The Green Party of England and Wales has won the Gorton and Denton by-election by 4,402 votes, overturning the previous Labour majority of 13,413 votes in the 2024 general election.
There can be no doubt that this is a seismic defeat for the Labour Party, given that the constituency is one of its safest seats in the country. It may be the penultimate domino to fall in Keir Starmer’s premiership before the upcoming May elections, which are set to be disastrous for the traditional mainstream parties. Yet what is more curious is Reform UK’s result.
On paper, it was an impressive night for them. A right-wing party should not be competitive in inner-city Manchester. They won 10,578 votes against the Greens’ 14,980, beating Labour’s 9,364 into third place. They comfortably crushed the Conservatives, wiping out their electoral deposit in the process. So why are they not happy?
Their candidate, Matt Goodwin, is a Reform UK heavy hitter. He is a senior academic on the British right and was a serious intellectual heavyweight behind the 2019 Conservative election campaign. Previously a counter-extremism professor, he turned towards right-wing populism in an effort to contain nationalist movements such as the BNP and the uncertainty of the 2016 era.
I brand him the intellectual theorist of the Boris wave, as his theory as to why Brexit happened was that people had a problem with the lack of control over immigration, rather than the number of immigrants or immigrants themselves. He said that once immigration controls had been taken back from Brussels, immigration could be higher because the people had their say in Westminster, which is what the Tories delivered to the letter from 2019 onwards.
Reform was clearly hoping to add Goodwin to its growing list of MPs, and parties do not tend to subject their senior team to the risk of a by-election in case of failure and humiliation.
In a typical Trumpian fashion, Goodwin and Farage have claimed that the election was rigged by family voting, where family units vote together and confer in the voting booth, and by religious and ethnic sectarianism. The claim of rigging via family voting is beyond laughable. It is highly unlikely, given the campaign and general voting trends, that any Islamic voter was intimidated out of voting for Reform UK in favour of the Greens. All of the Greens’ vote share came from previous Labour votes, and there is no possible configuration involving swapping Green and Labour votes that would have resulted in a Reform victory.
Put simply, Reform lost because it did not get enough votes. End of story.
So why did Reform lose and the Greens succeed? Matt Goodwin ran a divisive, Alan Partridge-style campaign in which he did not campaign for anything, but merely against the dismal record of Keir Starmer and the Green Party’s supposed Gaza fetish. Whilst Muslim voters are strongly motivated by Gaza, voters of all stripes and ages overwhelmingly sympathise with Gaza against Israel in poll after poll. So running a pro-Israel, anti-Gaza campaign outside Golders Green was never going to be successful.
Goodwin also foolishly attacked his own potential voters on the right. During the campaign, Rupert Lowe launched his Restore Britain Party, which led Goodwin to brand practically all of the online right in the following manner:
“Its entire ecosystem is filled with the wrong kinds of people, who hold the wrong kinds of ideas. The people who are criticising Reform from the right are an assortment of amateurs, egomaniacs, Zoomers with very little political experience, and inexperienced ideologues who do not really have any grip on political reality.”
Almost instantly, Matt Goodwin chewed up and spat out any tepid online support he was receiving from the likes of Connor Tomlinson and the Lotus Eaters, which left him at the mercy of the ravenous chud Zoomers out for blood. It was exactly something that a stuffy academic who previously worked with Hope Not Hate to counter the BNP and the far right would have done, and he paid dearly for it.
People may have been sympathetic to the anti-Starmer, anti-establishment campaign if Reform had not spent the campaign stuffing its fictitious shadow cabinet with washed-up Tories like Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi. Fundamentally, Reform has no policy differences with Keir Starmer on what really matters: economics and immigration. Both are neo-liberal in their outlook.
On the other hand, the newly minted Green MP, Hannah Spencer, ran a campaign on the cost of living, housing and, yes, supporting justice for Palestine. She was a local plumber who ran on the issues that local people actually cared about and won. Yet we are led to believe by Reform propagandists that something foul was afoot. After all, Reform Party Chairman David Bull said that anyone with a British passport is just as British as you or I, so what is he complaining about?
Incidentally, it now appears that Bull is throwing Goodwin under the bus, saying that Goodwin’s controversial, yet correct, comment that having a passport does not make someone British was not Reform Party policy and agreeing that the comment hurt Goodwin’s electoral chances. It appears that my prediction from January about Goodwin being given the by-election so that his inevitable loss would be grounds to throw him out was entirely correct. It was the British political equivalent of Hitler promoting Paulus to Field Marshal at Stalingrad, a blessing in disguise. Farage does not share the limelight easily, and it appears that Goodwin will now follow the fate of Ben Habib after the Wellingborough by-election in 2024.
A footnote to this election is the disappointing performance of Nick Buckley of Advance UK. Ben Habib’s splinter party was hoping to capitalise on online dissatisfaction over Reform’s establishment politicking. Yet, after receiving only 154 votes, 0.4 per cent, and getting five votes fewer than Sir Oink A Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party, it is safe to say that Advance UK’s political ambitions to replace Reform are dead in the water.
Nick Buckley was a phenomenal candidate and an accomplished community politician. He should not be upset. He received over 50,000 votes across Manchester in 2024, coming third in the mayoral race, but by-elections are a tricky thing. As they are essentially unpredictable, they give political parties without a national media presence little time to prepare a campaign. The advantage lies with larger parties whom the voters already know.
This is the problem that Restore will face in a similar situation. Just because its online presence on X and Facebook is large, it has no media backing as yet. GB News was crucial to the rise of Reform, and there does not seem to be a similar organisation in the making that will back Restore in a similar fashion. Advance currently has over 30,000 members. It is likely that Advance had more members in the constituency than votes.
Advance also has the backing of Tommy Robinson and other big names to the right of Reform. Restore may have more support in this regard, but I do not see how more online support is going to translate 154 votes into a majority.
Ultimately, if Restore wants to win, it must offer a radical alternative not only to Labour and the left, but also to the right. It must discard Toryism and Thatcherism in all their forms and adopt a truly nationalist agenda. It must also organise itself into a real political party, with branches and activists. At present, it is entirely lacking.
Most importantly, for any radical or non-establishment party, one must remember that the electorate are not, in fact, stupid. If you are offering a platform one step to the right or left of your establishment rival, you will lose. Why take a punt on an outsider with no chance of winning when you will get practically the same policies if you vote for the bigger centrist party anyway?
Only a radical agenda which gives people a real choice will capture the imagination of voters. Give them something that they cannot get anywhere else. That is how you will win.
