Welcome to the new sectarianism

Ten lessons from the Gorton and Denton by-election

Hannah Spencer’s victory for the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election offers us some insight into the current state of British politics.

1. Sectarianism comes to Britain. In the run-up to today’s result, much discussion about Gorton and Denton focused on demographics. The constituency, as we all now know, combines a white working-class community with a larger Pakistani muslim population. In the middle sits a smaller group of students and young professionals. Democracy should not be a question of counting people by race and religion but of winning people over to arguments. But this did not happen.

2. Victory for the elsewheres. By-elections usually combine an awkward mixture of local priorities and national issues with a referendum on the ruling party. In Gorton and Denton, Green Party members campaigned in keffiyehs, discussed Gaza, and distributed leaflets featuring British politicians alongside Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu. In appealing specifically to the Pakistani community, they divided the electorate along ethnic lines.

3. The failure of multiculturalism. Green Party leaflets published in Urdu and Punjabi suggest a significant number of voters in Gorton and Denton cannot read English. This points not just to high levels of migration but to a huge failure to integrate people. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, electoral reform went hand in hand with the expansion of education. Literacy - and, even more obviously, the capacity to speak English - was considered vital for democracy. This is not something we can assume today.

4. The rise of family voting. Democracy Volunteers, a group that monitors the integrity of elections, has expressed concern about a high number of ‘family voting’ incidents, where two people enter the polling booth at the same time. This is a breach of secret ballot rules so severe that John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers, felt forced to issue a statement on the night of the election. We can assume that such incidents primarily involved Pakistani women being ushered into polling booths and being instructed on where to place their vote by their husbands. Manchester’s Returning Officer has denied knowledge until after the polls had closed, although Ault insists problems were raised sooner.

5. Lies and deception are now routine. The Labour Party kicked off the by-election campaign by issuing a social media clip of Reform candidate Matt Goodwin saying, in 2023, that he was ‘unfortunate enough to be in Manchester a few days ago’. From the context, it was clear that Goodwin had been referring to his time at the Conservative Party conference. Labour then ended the campaign by issuing a leaflet, purporting to be from a group called Tactical Choice, claiming that new polls showed Labour was the party most likely to see off Reform. No such group exists, and the claims were entirely fictitious.

6. Politicians are gaslighting us. Labour MPs have been quick to accuse Reform of ‘being divisive’ and frequently raise the alarm about the spread of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. Yet, as the past few weeks have shown, it is not Reform that engages in such practices but Labour and the Green Party. Everything they accuse others of, they do themselves.

7. More chaos for the Labour Party. There is nothing unusual about the ruling party losing a by-election. But to wind up in third place, less than two years after winning a landslide in the House of Commons, and in a constituency that has historically been a Labour stronghold, is significant. Having mistaken parliamentary seats for popularity and failed spectacularly in government, Labour now looks completely irrelevant.

8. Starmer’s days are numbered. The by-election result calls Starmer’s judgement into question - yet again. He chose to disqualify the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, from standing. Looking at the result, it is unlikely Labour would have won, even if Burnham had stood - but his defeat would have reduced the threat to Starmer’s authority from the ‘King of the North’. That Starmer didn’t see this, or was too cowardly to see it play out, reminds us how useless he is at politics.

9. The irrelevance of the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party won fewer than 1,000 votes and, in an unprecedented defeat, even lost its deposit. The fact that this is not bigger news shows that - despite Kemi Badenoch’s personal popularity and success in Parliament - the Tory Party is also now irrelevant. Conservative MPs have been quick to claim that they never expected to win in a Labour stronghold. But why not? Reform’s second-place success shows that more than 10,000 voters in the constituency are open to backing a right-wing party.

10. The left behind commentariat. As I discovered earlier this week, high-profile politicians-turned-magazine-editors are in denial about the Conservative Party’s fortunes.