'We can offer hope': Greens' Hannah Spencer on tackling Reform in crucial by-election
The Green Party has selected local councillor Hannah Spencer as its candidate for the crucial by-election next month in the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton.
The contest is fast turning into a battle between Nigel Farage's Reform UK and the Greens, with Labour yet to select its candidate after the governing party's leadership blocked Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham (widely seen as a potential challenger to Prime Minister Keir Starmer) from standing.
On Tuesday, Reform announced its candidate was GB News presenter Matt Goodwin, who has a long record of making controversial comments about ethnicity, Islam and Muslims.
Hannah Spencer, selected as the Green candidate in a vote by local party members on Thursday night, cuts a strikingly different figure.
Middle East Eye spoke to Spencer, aged 34, ahead of the vote on Thursday.
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While Goodwin, 44, is a former academic born in St Albans, Spencer has lived in Greater Manchester all her life.
She is the leader of the Green Party on Trafford council, having first been elected as a councillor in May 2023.
"I work as a plumber, something I've done since leaving school at 16," she told MEE.
"I'm actually currently training to become a plasterer too. I lived in the constituency and still work there."
'A wider range of voices in parliament'
Spencer joined the Green Party just after the Covid pandemic, which she attributes to being "fed up of politicians deciding things that suit their interests at our expense".
"I was so angry at the gap between the super rich and all the rest of us getting bigger," she said.
"I saw that so few politicians are from backgrounds like mine and I realised the only way we can change things is having a wider range of voices in parliament."
Reform candidate Goodwin had a rather different journey.
As an academic, he studied and wrote on national populism and the far right.
He authored books on the British National Party, and on the UK Independence Party, which used to be led by Farage, now the leader of Reform UK.
In 2023 Goodwin said he was once a "fully paid-up member of the liberal left".
But in recent years Goodwin became increasingly sympathetic to the right-wing politicians he studied.
And now he has become one of them.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski on Tuesday alleged that Goodwin has a "track record of anti-Muslim bigotry".
Last year Goodwin argued on X that being born and brought up in Britain does not mean that people from immigrant backgrounds are necessarily British.
"It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’," he said.
Around 44 percent of people in Gorton and Denton are from ethnic minorities and 79 percent identify as British.
'We can offer hope'
Speaking to MEE, Spencer took aim at Reform's politics.
"This is such an important by-election because this is a chance for people to reject the usual stuff from the same old parties," she said.
"We need to show that Reform only care about protecting their own interests and fuelling division, blaming migrants and Muslims and whoever else they use as scapegoats."
'Reform only care about protecting their own interests and fuelling division'
- Hannah Spencer, Green Party candidate
Goodwin claimed in 2024 that "millions of British Muslims - millions of our fellow citizens - hold views that are fundamentally opposed to British values and ways of life".
Spencer said the by-election is a "chance for people to see that the Greens do care about working-class communities and that many of us are from those backgrounds ourselves".
"We can offer hope, and a voice to people who've been ignored for too long," she said.
The by-election has been widely touted as a referendum on Labour and Starmer.
But it is increasingly also being seen as a major test for Reform - and a possible breakthrough moment for the Greens.
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