When Sir Keir Starmer announced that he was standing down as an MP on Tuesday, jubilation erupted among Green activists. Zack Polanski’s party has already proved it can take on Labour’s campaign machine in ethnically diverse parts of Manchester; Starmer’s resignation now presents the perfect opportunity to do the same in London.
At the time of the 2021 census, the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras was 21 per cent Muslim and 45 per cent non-white. At the 2024 general election, Starmer received almost 50 per cent of the vote, while the Green party and the independent pro-Gaza candidate Andrew Feinstein secured a combined 29 per cent. Andy Burnham has taken some of the wind out of the Greens’ sails but Holborn and St Pancras presents a comeback opportunity for the far left, who think Burnham is just a less robotic-sounding Zionist capitalist shill than his predecessor.
The central-London constituency is fertile ground for the Greens to take the fight to Labour on their favourite subject: Gaza. In the ‘Greens for Palestine’ WhatsApp group, excitement about the impending contest was accompanied by an awareness of the consequences of failure. Green members agreed that, while deputy leader Mothin Ali would be a strong candidate in any by-election, he would be too great a loss to the north and better placed to fight a seat near his home city of Leeds. What was most striking was the apparent lack of enthusiasm for Polanski.
