To win a special election for the British Parliament Thursday, the Green Party deployed print, online, and television advertising in Urdu and Bengali languages.
Both languages are common in South Asia, from which thousands of immigrants now living in the U.K. emigrated.
In returns that were watched worldwide, the Green Party not only captured an open seat in a stronghold of the ruling Labour Party of Prime Minister Keir Starmer but also did so convincingly.
Green candidate Hannah Spencer, a plumber and local councillor, rolled up 41% of the vote to 29% for Matt Goodwin of the populist Reform Party.
Trailing with 25% was the candidate of Starmer's Labour Party — which had handily won the largely blue-collar constituency (Gorton and Denton) for a century — and the venerable Conservative Party with 1.6% (which meant their candidate lost the money he deposited to run, a requirement of British law when a candidate scores less than 5%).
No doubt contributing to Spencer's big win were commercials designed to turn out voters from the constituency's large South Asian population.
With narrations in Urdu and Bengali, the spots showed pictures of dark-skinned people handcuffed and under arrest amid photographs of Reform nominee Goodwin and some prominent opponents of illegal immigration — Reform leader Nigel Farage, President Donald Trump, and commentator Steve Bannon, who is shown waving his arm in what enemies have claimed is a Nazi salute.
Asked about his reaction to the ads, Farage told Newsmax "Sectarian politics has now taken hold in England, combined with mass electoral fraud."
The Reform leader was referring to a report released Thursday by the Democracy Volunteers monitoring group charging there were "concerningly high levels of family votings" — a practice the group defines as "two voters who either confer, collude, or direct each other on voting."
Democracy Volunteers said it had evidence of this practice occurring at 15 of the 22 polling stations it observed.
For now, the immediate fallout from the Greens' big win is more evidence the left in Britain wants Starmer out and will turn from Labour to another party to make their sentiments known.
"I think it says a lot that Labour have been beaten into third place in a seat they held comfortably and b) that Reform were so far short of winning," Stewart Harper, president of the National Conservative Convention, told Newsmax. "I am not surprised at the Greens winning, but the margin of victory was a surprise."
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Click Here Now.
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