The Green Party just made Keir Starmer yesterday's man and beat Farage's Reform, for good measure.

@CountScrofula On election day, I was campaigning before and after work. I'm knackered.

This could be the emergence of the Greens as a serious national political force on the left.

The Starmerites are terrified because if the Greens can win a 'safe ' Labour seat in the north of England...then...

@Burnley123 Right I was about to say you're in a stronghold for the party but uh... that stronghold is there because the party at least nominally delivered policy people wanted and instead you've got this bizarre paradox of a neoliberal police state.

@CountScrofula Exactly that. The Labour Party's base is collapsing. The story that the media wants to tell is that the white working class is going to Reform. Some of that is true, but it's massively exaggerated because most Reform voters are ex-Tories. Amongst other things, a Green win in a northern working-class city is extremely narrative-busting and in a very good way.

I also don't think the Labour Party has a candidate who can really improve much on Starmer. Andy Burnham was the one guy who might have done it, but they wanted to protect their Blairite clique by keeping him out of Parliament. So they stopped him from standing in Gorton and Denton. Brilliant. Fuck those guys.

@CountScrofula That is true. I can't get carried away because Reform is still top of the polls (their surprisingly poor performance here notwithstanding), the country is very anti-migrant. One of the reasons I joined the Greens is that they are unashamed to be pro-migrant.

When I joined the party five months ago, I didn't realise what was about to happen in the city I live. Labour threw the kitchen sink at the campaign too and used the massive infrastructure and loads of dishonest arguments. We had an army of canvassers, though.