Sally Hayes reports from Gorton and Denton on today’s crucial by-election.

For the past three weeks, the area I live in has been the centre of a much-reported and discussed by-election in Gorton and Denton. I don’t think there is a constituent who is unaware of it. Now writing as voters go to the polls, there is still real doubt as to the outcome and huge numbers of people who are either not saying or not voting, perhaps 30%.

The risks facing us are extreme. We are in danger of a far right Reform MP being elected through a combination of people who have been treated with contempt for years, people who will vote with their feet, and the prospect of a large Green and a smaller but significant Labour vote. And this Reform candidate is the high profile extreme far right Matt Goodwin, a pundit from GB News, supported by the far right extremists who have been a feature of the campaign.

The permitted ‘retirement’ of  the disgraced Labour Andrew Gwynne MP which led to the vacancy, together with the subsequent blocking of Andy Burnham personally by Keir Starmer, would surely in itself have caused many local Labour voters to reject a party where their MP showed the depth of his and others’ contempt for their constituents, and the leadership nationally have continued to do so.

This is an area where the Labour majority at the last election was over13,000 and roots in the labour movement run deep, but it is also one with high levels of poverty and election turnout last time was low at 47%.  We have seen the complacency  and contempt shown towards local people by some of the councillors within Tameside Council covering Denton along with their MP, which was exposed on their “Trigger me Timbers” WhatsApp group. Six Labour councillors in Greater Manchester were suspended over offensive messages, which allegedly included racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, hate speech and even death threats towards constituents. It  was genuinely shocking.

In the Manchester wards where I live, the demographics are different. The Labour Group backed moving several wards, as proposed by the electoral boundaries commission, into a newly created constituency with boundaries that no longer made any sense. This was partly to ensure that left Labour branches were split off from Manchester Central and Gorton constituencies.

Longsight ward had previously caused the biggest upset in Manchester Labour by narrowly voting in Shahbaz Sarwar, a Workers’ Party candidate, in an area with a high Muslim population. This was in a ward dominated for many years by a small group which rarely met as a Labour branch and conducted its real business behind closed doors.

I personally left the Labour Party a year ago after finally despairing that the thousands of people on the left who built the Party and elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be drawn back into it again, and when the appalling treachery of the right finally became too multi-faceted and too grave for it to be possible to continue to work for internal change, in my view. It was not an easy choice and the absence of a truly labour movement alternative continues. Building a left within the Party now appears to be such a long, protracted and doomed option set against the scale and urgency of the task. The future creation of a left labour movement party attracting mass support and with union affiliation remains a goal we are all aiming for, however we build it. Conversations between friends and comrades in our community centres on the big question: are Labour really ahead in seeing off Reform?

But is that the case? Young people, students, climate change activists and thousands more have been drawn to the Green Party in this vacuum. While personally not a member, I recognise they have brought together hundreds of activists into a well organised campaign with a real chance of winning the seat. It is by no means a shoo-in, but the parts of the constituency with high levels of professionals, students and Muslim voters are a large part of the electorate and there is also Green support across the rest of the constituency. 

Labour has the history, the data, and retains loyalty for some, and they have brought in Andy Burnham to ensure he is seen backing the campaign, along with London Mayor Sadiq Khan. This week, Keir Starmer also visited.

Reform have been largely absent other than through mailouts. Goodwin has used GB News and some far right heavies on occasion but has otherwise been invisible, other than to his own supporters, even failing to appear at local hustings. With no high-profile media coverage and a lot of enthusiasm from supporters coming from Sheffield, Liverpool and further afield, Greens have saturated the area with leaflets, door knocking, a bright, personable, local candidate and tons of energy.

Polling will end today. But the ramifications of this election will be felt locally and pundits will extrapolate endlessly. For most of us the issue is what does it mean to have a united front against the far right?  Labour is almost certainly running third, but continue to generate material showing they are beating the Greens, based on a discredited survey of 51 people before the by-election was even announced.

Huffington Post reports: “Labour is embroiled in a dirty tricks row over a campaign leaflet featuring a ‘fictitious’ tactical voting company. It says: ‘The Tactical Choice says Vote Labour. Based on a new prediction made in the last 24 hours we are recommending voting Labour.’ However, no organisation called ‘Tactical Choice’ appears to exist. The offending literature has been put through voters’ doors on the eve of Thursday’s crunch Gorton and Denton by-election.”

“Bookies make the Greens odds-on favourites, followed by Reform and then Labour,” says the report, adding, “ Two real tactical voting organisations – Tactical.Vote and StopTheTories.Vote – have already recommended voters back the Greens to stop Reform winning.”

In 2017, a friend in the Green Party at the time persuaded his local party to not stand a candidate against a left Labour candidate. The result was that the Labour candidate won by 600 votes. He joined the Labour Party in that period. In the following election that agreement was not continued and the Labour MP lost by a similar number of votes to the Tories. The friend subsequently was suspended by the Labour party for being too close to the Greens and after no progress in appealing his suspension he left the Party. Right now, maintaining the position of the Starmer cabal has clearly been shown here to be more important than the damage being done to us by the election of the far right.

Sally Hayes is a local activist and voter in the Gorton Denton by-election.

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