At last and thankfully, the seemingly interminable and allegedly dirty contest for the Gorton and Denton Parliamentary seat is finally over.
The winner is, as you will by now know, were the Green Party with their candidate the faux plumber/plasterer Hannah Spencer. Matt Goodwin the Reform Party candidate came in second place with Labour relegated to a humiliating third place in a seat that was once a solid Labour voting constituency. As for the ‘undercard’ candidates in this contest, some of them did a whole lot worse than I’d been expecting.
This result might have been expected and mid-term by-election losses to new or fresh looking parties are not a new phenomenon never experienced by a major British party in either government nor opposition. The first iteration of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the early 1980’s did well in some by-elections in part because of dissatisfaction with what left wing Labour was offering as well as with the Tories who were not enjoying the best of public images despite being in government. The Social Democrats became the repository of votes of those who didn’t like what Labour had become but also hated the Tories because of the economic and social problems that spouted up in the wake of the economic reforms carried out by the Tories.
There is somewhat of a similarity between the rise of the SDP then and the rise of the Greens today. Like the old SDP the Greens look fresh and untainted by association with the major Westminster political currents. They make the right noises about the cost of living and other stuff that is relevant to many Britons and have gained a significant amount of support through propaganda about their own left wing version of populist slop. They also have had, up until this by-election, the benefit of not being too closely looked into, unlike parties such as the Tories, Labour and Reform. Much of what the Green Party believes is not interrogated nearly enough by journalists local or national or by the general public at large and this must change now that they are winning Parliamentary seats in by-elections. They’ve gone a long way on vibes but now they need to be more closely examined. Personally I believe that should the Greens, their policies and their people be more closely scruitinsed, the more that the public may become concerned about this party’s policies, people and associates.
This by-election although to a certain extent a run of the mill mid-term contest for a vacant Commons seat and therefore the subject of much mainstream media coverage, as many of them have been, but the Gorton and Denton election also has a lot of differences. It’s unusual in that it was a seat fought by two challenger parties, the Greens and Reform, where the Big Two parties of Labour and Conservative were to all intents mostly irrelevant. But it was also not so run of the mill in how this contest was conducted. It’s one that really doesn’t smell all that clean and maybe should be examined in a bit more detail by the electoral management authorities.
As many of us feared, the Gorton and Denton by-election was much nastier than maybe it should have been and it is a contest that even now it is over has left a nasty taste in the mouth. There were attacks on the Reform and Labour candidates places of origin along with their degree of locality and familiarity to the area and a lot of digging into the interesting background of the Green candidate Hannah Spencer.
The Greens seemed to have run a nakedly sectarian campaign targeting the Muslim community primarily in a seat where there are marked divisions between the Muslim majority parts of the constituency and the rest. There were a significant number of postal votes cast in this election, 25%, and I refuse to believe that everyone of these postal votes could be justified by for example a person not being able to cast their vote in person. The large number of postal votes is of course going to invite scrutiny and questions about how legitimate and freely cast these votes were? This is because with postal votes there is always the danger that a voter might have been coerced or intimidated or induced to give their vote to a particular candidate. Britain did its best to stamp out this danger to democracy in the 19th century by requiring secret ballots in person but now instead of a person’s patron or employer standing behind them whilst they put their hands up to vote we have certain ‘community leaders’ and ‘influencers’ and ‘headmen’ guiding the hands of the voters in their voting bloc. Twenty five percent of the total votes being postal votes in a by-election in peacetime is not something that should be under-remarked upon. It may well be that we’ve brought back all the misdeeds and the twisting of the electoral system that the abolishment of ‘Old Sarum’ and the rest of the Rotten and Pocket Boroughs cleaned up by giving voters the dubious ‘convenience’ of having a postal vote on demand.
Going by what I’ve seen on social media a lot of people put a lot of hope in Matt Goodwin of Reform. Mr Goodwin is a great speaker and someone who comes over well. I thought he would do well and even take the seat but on reflection maybe Mr Goodwin might not have been the best candidate for the seat despite having childhood connections to the Manchester area. He was good with the words from what I could see but I don’t believe that he came over as the sort of man who would make a good constituency MP because his interests might well be elsewhere. I believe that Mr Goodwin’s campaign was also hampered by a lack of a properly functioning local party apparatus. If Mr Goodwin’s campaign was less than it could have been because there was no local party from which to recruit door knockers and similar, then it gives some degree of legitimacy to my complaint that Reform needs to build a local party structure that keeps things going between elections, something other parties, such as the Lib Dems, are very good at.
This was always going to be a difficult seat for Reform to fight and they did very well to come second with 10,578 votes more than double what Reform got in the 2024 contest when this seat was first fought following constituency boundary changes. Sadly this was still approximately 5000 votes short of what he needed to have got to won. As in so many other Parliamentary constituencies and local authority wards, the big winner was ‘the apathy party’ as only 47% could be arsed to turn out and vote even in a by-election which was extremely high profile. This low turn out may be indicative of just how many Britons have switched off from politics in part because of decades of politicians being unresponsive to the needs of Britons especially those Britons in places which the economy and the political classes have left behind to fester and rot. I can understand why so many people choose not to engage in politics but the problem with ignoring politics is that eventually and ultimately politics might not choose to ignore you. We will get the politicians we deserve if we carry on having elections with such low turnouts.
Now let’s look at the undercard in this by-election. Included in this undercard are the Tories and the Liberal Democrats who both lost their deposits. The Tories were never destined to do fantastically in this particular seat although they did get 2888 votes last time but this time they couldn’t even scrape a thousand votes and got 706. The Lib Dems fared even worse with 653 votes.
Also on the undercard were the usual jokers such as Count Binface and the Monster Raving Loony Party but this time the undercard was leavened with internet commentators like Nick Buckley but despite the massive amount of online noise made by Mr Buckley and his supporters, he only managed to get 154 votes. Mr Buckley did managed to achieve something for his efforts though, his candidature achieved less votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party.
As for the rest of the undercard it was a sad day for the party with whose values and policies I most align with, the SDP, they got 46 votes, less than the Libertarians on 47 and the Rejoin EU party who got 98 votes. Never mind, at least I have the consolation that the SDP beat the Communist league who could only find 29 voters who could bring themselves to go ‘that one’ to their name on the ballot paper.
This was an election that had to be called for nasty reasons relating to the way that the previous Labour MP treated and referred to his constituents. It has beget a nasty electoral campaign marred with religious sectarianism, something euphemistically called ‘family voting’ which sounds rather too much like people being coerced or ‘guided’ how to vote, nasty personal insults about each candidate, the involvement of questionable sectarian groups ‘advising’ their members how to vote and wolfish extremists dressed in some passable Ovine clothing. It was the nasty sort of election which we might sadly be seeing a lot more of as more constituencies become afflicted by sectarianism and those who exploit it. This sectarianism can, at least in some constituencies, be moderated or watered down but this might take more ‘normal’ people who might not normally vote to get out there and vote against those who for sectarian reasons are motivated to get out and use the electoral system for their own ends. However this is only a medium term fix, the longer term fix is to deal effectively with the problem of sectarianism and that’s beyond the scope of this article.
Now that the dust, bar the complaints of election fraud and misdemeanors that are starting to circulate, of the Gorton and Denton by-election is starting to settle, the next question will what will Hannah Spencer’s maiden speech in the Commons be all about? Will it be the environment as we might expec from a Green politician or maybe some nice words about what she’s going to try to do for her constituents and her motivations to do that? Or will she play the tune that the pipers who may well have played a major part in getting her to the Commons want her to play and talk about ‘Palestine’? We wait and see shall we?