On 1 September, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he would stand down as MP for Holborn and St Pancras, in the London borough of Camden, triggering a by-election which will be held on 8 October. Green Party leader Zack Polanski wasted no time throwing his hat into the ring, announcing in an interview with the Camden New Journal published 3 September that he would run for the seat vacated by Starmer. The contest is revealing just how tarnished Labour remains despite its new leadership – and the Greens are determined to seize the opportunity to regain electoral momentum. WILL JONES reports.

Green surge, Burnham bounce

Support for the Labour Party tanked under Starmer’s overtly reactionary leadership, with young and Muslim voters in particular abandoning Labour in droves and numerous councillors resigning in the past two years. By early 2026, the abortive attempt by opportunist forces to form Your Party as a social democratic alternative to Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, had fallen into total disarray.

Young progressives and those who see voting as a way to support Palestine have flocked to the Green Party. After Polanski assumed leadership in September 2025, the party experienced a ‘Green surge’. Membership increased from 60,000 to 200,000 in six months and the Greens reached 16-17% on voting intention polls (28% for young people aged 18-24, ahead of Labour and Liberal Democrats) by the time of the May 2026 local elections, where they gained 411 seats. Results of a survey by ThinkLabour published in September show that the Greens advanced 12 points since the 2024 General Election across 40 seats in urban areas while Labour receded 20 points, leaving the Greens just four points behind Labour in some supposedly safe seats.

But since Labour installed Andy Burnham as its new leader in July, the Greens’ overall polling figures have fallen back to 10%. Burnham’s reputation as a break from the Starmer era is completely hollow, even though opportunists such as the SWP campaigned for him to become an MP in the Makerfield byelection in June. Such organisations are desperate for any politician whom they can credibly hold up as a ‘left’ option, horrified at the possibility that more young people will sensibly abandon Parliamentary politics entirely. Fewer than half of 18-to-24-year-olds voted in the 2024 General Election.

No vote for Labour

London is traditionally a stronghold of Labour voters, with a record 55% of the electorate supporting the party in 2017 when Corbyn was leader. By the 2024 General Election Labour’s share of the London vote had fallen to 43%. Keir Starmer won in Holborn and St Pancras with a majority massively dented by his overt support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The Labour candidate for the October 2026 byelection, endorsed by Burnham, is Sagal Abdi-Wali, who is current leader of Camden Council. Abdi-Wali has made much of her background as a settled refugee from Somalia, however this has not hidden her loyalty to genocidal Labour.

Arch-Zionist Labour MP Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel, included Abdi-Wali on his ‘Labour to Win’ slate in the 2025 council elections and has been photographed canvassing for her in the byelection. On 15 September, Camden Friends Of Palestine brilliantly exposed Abdi-Wali’s politics when it released a video of a Council meeting in which she refused to support a petition signed by 4,000 residents demanding the council withdraw £104m it has invested in companies that are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. In an interview with the Guardian (25 September), Abdi-Wali condemned ‘the atrocities of Hamas’. ‘Burnham bounce’ or no, those who stand with Palestine have seen through the charade of the government’s paltry sanctions on Israel and recognise that this is the same old pro-Zionist Party.

Greens seize the moment

Enter Zack Polanski, recognising that Abdi-Wali’s complicity with Labour Zionism provides him with the perfect opportunity to market himself as the ‘pro-Palestine’ candidate to revive the Green Party’s flagging fortunes. In the course of the byelection Polanski has now claimed to be ‘anti-Zionist’, a highly opportunistic claim given his constant equivocations over Zionism (see below).

Meanwhile Labour’s appalling record on the environment has also allowed Polanski to call on Holborn and St Pancras constituents to vote Green in protest against plans for new drilling in the North Sea oil and gas fields, Rosebank and Jackdaw. The Labour government is rumoured to be ready to approve these plans which would extract the equivalent of 700 million barrels of oil, causing further global heating.

Desperate to find a candidate they can credibly vote for, local pro-Palestine groups have largely declared for Polanski. Andrew Feinstein, who ran against Starmer in 2024 as an independent on a pro-Palestine ticket and won 7,312 votes to Starmer’s 18,884, announced that his campaign group Camden People’s Alliance would not stand any candidate, giving Polanski a clear field. Meanwhile the SWP (in the guise of Stand Up To Racism), unable to bring itself to oppose Labour, has been frantically trying to deflect all attention onto the far-right Restore Britain candidate Tyler Johnson, sometimes by literally chasing his canvassers off the streets. Johnson is polling at 3%, compared to Labour’s 40% and the Greens’ 24%.

Don’t vote – organise

A defeat for Labour in Holborn and St Pancras would be a welcome sign that, regardless of Burnham, working class people still refuse to support a staunchly racist, pro-Zionist party defending British imperialism in the interests of the ruling class. But those disillusioned with Labour will need to recognise that the Greens have nothing to offer the working class: the ‘anti-Zionism’ professed by Polanski is heavily qualified and he refused to say whether or not he regards the Israeli state as legitimate; his concerns about NATO most emphatically do not mean backing down from the war western imperialism is waging against Russia in Ukraine. The only answer can be, as the RCG has always argued, not to be distracted by the sideshow of electoral politics, but to organise for a revolutionary socialist movement.

Let’s see how ‘anti-Zionist’ Polanski really is…

The Greens’ absorption of politically homeless Palestine supporters has stored up contradictions within the party which look fit to burst at its Conference in Brighton on 2-4 October. A motion to declare that Zionism is racism, support the call for a unitary Palestinian state and affirm the Palestinians’ ‘right to resistance and liberation by all available means’ is on the agenda for a second time. The motion was filibustered at the Greens’ Spring 2026 Conference, no thanks to Zack Polanski who instead went to the Together Alliance protest on 28 March. Whether the motion passes or falls, it will bring tensions over the Green Party’s stance on Palestine to boiling point. On 14 September Polanski told journalist Mehdi Hasan in a live interview that the motion is ‘a mistake’ and an ‘unhelpful distraction’, and that he backs several amendments to water it down, including an amendment which would remove the call for a single Palestinian state. No wonder then, that Polanski requested the Greens’ executive committee to vote on 17 September to postpone the Conference until after the byelection – unfortunately for him, he was outvoted.

Backed into a corner, Polanski finally declared, ‘I am anti-Zionist’ at a hustings on 24 September organised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the London Jewish forum, both Zionist organisations. Pressed on whether Israel had a right to exist, he dodged the question by suggesting it would be ‘imperial’ for Britain to decide the future of Palestine, but adding, ‘I do think it is our job to uphold international law in the same way that we do with Russia’. It took three years of the Gaza genocide and the pressure of a byelection to force Polanski to take this position – one which stretches his equivocation over Zionism and the Israeli state to breaking point.

Green light for austerity

In the contest for Haringey Council in the 2026 local election, the Greens formed a pact with Haringey Socialist Alliance (aligned to Your Party) which was fronted by SWP members such as John Sinha (see World Socialist Website, 29 July 2026). The Greens won the council from Labour on a platform of ‘mobilising opposition to cuts’. Once in power they rejected the demands of striking teachers at Highgate Wood School. Then on 20 July the Greens voted with Labour and Lib Dems to approve in full a plan drawn up by consultancy firm KPMG for cuts to frontline services including adult social care, children’s services, and temporary accommodation. Sinha refused to criticise the Greens for this, saying ‘it’s still early days’. Nearby, Greens-controlled Hackney Council held a sham ‘Anti-Austerity Summit’ on 9 September where Greens Mayor Zoë Garbett clarified ‘We are committed to setting a balanced budget’, effectively promising £53m of cuts over the next three years. It is never too early to start fighting back against Green Party attacks on the working class.