Newsletter #75: Greens win in Gorton and Denton
PLUS: War in Iran!
Good morning,
This week was focused on one big story as the highly anticipated Gorton & Denton by election resulted in a surprisingly large majority for the Green Party — until Saturday, that is, when President Trump unleashed all-out war on Iran.
This newsletter’s agenda: Greens win in Gorton and Denton (free); War in Iran (paid)
Greens win in Gorton and Denton
On Thursday, voters went to the polls in Gorton and Denton for the much-awaited by election which saw the incumbent Labour Party pitted against both Reform and the Greens, with each party polling roughly neck-and-neck in the immediate run-up to election day. Of course, the problem with polls is that, unlike Green Party campaigning literature, they are not conducted in Urdu - and as such, they failed to capture the extent to which the Muslim vote — approximately 30% of the population across the constituency — had shifted from Labour to the Greens, delivering them 41% of the vote and a victory with substantial margins over the other parties.
Reform’s Matt Goodwin came in second with 29% of the vote, just ahead of Labour on 25%. The Conservatives lost their deposit, having received their worst ever result at a parliamentary by-election with 1.9% of the vote. Advance UK received only 154 votes, proving fantasies of a missing nationalist vote begging for representation to the right of Reform to be just that. Turnout was 47.6% — which was surprisingly high for a generally low-turnout seat which only reached 47.8% turnout in 2024.
So, what are we to make of these numbers? First off, how did Reform perform, and what does it suggest about their standing nationally? Recent polls (both national vote share projections and MRP polls) suggested that Reform were on track for 28-30% in Gorton and Denton, but varied on whether that would be enough to win. Those same polls, evidently given credence by this result, give Reform a substantial majority nationally (regardless of the outcome they suggest for this particular constituency). That, at least, is reassuring.
To benchmark Reform’s prospects in the seat, we can look at the 2019 (notional) and 2024 results, where the Brexit Party / Reform received 4.9% and 14.1% respectively, with the Conservatives on 18.9% and 7.9%. Reform’s vote share at this election therefore substantially increased upon the combined performance of both parties at both previous elections, with the Tories still taking up nearly 2% of the vote. It looks as though they managed to squeeze out as much of the right-wing vote as possible, whilst consolidating more than 90% of it under their banner — a solid achievement. As for Matt Goodwin, these results suggest he was not the bad candidate that some suggested he might be. As much as localism is valued, especially at by-elections, name recognition should never be ignored — easy to do given it is so rarely a factor in British politics, where most new MPs are essentially unknown prior to their election.
Unfortunately, a good performance cannot always overcome unfavourable fundamentals, and Gorton and Denton was a perfect demonstration of that. The seat was, after all, somewhere between #420 and #440 on Reform’s target list — a victory there would have implied the largest majority since 1931 as a possibility. The western half of the constituency, which contains the majority of the population, is 43% ethnic minority and 42% graduate or current student, and as such it was never going to be a particularly friendly seat for Reform. Winning would only have been a possibility with a sufficiently split vote, and the collapse of the Labour vote was therefore the biggest worry — but it was the collapse of parties other than Labour and the Greens that gave the two a combined vote share more than twice that of Reform’s, and made a victory impossible regardless of the split between the two.
The Conservative Party, which has been entirely absent from the conversation throughout this election, lost their deposit for the first time ever at a parliamentary by-election. What is worse than the result itself are the facts that it surprised nobody and that nobody has even bothered commenting on it with any enthusiasm. The party was never going to be competitive in central Manchester — but the fact that this result feels barely worth commenting on is a sign of how far they have fallen. In particular, it is a vindication of the assessment of Dominic Cummings and others, who have said that the insurmountable problem for Kemi Badenoch is that the public is not even angry at them any more. As a marriage breaks down, there will be all manner of arguments — but it is when there’s no point even being upset that things go beyond the point of no return.
For Labour, this is the worst result possible. Had Reform won, even if the Greens had come second, they could have made the case that vote splitting by those on the left who make the perfect the enemy of the good allowed the victory of fascism in what should be a left-wing stronghold. Now, not only have they lost their uncontested claim to the tactical anti-Reform vote, but the very necessity of tactical voting has been called into question by the size of the Green margin of victory. This is now the second time that the left-wing vote has coalesced around an alternative to Labour at a by-election. Once could be brushed off as a fluke, especially with the specificities of the Caerphilly vote (being in Wales, and having a popular local Plaid Cymru candidate), but twice cannot be ignored.
Whilst a handful of Labour MPs have laid the blame at Keir Starmer’s feet, the response from within the Labour Party has been generally quiet. There’s a strange psychological game that occurs when a party is questioning its leadership, in which every time MPs respond to a failure or scandal a new baseline of criticism is established, building each time until the leader is brought down. With the failure to remove Starmer at the peak of the Mandelson affair, the Labour party entrenched the opposite psychological response — they taught themselves that even that level of crisis did not justify pulling the trigger on his Premiership. This has given Starmer a strange strength, at least as far as his position is concerned. His power, on the other hand, will be further reduced (if that is even possible) by this defeat, with the parliamentary plurality on the soft left seizing more and more influence.
In recognition of this, Number 10 is now reportedly setting up a number of ‘working groups’ containing MPs with expertise and opinions on particular subject areas, effectively allowing backbenchers to directly draft government policy in consultation with the cabinet. Ed Miliband has been speaking with various figures around the Labour movement, requesting their commentary to feed back to Starmer in what the Prime Minister presents as an act of support but what looks to us more like a tightening of Miliband’s grip over Downing Street. Rumours are now circulating of a reshuffle which might see Wes Streeting removed from cabinet entirely — a victory for the soft left, and likely a shrewd move from Starmer given that Streeting’s influence is likely at its nadir following his failure to shoot his shot last month.
For the Greens, this victory has given them credibility as a competitor to Labour nationally in a way they perhaps lacked until now. The party has long been expanding its influence in local government across England, and since the election of Zack Polanski as leader has gained on Labour in the polls — but their victory in Gorton and Denton confirms a ceiling of support above anything that had previously been anticipated. Hannah Spencer, the Greens’ newest MP, comes into Parliament with a higher profile that any of their four current members (can you name any of them?) — and having a secondary public face will be beneficial for the Greens just as growing beyond Farage has been beneficial for Reform.
Beyond its impact on the parties, this by-election has been perhaps the most impactful to date on public perceptions of the effect that mass immigration has already had on our politics. This is a somewhat unexpected result — after all, it is not the first or even the most egregious example of a by-election being won on an explicit appeal to Muslim voters (George Galloway first won an election in this way in 2005, and has done so twice more since then). Perhaps it is because this is the first time that this phenomenon has suggested a serious threat to the mainstream left, but whatever the reason, there has been far more widespread concern over the nature of the Greens’ victory than previous similar results.
On the night of the election, international observers raised concerns over the unusual prevalence of ‘family voting’, in which (mostly female) voters are escorted into polling booths by family members, assumedly to be told how to vote. Explaining the phenomenon on Sky News, Sam Coates — by no means a right wing figure — noted that in his own attempts to interview voters in the lead up to the election he had found many Muslim women suggesting that ‘my husband deals with that’, clearly implying that this disturbed him as it did other journalists. Whilst this particular framing attempts to hold within universalist lines, it is notable to hear explicit concerns about the ways in which certain minority communities engage with the democratic process raised so openly.
Reform have referred these reports to the police, but it is unlikely that any specific action will be taken — after all, it does not seem that whatever fraud took place changed the result of the election. More importantly, Farage has taken the opportunity to broaden the conversation beyond these specific lines and to discuss the fundamental problem of increasing appeals directly to minority ethnic interest groups in our politics. Writing in the Telegraph, Farage called for a range of restrictions on postal voting and stricter enforcement of election integrity. Most crucially, he called for an end to Commonwealth voting rights — under which all Commonwealth citizens can vote in British elections — and confirmed that a Reform government would end the practice.
This announcement — which, had it been made only a few weeks earlier, would have been hugely controversial — went down with little comment from a media which had in the past few days been forced to confront undeniable issues directly for the first time. We have covered ongoing debates about Farage’s true beliefs in this newsletter and in articles over the past few weeks, but the speed with which Farage capitalised on this opportunity sheds light on these questions better than any argument can. Over the next three years, there will be countless opportunities such as this to push the conversation further in the right direction, and Reform will take them just as they have taken this one. Pushing further than the public is ready to go, given this reality, is therefore a needless risk. This video was included in last week’s excellent piece by Jack Hadfield, but it is worth including it here too for those who haven’t seen it. The game should, at this point, be entirely clear — what remains is to sit back and watch it play out.
