It has been announced that the Reform Party candidate who will be standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election will be Matt Goodwin. This is a good choice in my view as Mr Goodwin is a calm and confident public speaker. He has already had a baptism of fire because of his work as an conservative leaning academic in an academic system that is stuffed full of various types of left winger along with the vitriolic attacks he gets online from the Left.
Mr Goodwin is well known to the public and has a pretty high profile for a by-election candidate which could help him in what is likely to be an extremely tough contest.
It’s going to be a difficult contest for a few reasons. Labour are going to throw all they’ve got at this seat in order to hold onto it. Mr Goodwin and Reform have a mountain to climb if they are going to overturn Labour’s 50.8% share of the vote (18,555 votes) as Reform, who came second last time only got 14.1% (5,142 votes), Reform and its activists will have to work extremely hard to get the vote out in the wards where they stand the best chance of gaining votes. Reform will also have to hope that there is a collapse in the Labour vote and that the crank left either don’t vote or vote for some no hoper left wing candidate therefore splitting the Left vote.
There are also demographic issues that also come into play with this seat. There are wards with large numbers of Muslims who are being whipped up by Islamic groups and being advised to vote for the Greens who are almost certainly going to play the ‘Palestine’ / Jew hate card in order to win over this particular bloc of voters. This is going to be an election with a large dollop of religious and cultural sectarianism and that sectarianism could get quite nasty. However there is a danger in treating Muslim voters as a monolithic bloc and there will of course be some Muslims there who will not follow the blandishments of the Islamic groups that are calling for a Green Party vote in this seat. They may vote otherwise and lessen the effect of the sectarianism that is being whipped up. On this issue we shall have to wait and see what happens.
Last time this seat was fought there wasn’t a particularly large Tory turnout (2,888 votes) and it remains to be seen whether these Tory voters stick with the Tories or shift their vote to Reform. You have to be a pretty pig headed and tribal Tory to vote Tory in a seat like this which might indicate that these voters will not vote tactically for Reform but instead will continue to vote for the Tories even they have no hope at all in this particular seat.
Finally there’s how Mr Goodwin might go over among the electorate. Because he’s going to be perceived as a southerner, even though he was born and brought up in nearby Salford but moved to the South for work, he is going to be attacked by the other parties as some sort of carpetbagger even though other parties such as Labour are not beyond parachuting into safe seats Southern origin party hacks and activists. Mr Goodwin is going to have to learn as much as possible about his target constituency and fall back on his existing knowledge of the area in the shortest possible time in order to not create the opportunity to make gaffes that will be exploited by other candidates, the Left and what is likely to be a hostile mainstream national and local media. Mr Goodwin is going to have to make use of whatever local talent Reform has got in order to fit into the constituency or at least give the impression he has fitted in for the purposes of getting elected.
Matt Goodwin stands a chance in this seat but the Greens are a strong contender because they probably going to go all ‘Palestine’ and ‘look at the nasty Jews’ in either their public publicity or their more background campaigning. Labour are in my view the main threats to Mr Goodwin and so are the Greens and he will have to watch their antics closely. Bearing in mind the type of seat it is there is also the chance that there could be voter or party activist intimidation going on here especially if the sectarianism blows up badly. If that happens then Reform and hopefully other parties will call this out and call it out using honest language, unlike how Jess Phillips MP did it when she complained about random ‘men’ indulging in harassment rather than identifying which sort of ‘men’ were allegedly engaged in harassment of Labour Party workers during the last General Election.
I hope Mr Goodwin does well but even if he doesn’t he will have learned a great deal about campaigning that he can make use of in the future.