I’m not a party person. I subscribe to the old-fashioned belief that journalists should have no political loyalties. But I see the Greens stepping into the howling void Labour has vacated and becoming everything you might have wanted Labour to be. In their byelection contender, Hannah Spencer, they have a brilliant candidate: a working plumber and plasterer with first-hand experience of the cracks and leaks in our social fabric and bright ideas for fixing them. Here and in many other constituencies, the Greens now appear to be the most plausible opposition to take on the extreme right.