Two weeks on from the Greens’ victory in Gorton and Denton, I wanted to share a few thoughts about what might come next.

I speak from a position very much on the fringes of both the Green campaign and the debate on left political strategy. For reasons of chronic illness, I was only able to get out canvassing once, and haven’t kept up with the conversation as it’s unfolded over the past few years. For a long time, this has held me back from offering any thoughts at all, lest what I have to say is either misinformed or is already being said by others. But I’ve decided that it’s time to come out of my hermit cave and rejoin the conversation. Perhaps, after all, the fringes can be a useful vantage point.

The first thought is about who this victory belongs to and how we might relate to it. I think the Greens deserve an awful lot of credit for running an amazing campaign. Hannah Spencer was a brilliant and inspiring candidate. Zack Polanski deserves a lot of credit for the way that he’s turned the Greens’ strategy and fortunes around, and for his boldness in believing that they could go for Gorton and Denton and win, which turned out to be absolutely justified.

But at the same time, I think there’s an extent to which the victory in Gorton and Denton was really a victory for ordinary people. It was the same thing that we’re seeing in Minneapolis, with people pushing back against the onslaught of ICE. It was a story of ordinary people coming together to defeat the far right. And I think it’s important to hold onto that thought.

Zack Polanski is certainly delivering on his promise to “make hope normal again”. But the question arises what kind of hope we’re talking about. This is something I’ve thought about a lot during these years of slow, uneven recovery from long covid. As I wrote a year or so ago, I think we need to break free of oscillating between the feeling that salvation is just around the corner and the feeling that all is lost. We need to find what Tara Brach calls mature hope, or spiritual hope: the belief that no matter how bleak things seem, they can and will change, even if we’re under no illusions about how difficult that change may be. The belief that what we do matters.

I think the Greens have given people this kind of hope with the Gorton result. They’ve shown that the country’s slow descent into fascism is not inevitable. They’ve shown that both hope and despair can be self fulfilling prophecies – that when enough of us believe that our actions might make a difference, enough of us act together that we can make a difference. This, for me, is far more important than the idea that Green success in the polls is going to single handedly turn this country around.

My fear with the resurgence of left populism is that we see a repeat of the cycle that we went through in the Corbyn years, where young activists swing from a wholesale disillusionment with party politics as a vehicle for change to a wholesale investment in it. And as much as I admire what Zack Polanski is doing with the Green Party, I don’t think that’s what the world needs right now. I don’t think going back around that loop is going to serve us.

I think we need to be clear eyed about both the possibilities and the limitations of party politics. We need to see it as one vehicle, alongside many others, in which ordinary people can come together to effect change in our communities. We need to have a sense that we are building our own power, rather than simply seeing ourselves as foot soldiers for some parliamentary saviour. And we need to have a sense of how those different things might fit together.

It may yet be that the most valuable thing Zack Polanski has done is to provide people with a space to organise in, and the belief that what they do in that space might make a difference. It is now up to Green activists to make that space their own. Of course, new members should act with respect for the history and culture of the party they have joined, but they should also feel empowered to innovate and try new things.

Oscar Wilde famously said that the problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings. But I think this misses something important about the work involved with democracy, something that makes it so different from the endless free labour that capitalism demands of us – be it shopping around to find a slightly less exploitative energy deal, or trying to get our head around our pension arrangements. The work of democracy gives us something that is desperately needed in our lives: a sense of connection, of shared purpose, of belonging.

This, I’ll be honest, is part of the reason that I wanted to be part of the Gorton and Denton campaign. I knew that I needed this in my life. Yes, I wanted to make a difference, but I also wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. As I travelled to the constituency, I had in mind Thich Nhat Hanh’s instruction: “go as a river, not a drop of water.”

I specifically wanted to go canvassing, because it turns out I really enjoy it. This isn’t just because I enjoy talking to strangers. It’s also because canvassing is one of the few opportunities that most of us get to talk to people about politics who may not share our views. I like canvassing because it changes me as much, if not more so, than the people on whose doors I knock.

And yet, out on the streets of Gorton and Denton, I became acutely aware of how easy electoral politics makes it to get means and ends confused: how easy it is to fall into the mindset that you are listening to people’s concerns because you want them to vote for your candidate, rather than the other way around. I think the more that we can let go of that instrumental, transactional mindset, the more opportunities we create for meaningful connection and real change.

So yes, of course, if people want to be out canvassing every day, they absolutely should. If they get something from it, that’s great. But I think we need to be honest about why we’re doing it, and we also need to remember that part of the reason we get something from it is because the process itself is valuable – and the integrity of that process matters more than anything. This can help us to avoid getting so emotionally invested in a particular outcome that we can’t cope if that outcome isn’t achieved.

Last month, I went to see Grace Petrie’s comedy show ‘This Is No Time to Panic.’ Written during the doldrums of the post-Corbyn, post-pandemic years, it’s all about her struggle to find hope. After the show was over, she sheepishly admitted that it had been written before Zack Polanski became leader of the Greens. Now, she said, we had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform British politics. She hoped we’d all be out on the doorsteps in Gorton and Denton to make it happen.

I felt strangely torn about this. It seemed to me that the sort of renewed hope she was now espousing was the mirror image of the despair she’d confessed to during the show, and the sort most calculated to land her back in the same place in five years’ time. Yes, I came away galvanised to act, as I’m sure many others did. But I still have chronic fatigue, and I was exhausted that day, and I didn’t feel as ready to gear up and throw myself back around that cycle as she seemed to. I couldn’t help thinking: it doesn’t feel like so long ago that you were saying this about Jeremy Corbyn. These once-in-a-generation opportunities, they seem to be coming around awfully frequently.

Perhaps I’m just getting old: as I wrote this, I realised with a jolt that the heyday of Corbynism was almost ten years ago. There is indeed a whole generation who have come of age politically since its demise. But I don’t think it’s just that. As Grace herself acknowledged in the show, when she quipped that she longed for “some precedented times”, we are living in an era of chaos and upheaval. History is speeding up. These moments will keep on coming around until something fundamental shifts.

I don’t want to see another generation burn themselves out, throwing themselves against the fortress of the British state the way that we did. Some of the Greens’ campaign messaging worried me a little in that regard. “Don’t wake up on Friday the 27th wishing that you had done more. Don’t slow down. Don’t stop. Keep pushing.” I remember deploying this kind of language myself during the 2019 election campaign. “When this is over, let’s make sure we can say we threw everything at it.” Now that I’m disabled, and getting out for a single hour of canvassing feels like a major achievement, I must admit I find it alienating and stressful.

The left likes to talk about collective power, but messaging like this is curiously individualising. It conveys the idea that the weight of the world is on your shoulders specifically, and that if things go wrong, it will be your fault. It will be because you, personally, didn’t do enough. I just don’t think that’s the mentality we need in our movements these days.

I totally understand why this messaging feels necessary when the stakes seem so high and time is of the essence. I deeply understand this feeling, because I felt very much the same about climate change at the time I graduated. It shaped my life choices in ways that I’m not sure were necessarily all that wise. That was nearly twenty years ago.

What I’ve learned in the decades since is that social change is always going to be a marathon and not a sprint. It’s vital that we’re able to sustain ourselves for the long haul. We also need to have realistic expectations of what any single moment of change can offer. We don’t want to simply repeat those cycles of mobilization and paralysis, optimism and despair.

I think we need to let go of the idea that this is our one chance to change everything, and that we must throw everything at it. That is a recipe for burnout and disillusionment. We need to retain some perspective, and we need to look after ourselves. We need to nourish the roots of change – in our own bodies and minds, and in our communities – if we want to harvest the fruits.

One of the many good reasons not to burn ourselves out during election campaigns is that we need to save some energy for what comes after. And I think what comes after this result is really important.

Those voters in Gorton and Denton, who had swarms of canvassers crawling all over them, fighting for their votes for four weeks, who had their doors knocked on a daily basis: what happens to them after the election? Do they feel that everyone’s forgotten about them? Do they feel that all those activists have just gone home, that now they don’t want something from them, they don’t care about them any more?

Or is this the beginning of something new? The beginning of something really exciting – a new kind of participatory politics, where those activists can stick around and show that they want to build something with the people of Gorton and Denton.

As I sauntered around the sunny streets of Levenshulme, I said to one of the people I was canvassing with that I felt I was exorcising my demons from the 2019 election. I’d been sent to get the vote out in Bolton in the pissing rain with my baby in a pram, and almost every door we knocked on said that they weren’t voting Labour. That was when I knew it was going to be a bad night.

He asked me which part of Bolton I’d been in, and I said, “You know, I’m not sure.” I’d never been to Bolton before. I don’t know Bolton. And I remember thinking at the time that this was the problem. I think none of us knew Bolton. We’d just been bussed in from other parts of Greater Manchester. And my overriding thought in the wake of that devastating result was, what were we building? What has Labour been building in this town for the last five years, that people should trust them with their vote now?

It’s easy to ask such questions in the wake of a defeat – much less so in the wake of a victory. But for those of us who were involved in the movement that coalesced around Corbynism, the overriding question in our minds must be: how is this time going to be different? I think we have a responsibility towards the younger generation of activists who were not there, many of whom were just children at the time, to learn and reflect on that experience, so that we can all avoid simply repeating the same mistakes.

After the Gorton and Denton result, I found myself thinking about the time I spent on the doorstep trying to persuade people to put their trust in the Greens – people who didn’t trust politicians, like Charlene, the woman who told me she was sick of all the lies in politics, that it was so hard to know what to believe. I wondered who I was really asking her to trust, and – perhaps more to the point – whether she had any particular reason to trust me. I wondered if I’d ever see her again. I wondered if she did vote Green in the end, and if so, what it would take for her to feel that trust was not misplaced.

This, for me, is the question facing not just the Greens, but everybody on the left – and not just in places like Gorton and Denton, but everywhere: what are we building? That’s the question that I’m really interested in. Because the thing is, that has value regardless of how people vote, regardless of how those winds of national politics change (and we know from what’s happened to Labour that they can turn against a party just as quickly as they can turn in favour of it).

And – as Australian Green Tim Hollo points out in this thoughtful piece – we also know that there is no political party on Earth, operating in the political and economic systems that we live under, that could possibly live up to people’s expectations of the change they want to see, at least in the short term. So how do you earn people’s trust? You earn it by standing shoulder to shoulder with them, by working with them, by being present and caring and saying, “I’m here. What do you need?”

What would really excite me is if the Greens invited me back to Gorton and Denton in a few weeks’ time, to knock on people’s doors and do exactly that. Inviting them to participate in local assemblies to help determine Hannah’s priorities in Parliament – or, perhaps even better, to share ideas for community action. Inviting them to become part of a new kind of politics. As Tim asks: what would happen if local Green parties became hubs for mutual aid and community wealth building, not just machines for winning elections?

I think it’s really important to remember that the sense of hope and collective empowerment that so many activists found by being part of the Green campaign has not yet been felt by most ordinary voters in Gorton and Denton. More than half of them didn’t even turn out to vote – and believe me, it wasn’t because they didn’t know there was an election on. The real question for me is how we can extend that feeling to more people – how we can create spaces where they can feel part of something empowering beyond the individual act of casting a vote.

I don’t think it would be a good thing if the next time voters (and activists) heard from the local Green party was to ask them to come out and vote in May’s local elections. I think this could leave people like Charlene thinking they are just like the others: only interested in talking to you when they want your vote.

Corbynism failed in part because it did not have deep enough roots to withstand the battering it took in the mainstream media and political debate, or the surface currents of Brexit which tore its electoral coalition apart. In 2017 it drew together a diverse coalition of disaffected voters, but that support proved shallow and short lived. At the moment, the political winds are blowing in the Greens’ favour, and that is something to celebrate. But they will need to begin putting down roots if they are not to suffer a similar fate.

The Greens are riding the same wave of popular disenchantment with incumbent politicians that swept Starmer to power two years ago. As Labour have learned to their cost, once people are perceived to have any degree of power, that tide can turn against them very quickly. If the Greens want to avoid this, they must embrace the city’s unofficial motto: “This is Manchester – we do things differently here.”

My final thought is about tactical voting. There were some very dodgy claims made by Labour in this election about tactical voting – most egregiously in their wilfully misleading “Tactical Choice” leaflet. It was clear from a long way before polling day that the Greens were right to say that they were the best placed party to stop Reform. I repeated this line myself on the doorstep to at least one person. But afterwards, I thought about it, and I felt there was another line I could have taken. There was something else I could have said, and it was this.

“The truth is that nobody really knows what’s going to happen in this election. Things are so volatile and so unpredictable right now that anything could happen, and nobody really truly knows what the sensible tactical vote is, so you might as well vote with your heart.”

And I actually think that is a line that serves the left so much better than getting mired in competing claims about tactical voting – which ultimately, I think, just serve to further confuse and disillusion voters. They don’t know who to believe, because they’re not just being presented with competing visions – they’re being presented with competing claims about reality. My worry is that a lot of people just switch off from that and think that everybody is lying to them.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the left just stopped engaging with that: if they embraced the true import of what the Gorton and Denton result means, which is that there are no safe seats anymore, that nobody knows what the hell is happening in British politics. And so for the first time in my lifetime, people are free to vote with their heart, to vote with their conscience.

One of the many shitty things about our electoral system is the way that it forces people to vote tactically, rather than for what they believe in. Loosening those chains has the potential to be incredibly transformative, creating a momentum for change that could become self sustaining. The more people believe that it’s safe to vote with their hearts, the more people will vote with their hearts, and the more those votes will seem like they could matter.

I think that, more than anything, is what it means to say that the Green victory in Gorton and Denton was seismic. It is shaking the very ground on which our politics stands, the hard earth that has been a blocker to change in this country for far too long. That is the real gift that the Greens have given people with this result – and I think they need to own it.

Had the Greens not been in the campaign, whatever the result had been, people would have been voting for the lesser of two evils. A lot of people would have voted Reform UK because they were so pissed off with Labour, even if they had little love for them. A lot of people would have voted Labour even though they were pissed off with them, because they wanted to keep Reform out and felt there was no other way to do it.

The Greens gave people a third way out. They gave people an alternative. They gave people something positive to vote for, and the belief that it was safe to vote for it. In a country that’s been stifled by an undemocratic electoral system for so long, I don’t think we can underestimate how transformative, how liberating it could be to give that gift to everybody in the country – to say, “All bets are off, so you may as well vote for what you believe in.”

It also means that every vote matters – or at least, feels like it could matter – for the first time ever. I have lived in safe seats for my entire life. I had a conversation with my husband during the campaign about my worry that people were getting fed up of being canvassed repeatedly by the Greens. And he said, “Well, I have no idea how these things normally work, because we’ve never lived in a seat where we’ve been canvassed before.” And I realised that it was true: we’ve never lived in a seat where anybody cared about our vote. Our vote has never really mattered.

But from now on, every vote matters – because there are no safe seats. And the potential of that to unlock energy and hope and responsibility, to revitalise what has become a very stagnant, very stuck form of democratic politics, is genuinely exciting.

I’ve lived in two different wards in Manchester across nearly nine years, and I have never felt like my vote made the blindest bit of difference. Labour has always dominated this city. But this year, I feel like things could be different. I would be highly unsurprised if some of the wards near me go Green in May’s council elections. People here are bitterly fed up with a Labour Council that they feel has ignored and taken them for granted for too long – not least when it comes to the rapacious overdevelopment that increasingly blights the city.

Like the national Labour government, people feel that the council is more interested in listening to developers than to the local citizens who have to live with the things they build. I think this could be the year when the discontent that has been simmering beneath the surface in this city for such a long time finally bursts through into a sense that things can change. I’m excited about it.

More than anything, I’m excited about the prospect of the community campaigns I’m involved in – like the effort to save Ryebank Fields, a much-loved rewilded local green space, from being turned into luxury flats – finally having a sympathetic partner in their local councillors. So far, Labour councillors have consistently stonewalled and refused to represent local people’s concerns. I feel I can dimly see the contours of the kind of politics I’m advocating, where community action and electoral representation work hand in hand instead of being locked in battle against each other.

I have no idea if Manchester is on the Greens’ target list for the local elections, but I really hope it is. I think that what the Gorton and Denton result means for this city could turn out to be just as pivotal, if not more so, than what it means for the country. There are hundreds of local activists here feeling galvanised and ready to do more. There’s a palpable buzz in the air. Green participatory politics has the potential to truly transform the city, and the time is ripe for it.

I’ll be doing what I can to help make it happen. But I won’t be throwing everything at it.