Lessons of Gorton/Denton by election
This is a response to an open letter by Leonie Cooper and Lisa Trickett on the implications of the Gorton and Denton by-election. They are both officers of SERA, Labour’s environmental group, of which I am also a member. Their open letter, which is designed to open a discission, can be found here.
They rightly warn of disaster for Labour on May 7, and potentially at the general election itself.
Keir Starmer’s personal rating is in free-fall – due to self-inflicted wounds and unprincipled retreats. Labour has a massive parliamentary majority but it is based on only 33.7 per cent of the popular vote. This makes it vulnerable to the 24-hour media which favours opposition parties, and allows the right-wing to set the agenda. Negativity is piled on negativity, creating a cycle that has its own logic, and could well result in a fascist party elected to Westminster for the first time ever – which would be an unmitigated disaster.
The spectacle of Boris Johnson throwing drinks parties in Downing Street whilst banned them in the rest of the country runs deep. Voters are looking — in some cases nihilistically — for someone to punish rather than who can run the country best and on what principles.
Contrary to perceived wisdom on the left, and largely due to the influence of Ed Miliband, Labour has a remarkably strong policy on climate change, emissions reduction, and the energy transition, that takes advantage of a spectacular fall in the cost of renewables, with wind and solar in the vanguard.
The cost of onshore wind has fallen by 70 per cent, and storage batteries by more than 90 per cent. (For the knuckle draggers of Reform and the Tory party, environmentalists have always understood the need for storage to get a twenty four hour supply from wind and solar.) There is now an explosion of wind and solar farms that are the backbone of the energy transition. Recent UK renewable projects are around 40% cheaper than new gas-fired power generation. As the cost of renewables fall the new possibilities open up.
Labour plans involve an upgraded and decarbonised national grid by 2030, and net zero by 2050. They also include a policy of no new investment for the North Sea, which again favours renewables.
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which most of the left opposes, is crucial to getting this done. Only China, Denmark, Canada, and New Zealand have matched the British Labour government on grid upgrade. According to Australia’s Climate Council 11 countries are ‘leading the charge’ on national grid updating with the UK at the top of the list.
It is true, as the letter acknowledges, that Labour’s policy message is not getting through, particularly on the environment – though that has changed a somewhat with the discourse around the illegal invasion of Iran – where the need for Britain to have a renewable energy source free from the influence Trump’s or Putin’s – or any other fossil fuel drenched dictator – is even clearer.
When Labour took office in July 2024, they found that the Tories had been sitting on dozens of major infrastructure projects, mostly solar and wind farms, with no intention of processing them. Miliband reversed that situation within days. In recent auctions offshore wind secured enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of over 12 million homes.
The government is also promoting roof-top solar and light-weight self-installation solar power systems that are easy-to-install solar kits designed for homeowners to install themselves. Panels can be mounted on balconies, fences, or roofs, and plugged into the household electricity supply.
The Green Party, we must insist, is not the enemy – they have suffered egregiously the hands of the FPTP system for many years. They should have been a major party in Westminster since the 1990s but for an undemocratic voting system. We are, moreover, likely to need the unity of progressive forces to keep the fascists out of Westminster when a general election comes.
If we cant get electoral reform before the next election we will need the maximum unity of anti-fascist forces if we are to keep Farage out and that is not best served by statements such as ‘there is little difference between Reform and Labour’. There is a very big difference, but lets not go through a Farage government in order to find it out.
There, is in any case, an important policy debate to be had with the Greens. For example the Green Party is well behind the curve in terms of the production of large quantities of renewable energy via wind and solar, the Green Party. They remain opposed to large solar farms and sit on many of the bodies set up to oppose them. They defend ‘prime farm land’ under conditions such land is largely devoid of biodiversity.
At the moment the Labour party has more to offer in terms of the planet and the energy transition and carbon reduction than the Green Party. In any case the energy transition, once carried through, is irreversible. If Labour is able to say at the next general election that the national grid is now upgraded and carbon free and that the economy is now running on clean and renewable energy, and is no longer vulnerable to the price of gas on internation markets the case will be very strong to vote Labour.
Alan Thornett March 22 2026
