Labour holds Holborn and St Pancras as Green leader Polanski vows to stay

Sagal Abdi-Wali won the Holborn and St Pancras byelection for Labour on October 9th, securing 12,292 votes to Green party leader Zack Polanski's 8,928. The contest had been framed as a two-horse race for the left of British politics, fought in a seat vacated when former Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned in September. Abdi-Wali's victory margin of 3,364 votes delivered what analysts described as a historic win for the governing party—not merely a hold in a safe seat, but a meaningful reversal of momentum that had favored the Greens over the past year.

Turnout proved notably thin at 38.7%, the lowest recorded in any English byelection during this parliament and a sharp drop of 15.4 percentage points from the 2024 general election. The Greens conceded defeat before results were officially announced, with a party spokesperson framing the outcome as evidence of how far the party had come, claiming they would continue to hold Labour accountable on housing, water ownership, and climate policy. Yet the numbers told a different story. Polling expert Peter Kellner, a former YouGov president, published an analysis arguing that the Greens' claim of a 22 percent vote share increase was misleading. In 2024, the left-wing vote in Holborn and St Pancras had been split between the Greens at 10.4 percent and independent candidate Andrew Feinstein at 18.9 percent, totaling 29.3 percent. Polanski won 32.8 percent this time—a genuine gain of just 3.5 percentage points, not the tripling the party claimed. More tellingly, the combined Green and left-wing vote actually fell by more than 2,000 voters compared to 2024, suggesting the campaign had failed to generate the enthusiasm that had powered Hannah Spencer's Green victory in Gorton and Denton earlier in the year.

Abdi-Wali's vote share declined by only 3.7 percentage points from the 2024 result, a smaller drop than Labour had experienced in any comparable byelection where it was defending a seat against left-wing opposition. The result offered relief to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who faced his first significant electoral test since taking office. National polling suggested he had recovered some of the public support lost by his predecessor, and the byelection result aligned with that trajectory. BBC elections expert John Curtice noted that Labour remained in a stronger position than six months earlier but still fell short of the popularity it had enjoyed in 2025, making a general election call an extremely risky proposition.

The campaign had been shadowed by the Green party's decision to pass an anti-Zionism motion the previous weekend, which party activists and councillors from both Labour and the Liberal Democrats reported had alienated voters. Abdi-Wali told the Guardian that constituents at school gates had found the motion divisive. She highlighted the work of Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband on Gaza and Palestine as resonating with local people, emphasizing that he had taken action rather than merely spoken. When pressed on whether he believed Zionism was racism, Polanski did not directly answer but described growing up in a Zionist household and later rejecting what he called the false premise that the region was empty. He stated plainly that he believed the displacement of Palestinians and the genocide occurring were clearly racist acts.

Polanski's leadership faced emerging questions about his future. Former Green leader Caroline Lucas, the party's first MP and a three-time leader, suggested on BBC Newsnight that people should watch what happened in the coming days and weeks. She criticized Polanski for not participating in the anti-Zionism vote, saying he should have been present and voted. Polanski denied he had lost control of his party, pointing to membership growth from 55,000 to 60,000 when he ran for leader to 220,000 members now. He defended the party as democratic and grassroots, entitled to hold diverse opinions.

Abdi-Wali's victory speech centered on belonging and representation. Speaking at Camden council headquarters, she addressed the attacks on her candidacy as a British-Somalian, saying her win sent a message about who gets to belong in Britain. She spoke of hope not as naivety but as essential to belief that politics could improve lives and that communities could thrive. The byelection result, in Kellner's historical framing, marked only the third time in Labour's history that a governing party had cheered a byelection night as a boost to its prospects of remaining in office—the first being Kingston-upon-Hull North in January 1966, ahead of Labour's general election victory two months later.