The Gorton and Denton by-election is anyone’s call
It was pouring with Manchester rain when I visited the Gorton and Denton constituency on Saturday ahead of its crucial by-election vote. On the streets of Longsight and Levenshulme, where Green and Labour activists were vying for local support, I accompanied a group of Labour canvassers door-knocking on Burnage Lane. One joked they might need windscreen wipers for their glasses. Another consulted a laminated map showing which slices of the constituency were still untouched. My Doc Martens squelched. “Welcome to door knocking!” an activist chirped.
The election is a three-horse race between Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, Reform’s Matt Goodwin and the Green’s Hannah Spencer – which means the fiercest contest is not simply between left and right. Labour and the Greens are simultaneously locked in a struggle to define who represents the progressive politics across Britain. Each insists the seat is theirs to lose when voters go to the polls on Thursday; each warns that backing the other risks letting Reform through the middle.
As if to illustrate the division, Burnage Lane is a patchwork of red and green. Along one stretch, posters alternated neatly — red, green, red, green. One house had both a tall Green Party stake in the garden and a Labour Party poster wedged between two upstairs windows. In this contest, left-leaning voters are being asked not simply what they believe, but who can realistically win.
Labour insists this is fundamentally a straight fight between themselves and the right. “The fundamentals are Labour versus Reform,” one source told me before I travelled north. “The Greens have been very noisy and have tried to talk themselves into the game.” As the incumbent party, with a history of winning in the area, Labour is clearly hoping that its base comes through.
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That morning, volunteers gathered at Rushford Park, a community centre between Longsight and Levenshulme. They heard from the Defence Secretary John Healey and Stogia, a Manchester City councillor who has represented Whalley Range since 2012. Lucy Powell and Jonathan Reynolds also made appearances, underscoring how seriously Labour is taking the race.
On the doorstep, one campaigner urged activists to highlight the Greens’ support for drug decriminalisation. Another described Green support as “soft”. But among a few canvassers there was private frustration. Why not foreground Labour’s record – employment rights, the Renters’ Rights Act – rather than focus on attacks? “We should be doing that instead of saying, you shouldn’t vote for them, vote for us”, one told me.
There are vulnerabilities. The fallout from the leak of the “Trigger Me Timbers” WhatsApp group chat, which led to Andrew Gwynne’s suspension, still rankles in Denton. The group chat contained negative messages about local residents, as well as offensive jokes. “A lot of Labour voters are still cross about it, so they won’t vote Labour, they’ll just stay at home,” a canvasser admitted. At a focus group I attended, one woman said she was tempted to “punish” Labour for blocking Andy Burnham from standing. The Manchester Mayor remains popular locally; Labour’s canvassing app allows volunteers to send wavering voters a personalised letter from him. “Every doorstep you go to, they know Andy,” an activist said.
The Green Party’s temporary campaign headquarters was located just fifteen minutes away at Greenbank Playing Fields. Activists queued in the drizzle for leaflets and maps. Spencer darted between interviews, her four adopted greyhounds wrapped in quilted jackets nearby.
Her campaign has faced hostility. The Daily Mail published allegations about property ownership with her ex-partner. She has also been the target of lies online, with posts questioning her background as a plumber. She has displayed her qualifications in her office and occasionally has to travel with security. “We had someone walk past the office who was really angry, shouting ‘you’re not a plumber,’” Spencer told me, when we spoke on Saturday. “Now, in my office we’ve put all of my plumbing certificates up on the wall”. She added: “[Misinformation] is really bad for democracy”.
At the campaign hub I met Caroline Lucas, the party’s former leader. She claimed Labour voters were turning to the Greens in droves, disillusioned with Keir Starmer. Nowhere is that clearer, Greens argue, than among Muslim voters in Longsight and Levenshulme. There remains lingering anger among the community both here and across the country for comments Starmer made in a 2023 LBC interview about Israel’s right to withhold water and power from Gaza – remarks he later clarified. The Muslim Vote campaign has endorsed the Greens. Fesl Reza-Khan, co-chair of the Muslim Greens, said the party’s initial canvassing outside mosques was met with polite caution. Many Muslims have long backed Labour. But, he said, by the final Friday before polling, “word of mouth” was spreading in community shops and centres. In Denton, however, where the population is more white working class, the Greens admit it has been harder to break through. Without tight community networks, momentum is less visible. Could that be where their vote falls short?
In Denton, turquoise dominates. Reform posters and “Vote Matt Goodwin” placards dot the streets. “We feel very good,” a Reform source told me. “It’s a three-way toss-up.” Reform finished second here in 2024 with 14.1 per cent, and though the seat ranks low on its national target list, the party senses an opportunity.
Goodwin, an academic and former GB News presenter, was selected early. His candidacy has not been without controversy: allegations of sexual harassment during his time at GB News were reported by The Guardian on Friday; he denies wrongdoing and no formal action was taken. Critics also note he was raised in Hertfordshire and lives in Hitchin. Reform’s opponents accuse the party of parachuting him in.
Goodwin counters that “Manchester made me” on campaign literature, pointing to his time at Salford University and family ties to the city (he told The Sunday Times “my ex-wife is from Manchester”). More importantly, with more than 200,000 followers on X and a perch on television, he brings name recognition. At a Good Growth Foundation focus group in Manchester, every participant had heard of him. “He seems like a nice man,” one woman said.
But will name recognition be enough? Voters in Gorton and Denton are clearly fed up and agitating for change, but they remain wary of a party which has courted elements of the far right’s divisive rhetoric, including describing immigration as an “invasion”. One woman told the focus group she wanted to vote for Reform due to their stance on illegal immigration and closing asylum hotels but felt anxious about some elements of their rhetoric, worrying that it might be perceived as racist. Still, compared to other Labour and the Green Party, Reform UK and Nigel Farage had the edge. “They’re the best of a bad bunch,” she said.
This by-election is impossible to call. Walk down one street in Levenshulme or Longsight and it might be red or green, in Denton blue. Over the past four weeks, Gorton and Denton has been placed under a national microscope. Activists from across the country have headed up to this patch of Greater Manchester to campaign to get their party’s vote out (on Saturday, a bus of Green Party activists left Brighton at six in the morning).
Some residents of Gorton and Denton have grown tired of the national press circus rolling into their lives . More than one person commented on the number of activists knocking on their doors – occasionally late at night – to ask how they might vote, thrusting leaflets into their hands and letter boxes. Though their political allegiances may be disparate, there is one thing that seems to unite voters in Gorton and Denton: a mixture of exasperation and anticipated disappointment that once the dust has settled – and the Westminster hullabaloo has drifted back down south – will anyone pay attention to them anymore?
[Further reading: Equating the Greens with Reform will ruin Labour]
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