Labour sees off Polanski to hold Holborn and St Pancras

Holborn and St Pancras stays with Labour. In the north London by-election, Camden Council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali beat Green Party leader Zack Polanski in a contest widely read as an early test for Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Her majority was cut sharply, and the result came at the end of a difficult week for the Greens.

The result in numbers

According to the full count reported by The National, Abdi-Wali took 12,292 votes, or 45.17%, against 8,928 for Polanski, or 32.81%. The Conservative candidate, Ewan Cameron, finished a distant third on 1,922 votes, about 7%, according to the BBC. Reform UK candidate Peter Newman polled 1,612 votes (5.92%) and the Liberal Democrat, Patrick Stillman, 924 (3.40%). The BBC lists Restore Britain among the other parties on the ballot.

• Labour majority: down from 11,572 to 3,364.
• Turnout: 38.7%, the lowest of any English by-election since this parliament began, and 15.4 points down on the 2024 general election, according to The Guardian.
• Labour share: down 3.75 points on 2024.
• Green share: up 22.37 points on 2024.

The seat has been Labour since it was created in 1983, and the party has won at least 40% of the vote there at every general election, the BBC notes. Labour kept it, but by a far smaller margin than before.

Why the seat came up

The by-election was called after Sir Keir Starmer, the former prime minister, stood down as the constituency’s MP in September. It was treated as a two-horse race between Abdi-Wali and Polanski, and as the first big electoral test of Burnham as prime minister. According to the Guardian, the outcome should reassure him, because it fits polling that suggests he has regained some of the support Starmer lost. The paper adds that the low turnout suggests Burnham still faces an uphill battle in cities, especially in London, where the Greens won control of three councils in May.

Two readings of the same figures

Polanski said he was disappointed but insisted he would carry on as Green leader. He pointed out that his party’s share of the vote had risen sharply since 2024, called the result the Greens’ second best by-election performance and said a seat once seen as safe was now a marginal. He also told the BBC that many voters had told him they wanted to give Burnham a chance, adding that the prime minister now had one.

The Guardian takes a more cautious view. It compares Polanski’s 8,928 votes with the nearly 11,350 won in 2024 by the Greens and the independent candidate Andrew Feinstein combined, and concludes that the Greens have not significantly widened their base in the seat. That is the newspaper’s interpretation of the numbers, not a result declared by the count.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s chair, said the win showed the party’s message of hope was cutting through. Abdi-Wali, who came to Britain from Somalia as a child refugee in the 1990s, said in her victory speech that she hoped the moment said something about who gets to belong, and that her commitment to the community ran deep whether or not people had voted for her.

A hard week for the Greens

The final days of the campaign were overshadowed by the Greens’ conference in Brighton on Sunday, where members backed a motion saying Zionism should be treated as a form of racism and calling for a single Palestinian state in place of Israel. The vote went ahead despite opposition from four of the party’s five MPs. Polanski had left the gathering ahead of the vote to campaign in the constituency, so he did not vote.

Afterwards he said he would only have backed the motion if the call for a single Palestinian state had been removed. Caroline Lucas, the former Green leader, told the BBC she wanted him to show the leadership that, in her words, was missing on Sunday. Polanski said people in Holborn and St Pancras had wanted to see him on the ground dealing with local issues.

Natalie Bennett, a Green peer, defended him, saying the party had won its first parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton in February and had strong results in May. Polanski took over as leader in September last year, and the BBC says polls suggest the surge in Green support has faded in recent months. He puts membership at 220,000. Under party rules he faces a scheduled leadership election next summer.

What the vote does and does not show

One by-election cannot settle the contest for the left. Labour has held a seat it has always held, with a reduced majority and low turnout. The Greens have shown they can make a safe seat competitive, but they did not win it, and the week’s controversy over the conference motion will keep their leadership under scrutiny.

Featured image. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Richard Kelly. License: CC BY 4.0.