Holborn & St Pancras and the battle for the future of the left

Zack Polanski is taking on Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali in a contest shaped by Gaza, housing and the fallout from Keir Starmer’s collapse. ANDREW MURRAY reports

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THIS has been the year of decisive parliamentary by-elections.

The first, in Manchester’s Gorton & Denton, fatally undermined then-prime minister Keir Starmer and raised the prospect of Labour losing, for the first time in a century, its hegemony over the left across England.

The second, in nearby Makerfield, in effect chose Britain’s next premier, giving Labour’s Andy Burnham the Commons seat he need to displace the wretched Starmer.

And now we are in Camden in north London, with its Holborn & St Pancras seat in play following Starmer’s decision to quit Parliament — something that seemed inevitable from the moment that most mendacious of men declared, just a month earlier, that he would serve for the rest of the parliament.

This one is different from the outset. In both Manchester and Makerfield a central concern was denying victory to Nigel Farage’s then-rampant Reform UK and how best to vote to obstruct that possibility.

In Camden, Reform is not a threat. Nor are the Tories and the Liberal Democrats for that matter. This by-election is about the future of the left.

There are two possible winners — Green Party leader Zack Polanski and Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali. Other candidates, who include Workers Party leader George Galloway, can affect the outcome without realistically hoping to win.

Thus the future of the “Green surge” which so spooked Labour earlier this year, and the “Burnham bounce” which was the governing party’s response are both on the ballot, set for October 8.

A month ago, the seat could be regarded as more-or-less nailed on for Labour. In the pits of Starmer’s decay the party easily held the council in May’s local elections when others were tumbling across London and the rest of the country.

Independent pro-Gaza campaigner Andrew Feinstein, who won 20 per cent of the voted in the 2024 general election, might well have prevailed in a rematch with Starmer, whose majority was cut to 11,000.

But Feinstein declined to stand again for personal reasons while Starmer has fled in search of pastures more lucrative.

The Camden People’s Alliance (CPA), which grew out of Feinstein’s campaign and embraces communists and other local activists, has backed Polanski, as has Feinstein personally. The CPA won a council seat in May in alliance with local Greens.

It sent Polanski a list of 10 pledges to endorse, including opposition to austerity, standing against the Gaza genocide, supporting union rights and fighting alongside local people for social justice. The Green leader readily endorsed the list.

Feinstein and CPA co-chair Susan Michie said: “We are delighted to back Zack on the basis of the broad progressive platform he has endorsed. CPA will campaign for him in its own name, confident that we can help him win a famous victory over the entrenched local Labour machine that has long been at odds with the progressive values of our area.

“CPA will also work with local Greens to build a strong  movement for social solidarity and change across Camden after the by-election, hopefully with the backing of Zack Polanski MP.”

Two things have transformed the picture in the by-election, otherwise a safe Labour bet. The first was the decision of Polanski to personally be the party’s standard-bearer.

This was a bold move. For the reasons already adumbrated, victory will be a stretch. Polanski himself had been believed to be nursing ambitions in a Hackney constituency — a Green-run borough where the party is far stronger than in Camden.

But clearly the accession of Burnham, and relentless attacks on the Greens and Polanski personally, had started a deflation of the party’s position. Putting himself front and centre offers the chance to change that narrative.

In a brief chat with the Star — he is eschewing any media interviews in favour of intensive canvassing — Polanski rates his chances as “fifty-fifty,” as estimation most Green supporters in the seat generally align with.

He added that he saw it as vital for the Greens to mount a “serious challenge” in the seat, with which he has had a long-standing connection.

Labour may also have put the seat in play with its selection of council leader Sagal Abdi-Wali, an inveterate Starmerite and a product of the borough’s entrenched and powerful right-wing Labour machine.

Abdi-Wali, who came to Britain as a refugee from Somalia when a child, may benefit from two factors beyond the Labour rosette — a backlash against the racist attacks on her, most notably by Reform’s Zia Yusuf, and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s recent sanctions against Israel, overwhelmingly popular in the constituency.

But that is the end of her advantages. Encountering her by a chance at a local street party, she comes over as evasive on the issues — she assured a voter that she had “strong views” on Gaza, for example, but declined to outline them.

In fact, she has been silent on the genocide throughout, and has passed on all suggestions of indicating support for the Palestinians.

Worse still, she has manoeuvred to keep the issue off the agenda at council meetings, doubtless to the satisfaction of Labour’s chief whip at the town hall, Izzy Lenga.

Lenga can be seen posing in photographs with a machine gun and an Israeli flag in her previous role training with the Israeli Defence Forces. Abdi-Wali has posed with Lenga in a picture the latter described as “twice as zionist” last year.

She also backed Starmer in all his planned assaults on welfare and pensioners and, locally, has a miserable record on the key issue of housing — rough sleeping has soared in Camden on her watch.

She ducked out of hustings organised by the Camden Muslim Network at which Polanski outlined plans to tax the rich to tackle a housing crisis he dates back to Thatcher and “right to buy.”

In a sense, therefore, Polanski and Burnham are on the same page in acknowledging a “wrong turn” in the socio-economic model 40 years ago, but differ as to who is serious about addressing it.

Such considerations appear beyond Abdi-Wali, Labour’s election message does not go beyond the trite invocation of “hope.” As Polanski told the hustings, “hope without action is pretty meaningless” and the Labour candidate does not seem geared for action.

Galloway’s campaign is peculiar, since he is conducting it from abroad, where he has lived for the last year following his detention, with his wife, by security services for nine hours at Gatwick airport.

They were apparently concerned about his alleged support for Russia in the Ukraine war, a conflict which he has, commendably, made central to his campaign in Camden, pregnant as it is with the possibility of a still-wider conflict.

Galloway’s by-election record is impressive — famous victories in Bradford and Rochdale and a strong showing in Batley — but he will be hard-pressed to repeat the feat in Camden, particularly in absentia.

His Rochdale win in 2024, when anger over Gaza was at boiling point, was based on a huge turnout among a Muslim community almost monolithically behind him and a general apathy in other sections of the electorate.

Those conditions will not be reproduced on October 8. Indeed, it seems that Galloway’s campaign is driven in significant part by a desire to see Polanski defeated — in effect, to Labour’s advantage.

He has described Polanski, with customary rhetorical abandon, as “a deeply unpleasant crank,” embodying the social liberalism the Workers Party holds as anathema to its brand of nostalgic socialism, evoking a bygone Britain of more heavy industry and less identity politics.

There may be places where such positioning could play well, but Holborn & St Pancras is not among them.

Social liberalism is pretty deeply embedded in all classes in Camden, and Galloway warnings about “men wearing dresses” or sly homophobic remarks suggesting Wes Streeting would have “run off with a sailor” had he lost his seat in 2024 butter no parsnips locally.

In any case, local Muslim activists who spoke to the Star were clear that for the local community it was a choice of Polanski or Abdi-Wali, with Gaza, rather than Ukraine, a touchstone issue.

“He is just a spoiler,” one told me. “He has got no chance, he is purely wrecking,” said another.

In person Galloway’s bravura campaigning talents could surely have made a larger impact, but small knots of mainly out-of-constituency canvassers — the Workers Party did not contest any seats in the borough in May — are no substitute.

But there are fears that he could siphon enough votes from Polanski in a close race to tip the balance to Labour.

So — the Green version of the left, strong on Palestine and with a left social-democratic platform generally, or Labour’s, trading on long-established brand loyalty burnished by an affable new premier but with a candidate mute about genocide?

Look again at that picture of chief whip Izzy Lenga in her murderous regalia. If the world had a vote, it would be pretty clear where it would go.