Labour held the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on Thursday, beating back a strong challenge from Green Party leader Zack Polanski in a contest that had become a proxy battle over the future of Britain's political left. Labour's candidate, Camden council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali, won with 45% of the vote to Polanski's 33%, according to results reported by the BBC and the Guardian — but the party's majority collapsed from 11,572 at the 2024 general election to just 3,364.
Turnout was 38.7%, the lowest of any by-election held in England during the current parliament and more than 15 percentage points down on 2024. The Conservatives' Ewan Cameron finished a distant third with 1,922 votes, or 7%. The seat, vacated after former prime minister Keir Starmer stood down as an MP, has been held by Labour since the constituency was created in 1983. The Green Party's vote share, however, rose by 22 percentage points on the last general election — a result Polanski called "our second best by-election result in Green Party history."
Abdi-Wali, who came to Britain as a child refugee from Somalia in the 1990s, framed her win as a rebuke to attempts to "divide" the electorate, an apparent reference to comments from Reform UK's Zia Yusuf questioning whether she was British. "This is Camden, and this is Britain," she told supporters at the count. Labour chair Bridget Phillipson said the result "demonstrates that Labour's message of hope is really cutting through," and the Guardian reported the win is expected to steady Prime Minister Andy Burnham after his first major electoral test since succeeding Starmer.
Pressure mounts on Polanski
The result caps a difficult week for Polanski, whose Green Party voted at its conference in Brighton on Sunday to adopt a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism, a move criticized even within Green ranks. Former Green leader Caroline Lucas told the BBC that Polanski had "failed to show leadership" by abstaining from the vote, which he skipped to campaign in Holborn, and declined to say whether he should resign: "I want him to show the leadership that was frankly missing on Sunday … the jury is out about whether he will do that."
"I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm not disappointed. No politician runs in a by-election and doesn't want to win. But … to see the growth in what was supposedly a safe Labour seat since 1983 [and] is now a marginal Labour seat, that's clearly growth."
Zack Polanski, Green Party leader, to BBC Radio 4's Today
Polanski insisted he would stay on as leader of his "party of 220,000 members," and argued voters had responded to Green policies on rent controls and nationalizing Thames Water. He also needled Burnham directly: "So many people told me on the doorstep they want to give Andy Burnham a chance. Well, he's got a chance now." The by-election was widely seen as a gauge of whether Burnham's Labour can win back voters who drifted to the Greens after local election gains in May, when the party took control of three London councils — and with Polanski's leadership now under visible strain, both parties are likely to treat the result as a warning ahead of further electoral tests.
