The Holborn & St Pancras by-election on 8 October is Keir Starmer’s act of revenge on his erstwhile ‘loyal colleagues’ who dumped him for the King of the North as soon as Andy Burnham was elected at the Makerfield by-election in June of this year. That by-election saw Labour beat Reform UK into second place. This by-election sees no such electoral threat from the far right. The outcome will make little difference to Labour’s 174-seat parliamentary majority. Having become prime minister through a backroom deal, Burnham has already announced that he will not call an early general election.
Starmer’s Labour Together clique in Holborn & St Pancras are fielding Camden Council leader, Sagal Abdi-Wali as Labour’s candidate. Her record as a councillor is brief and inglorious. Elected in 2022 after a purge of the Labour left, she became Camden’s Cabinet Member for Better Homes. In November 2024 the Housing Ombudsman made 124 findings of maladministration against Camden during 2023-24 alone (83% of all the cases investigated) as homelessness soared. In 2025, Sagal was among councillors who filibustered a motion to divest Camden’s pension scheme from companies complicit in Israel’s genocide. In May 2026, Sagal became Council leader after the Greens unseated her predecessor. Her campaign is based on empty promises and false hope.
Holborn & St Pancras is in the spotlight because Green Party leader, Zack Polanski is standing in a winnable seat against such a weak candidate. The Greens are throwing everything at Holborn & St Pancras, but Polanski is hampered by the fact that not all voters have short memories. In March 2015, five years into a Conservative-Lib Dem government responsible for brutal austerity measures, including cuts to public housing, libraries and youth centres, Polanski stood as the Lib-Dem candidate in St Pancras and Somers Town ward, one of Camden’s most deprived with high rates of social housing and child poverty. To be a Lib Dem candidate in a working-class, inner-city ward at the height of ‘Orange Book’ neoliberalism is not something to be merely overlooked.
The new Green Polanski is running publicly as a pro-Palestine candidate, endorsed by former independent, Andrew Feinstein who was runner-up to Starmer with 18.9 per cent of the vote in Holborn & St Pancras at the 2024 general election. Polanski’s claim to be anti-war however is as inconsistent as his party affiliations. Polanski supports Britain sending arms to Ukraine to continue the British establishment’s favourite war.
In 2023, the Green Party dropped its policy of seeking to leave NATO. Today, the Green Party of England & Wales, endorses NATO propaganda that it ensures member states’ security and claims to want “to reform NATO from within.” The Greens’ inability to
oppose the world’s foremost war machine and its call for NATO to adopt a “No First Use” nuclear weapons policy – asking imperialism to reform itself – speaks volumes. Polanski’s own wish for “an alternative alliance with countries based in Europe” would be music to the ears of that wing of the German rearmament lobby calling for a European NATO.
The Green Party competes with Labour and the Lib Dems in its full-throated advocacy of Britain’s full membership of the EU, including rejoining the EU Customs Union. The Green Party has gone further than any other party in its opposition to protecting women’s sex-based rights including the legal right to single-sex spaces.
Other candidates include George Galloway for the Workers Party of Britain, whose campaign is a microcosm of his largely online political existence. Unlike previous by-elections in Bethnal Green, Bradford and Rochdale, Galloway’s campaign in Holborn & St Pancras is run from abroad with few roots in local communities. If the reason for standing a principled anti-imperialist candidate in elections is to build grassroots organisation for working class power, then Galloway falls at the first hurdle.
Faced with these unpalatable choices and with no Communist candidate standing in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election, the Executive Committee of the Communist Party calls for a principled abstention and calls for those who are dissatisfied with the choice on offer to join us building the Communist Party of Britain. The crisis of working-class political representation cannot be resolved by voting for any of the candidates on offer.
The needs of the hour; to build a stronger peace movement, end imperialist slaughter in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine, get Britain out of the NATO war machine, and to strengthen working class communities to fight for better housing, public services and jobs, will be achieved by building a stronger Communist Party – not by voting for hopium or hype.
28 September 2026
Executive Committee
Communist Party
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