Starmer faces utter catastrophe against Corbyn-Galloway-Polanski pact | Politics | News
The shock result in Gorton has impossibly pushed Labor into third place in one of its safest seats, sending the party into crisis mode – and a leading election expert is now warning that the far-left coalition that carried out the humiliation could be about to go national.
As Lord Robert Hayward told a press conference on Monday that a formal agreement between Zack Polanski’s Greens, Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party and George Galloway’s British Labor Party on May 7 had the “very significant” potential to damage Labor across the UK, Keir Starmer reportedly called for a rare political Cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning to confront the fallout.
This month’s Gorton and Denton byelections showed what this alliance can achieve. Corbyn and Galloway’s organizations stepped aside to unite the far-left and Muslim votes behind the Greens, with Labor finishing third behind the Greens and Reform in the seat it has held comfortably for decades.
“We saw the Greens, Labor and Your Party working together successfully in Gorton, and now there is the potential to do so again in many other places, including London,” Lord Hayward said. “If they work together and the Greens can maintain their current poll scores, then the potential threat to Labor is very real indeed.”
London is on target
According to the Daily Mail, the capital presents the harshest test. Labor holds 21 of London’s 32 boroughs, and senior figures within the party have quietly acknowledged that a Green advance could see them lose hundreds of seats. Lord Hayward said that no corner of the city was safe; Even Starmer’s own north London district, where every council seat is now held by Labour, could see Green gains.
The results could also reshape the terrain of Labour’s next leadership contest. Lord Hayward pointed specifically to Health Secretary Wes Streeting, whose local authority in Redbridge, north-east London, is in danger of falling. Streeting was returned to Parliament by fewer than 500 votes in the last election after a fierce pro-Gaza independent campaign. “If you are arguing that you want to be leader of the party, it would be a little more difficult if Labor failed to set up your own local council,” Lord Hayward said.
Farage’s party faces its own problems. Despite promising to crack down on both Labor and the Conservatives in May, Reform reportedly faces a growing sense of “anything but Reform” on its doorstep; Voters across the country are apparently telling pollsters that they will support whichever candidate is best suited locally to keep Reform out.
Starmer’s moment of truth
May 7 will see more than 5,000 seats contested across 136 British councils; The devolved governments in Scotland and Wales will also be seized; This is the most sweeping national decision of any government since the 2024 general election.
Lord Hayward left little doubt about the Prime Minister’s personal interests.
“He may have felt like he survived a few weeks ago, but now the question is: Will he survive May 7?” he said. “These are truly national elections as well as multi-party and multi-venue elections.”
