to make dementia research a national priority as he announced a £48m industry partnership to accelerate the search for a cure, the Press Association reports. PA says:

The prime minister, whose father Roy died last month after suffering from Alzheimer’s, said he wanted Britain “to be the country that makes the breakthrough”.

The government will invest £33m, and there is also funding from Bristol Myers Squibb, GSK and Gates Ventures to help recruit more people for clinical studies.

The investment will support The Barbara Alliance, which was launched in memory of the late EastEnders actress Dame Barbara Windsor to speed up the development of dementia treatments.

It will establish a platform connecting health data, research and clinical trial capabilities to make it easier to find participants for trials.

Burnham said:

Dementia is a devastatingly cruel disease, not only for those who live with it, but for the families who care for them.

For too long, we have accepted dementia as something to be managed later in life, rather than a disease we can defeat.

I don’t accept that.

In fact, I have real hope that we can come together and do exactly that.

Downing Street has published further details here.

Caroline Lucas, the former Green leader, has said that Sunday’s vote for the “Zionism is racism” motion has shown how the party is “woefully exposed” to entryism.

In an article for the New Statesman, she said passing the motion crossed “a very significant red line” and she said the party urgently needed to reform its internal procedures to stop this happening again.

She explained:

It’s worth recalling that this motion was supported by 1,022 self-selected members – just 0.5% of the party’s total membership – an unknown number of whom were actively encouraged to join the Green party simply to vote to push the motion through. This speaks volumes about the vulnerability of our internal structures. Entryism has been a problem for many parties, but with our commitment to direct democracy and our cumbersome internal accountability mechanisms, the Greens are woefully exposed.

In the weeks and months to come, we Greens have urgent work to do: taking action to show everyone in our communities, especially Jewish people, that our party is safe for them; finding ways of making our party’s policy making processes more inclusive and effective, our internal structures more accountable and resilient, and our understanding of both antisemitism and Zionism more informed.

Setting out what she saw as the flaw in the motion, Lucas said:

One of the most dangerous outcomes of rising populism and polarisation is a refusal to accept complexities, to deal only in zero-sum binaries. And so the radical over-simplification at the heart of the “Zionism is racism” motion has led to many Jewish people, both inside and outside the party, feeling scared and unwelcome. For many of them, the knowledge about why their ancestors or families fled Europe and sought sanctuary in Palestine can, and often does, simultaneously sit alongside their utter abhorrence at the actions and ideology of the state of Israel now. But asking all Jewish people to deny the historical realities that might explain their own families’ attachment to Israel as a sanctuary is not an ask our movement should or needs to make.

In his speech in Manchester, Andy Burnham congratulated Sagal Abdi-Wali on her victory in the byelection.

He said:

We’re here in Manchester. But actually, it’s good news from London that it’s lifting us. And I just wanted to say congratulations to Sagal Abdi-Wali, the new member of parliament for Holborn and St Pancras – and, relevant to this morning, the constituency that is the capital of innovation in the UK, home to the Crick Institute, the Alan Turing Institute and so much more.

These are from the More in Common pollster Luke Tryl on the Holborn and St Pancras byelection result.

3000+ majority for Labour, comfortable and a sign of Burnham’s gains on the left. Labour vote barely drops. Green vote significantly up from 2024, but less impressive if you assume lots of Feinstein 2024 voters went to the Greens. Bad result for the Greens but not at worst end

Wider context to the Holborn result: this chart shows the proportion of Labour’s 2024 vote going to different parties. Post Gorton over 1 in 10 Labour 24 voters were going to the Greens – that number has more than halved as Labour’s retention improved, particularly on the left.

Tryl also points out that it was a record bad result for George Galloway, who in the past has pulled off two remarkable byelection victories.

Obviously not helped by the fact he is in self imposed exile. But Holborn was George Galloway’s worst ever result in a Westminster election.

Here is Guardian video of Zack Polanski responding to the byelection result.

Party leaders sometimes visit the constituency after a byelection win. Andy Burnham is giving a speech this morning – but not in Holborn and St Pancras. He is in Manchester, where he is giving a speech at the Innovation Nation summit.

Burnham is speaking now, and he is following the former PM Gordon Brown. Brown said the UK could be a leading innovation nation, and Burnham started his speech with what he said were words that he used every week when he was a cabinet minister almost 20 years ago. “Gordon is right,” he said.

Jenny Jones, the Green party peer, said that the Greens should clarify what they meant by the “Zionism is racism” motion passed at their conference.

Describing the vote “a rather big blip” for the party in an interview on Times Radio, she said:

I actually chaired the session and I was astonished. It was very emotional, but it was also relatively polite, which was surprising.

And I would like to see it reorganised. It is not clear exactly what we mean.

Zack has been working with Jewish members of the party and with Jewish organisations to make it clear that we are not antisemitic.

And nobody in the party will be disciplined for going to the synagogue or any sort of community centre.

We have to work through it and we’ve got to make it clear exactly what that motion means.

In his Today interview, Polanski also said that he would like the party to revise the motion. He said:

At the earliest possible opportunity, I do want, at a conference motion, to see us go back to a process where Israelis and Palestinians decide the future of their region.

Now, that’s up to members because we’re a grassroots party.

On the Today programme (see 9.12am) Zack Polanski was being interviewed by Nick Robinson. At times, it got rather tetchy.

When Robinson asked about Caroline Lucas saying that Polanski should have voted in the debate on the “Zionism is racism” motion (see 2.55am), Polanski said he was fighting a byelection. Robinson then told him not to “insult the intelligence of people listening” and said that of course he could have been at the debate. Polanski said he had in fact pushed to get the conference postponed.

Asked how he would have voted if he had been there, Polanski said he wanted to amend the motion on two grounds. But those amendments fell. “And so I would have voted against the motion,” he said.

Polanski backed taking out the reference in the motion saying there should be a one-state solution, and another amendment that would have ensured Jewish Green members were not penalised for belonging to synagogues that identify as Zionist.

Asked if he believed there should be “a safe home for Jews in a state called Israel”, Polanski replied:

I believe everyone deserves a safe home, and I’ve not dodged the question.

When Robinson asked again if Israel had a right to exist, Polanski said:

I believe Israelis and Palestinians should have equal rights in a democracy …

Right now, Israel is a one-state, apartheid state. Palestinians don’t have democracy and they don’t have the right to vote for their government.

Robinson asked why Polanski was not able to say he believed in Israel as a safe home for Jewish people, even if he loathed what its government was doing. Polanski replied:

I don’t believe that any state has a right to oppress or to commit apartheid, and certainly not genocide, on another people.

Now, it may be that in the future that there is a solution in which case Israelis and Palestinians can have equal rights.

I believe my role as leader of the Green party, and more importantly the British government, is to uphold international law.

But this is a context where we’ve seen 75,000 Palestinians murdered in the last few years, 1,500 murdered since the so-called ceasefire, and there are more child amputees than in modern history.

I don’t believe that’s a state that anyone should be supporting.

Robinson asked about the distinction between the Israeli government and the Israeli state. Was Polanski saying things were so terrible the state of Israel should no longer exist? Robinson said the motion passed at the Green conference implied this because it proposed a single Palestinian state. Did Polanski want to scrap the state of Israel?

Polanski replied:

No. What I want is to see a safe space for Israelis and Palestinians. And by the way, this isn’t a new position. We could go back to Edward Montagu, a Jewish man who was in the cabinet, who said at the time that he felt Zionism was a racist endeavour against Jewish people …

Jewish people have always had different opinions about the state of Israel.

Robinson intervened:

I still don’t know what your position is, whether it has a right to exist or not. You could just give me a yes/no and we could move on.

Polanski said he wanted to equal rights for Israeli and Palestinians. Robinson said that was not an answer to the question. Polanski replied: “At the moment Palestinians don’t have equal rights, so I think I’m answering your question really clearly.”

And Andy Burnham has posted this message on the result.

Yesterday, Holborn and St Pancras voted for hope.

Congratulations @Sagal_AW and the whole team on a fantastic campaign. Looking forward to working together!

Keir Starmer, the former PM, has posted this on social media about Sagal Abdi-Wali winning the byelection created by his resignation as MP for Holborn and St Pancras.

Brilliant result. Congratulations to my friend @Sagal_AW, I know you are a brilliant champion for our communities and will be a fantastic MP.

In an interview on the Today programme, Zack Polanski was asked about reports that Lubna Speitan, one of the Green party members proposing the “Zionism is racism” motion, was listed in court documents as a “close friend” of a man later jailed for supporting al-Qaeda.

Polanski said that he was not aware of this at the time of the debate. But he said this was now being investigated by the party.

When it was put to him that, given the importance of this motion, he should have looked who was proposing it more carefully, Polanski said there were 121 motions proposed at the conference.

Asked about her friendship with Minh Quang Pham, who denied planning a suicide attack, Speitan told the Telegraph: “People are demonised for all sorts of things and wrongfully accused of all sorts of things.” She also claimed she was the victim of a “character assassination”.

Here is an extract from Prof Sir John Curtice’s assessment of the Holborn and St Pancras byelection in an article for the Times.

With 45 per cent of the vote, Labour was much further ahead of the Greens, on 33 per cent, than they had been in May. Yet, Labour’s tally was still four points down on the 49 per cent Sir Keir won in 2024 — a figure that, as in many constituencies with a substantial Muslim population, was well down on the 66 per cent the party won locally in 2019.

In short, the result confirmed that, while it is enjoying a substantial recovery from the nadir to which the party fell in the final months of Sir Keir’s tenure, Labour still has significant ground left to recover before it is in a position where it might win another Commons majority.

Curtice also points out that the results confirm that Restore Britain is a problem for Reform UK. (See 6.15am.) The Conservative party came third, but Reform UK would beaten the Tories if its candidate had also had just half the votes that went to Restore.

Here is a Guardian graphic showing how the share of the vote changed in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection since the 2024 election.

And this is what Bridget Phillipson, the Labour party chair, told Times Radio about the byelection result.

I think it demonstrates that Labour’s message of hope is really cutting through, that people don’t just want parties like Labour to talk about the progressive change this country needs but they want to see it delivered in action, and that’s what we’re focused on every day as a Labour government.

The things that really matter to people about the cost of living, about issues around homelessness as Sagal [Abdi-Wali] was talking about.

In Sagal we had a fantastic candidate who really resonated with the public, backed up by Labour’s clear message of hope and I couldn’t be more pleased.

Bridget Phillipson, the Labour party chair, told Sky News that the Holborn and St Pancras byelection result showed that Andy Burnham had “got off to an incredibly strong start” as PM.