Gorton & Denton by-election thread

[fromorbit]

This dramatic byelection to be held on Thursday 26 February 2026 is looking likely to have a confrontation over sex and gender with the Conservative's just announced candidate Charlotte Cadden being a trustee for Sex Matters. Another factor is with a large Muslim population in the area the group Muslim Vote has endorsed the Green candidate despite one of their aims to be remove teaching about LGBT issues from schools when religious parents object. Obviously in conflict with Green policy.

Candidates

• Angeliki Stogia will be the Labour candidate in this year's election. Ms Stogia moved to the UK from Greece in the 1990s and has served as a councillor in Whalley Range since 2004.
• Reform UK have selected GB News presenter Matt Goodwin as their candidate. He studied at the University of Salford and went on to have a career as a commentator and academic.
• The Liberal Democrats have selected local campaigner Jackie Pearcey as their candidate. She lives in the constituency and previously won 2,600 votes at the 2017 elections.
• The Green Party have put forward Hannah Spencer to stand for them at the by-election. She is a plumber by trade she is from Bolton and has lived in Greater Manchester all her life, and is based in Hale where she is a councilor. She doesn't believe biology is important in deciding gender.
• The Conservative Party have chosen former detective chief inspector Charlotte Cadden as their candidate. She served for 30 years in GMP and London's Met.
• The Re-join EU Party have announced that Joseph O'Meachair will be their candidate. He is a member of the party's executive committee and lives in the North West.

Sebastian Moore (Social Democratic Party)
The Social Democratic Party announced on Friday 30 January that the current SDP North West Chair Sebastian Moore will be running as their candidate in the by-election.

Nicholas Brendan Buckley Advance UK

He is a British charity worker and political figure who previously represented Reform UK.

Dan Clarke is the Libertarian Party candidate

Sir Oink A-Lot
Sir Oink A-Lot is The Official Monster Raving Loony Party candidate

https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/elections/parl.gorton-and-denton.by.2026-02-26/gorton-and-denton/

The just announced Conservative candidate has serious form:
Former detective chief inspector Charlotte Cadden is a lesbian served for 30 years as a Police Officer, both for Greater Manchester Police and the Metropolitan Police - Charlotte is a trustee of the charity Sex Matters, a member of the LGB Alliance Business Forum. She coordinates the Women’s Rights Network in Greater Manchester, In 2023, she set up the national Police SEEN.

Galloway's Worker's Party have now decided not to stand. They may have attracted a bunch of Muslim votes which will now go elsewhere.

Any hustings are going to be rather interesting.

I read the Rob Ford article and I thought 'hmmm Rob Ford has a lot of personal animosity towards Goodwin that he's desperately trying to dress up as objective opinion'.

There is a hell of a lot of snobbishness and groupthink in academia, which is sad really considering what Universities are supposed to be about. Two issues they're currently particularly insane about as well as vicious in gatekeeping on are gender ideology and 'the right wing' (which means any normal person with common sense opinions as far as I can tell). They're generally quite classist and often highly contradictory social environments (science and empirical evidence matters / TWAW).

I don't think it's that much fun being openly gender critical or right politically on many Uni campuses. Which is the opposite of inclusive or having diversity of thought. And also, in many cases, the opposite of evidence-based.

It's sad, I don't remember it being like this when I was at Uni but perhaps I just saw a different side when I was younger and it was always this way.

Alexander McCall Smith's von Igelfeld books are hilariously good on academic rivalries, but much more gentle than the reality!

All of that is to say I'd take the veracity of any opinion of a former academic colleague of Goodwin's (especially one with different politics) with a truckload of salt.

I can only name three British academics who are right wing...and one of those is dead!
Matt Goodwin, David Starkey and Sir Roger Scruton.
Are there any others?
I recall a study showing the spectrum of left v right on varied academic disciplines in US universities.
Mechanical engineering came out close to half and half Democrat v Republican voting.
Archaeology and anthropology were something like 500 Democrat to 1 Republican, lol.

I read a lot of Goodwin's early stuff & had some mild optimism about him, he then set about making an arse of himself & in that succeeded splendidly.
Ford has no reason to be jealous.

In my experience academics can be massively jealous even when they have no reason to be.

Many also don't like people having opinions other than their very important and obviously right ones.

And I didn't say he was jealous, you're saying that. I said it read to me as if there was personal animosity involved from what RF wrote. That might not be jealousy. It might be blindly and tribally hating anyone right of centre. Who knows. Just my observation.

Academic beefs do not usually interest me. I don't work in that world and I usally find its internal bickering very boring.

I don't know what went down between Ford and Goodwin, except that Ford is very keen to tell everyone that they're no longer on speaking terms, after he tried but failed to talk sense into Goodwin.

I know someone quite well, a (male) TRA, who sometimes laments that he's no longer on speaking terms with Alice Sullivan, who persisted in her wrong beliefs about women existing even after he'd explained things to her.

I see that Sunder Katwala has predicted Reform lose to the Greens by 10%. And then follows it up by saying even if Goodwin won it, he'd likely "trade" for a seat in the SE or Mids.
So, there's your bias. Katwala cannot confidently make a prediction that even Rob Ford says is too close/too impossible to predict, and is snarky if Goodwin wins it.
At the same time as decrying Goodwin for his politics, says nothing about any of Hannah Spencer's controversial views.

Academics seems more willing than politicians to socially exile people with different views.

Ford's approach to Goodwin is more in sorrow than in anger. It's always disappointing when someone with genuine academic potential throws rigour out of the window.

It's not really as simple as that. For an American, or Canadian, being English or Irish or Ukrainian or German was very significant, and even now it can have a real impact on people's culture.

There are a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be a transplanted Scot or whatever. Who "owns" that. The French, in France, for example, have often tended to be quite disdainful of Quebecois French, and the accent as inauthentic or degraded. Although in fact it's no more degraded than French in France is degraded, and may actually be closer to the accent that people had at the time the Canadians left France. (Similarly, Scottish Gaelic scholars in Scotland have sometimes looked to Canada for examples of usage that may be closer to the historical use.)

Ford isn't his dad. And he has strong political commitments of his own.

@SionnachRuadh Definitely but I think that like me he sees Goodwin less as a hate figure than as an example of the curse of early promise.

So, so far we have objections to Goodwin
1- what he said about Sunak
2- an old friend (which his own agenda) bitching about him
After pages and pages of comments.
Sounds a bit desparate to me.

He could have been a contender. He could have been a somebody, instead of a bum, which it's what he is.

Who the heck are the Communist League

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8x9z1kve0jo

Goodness how patronising.

Being a politician seems a lot more useful for society than being an academic to me. Why should anyone believe Ford? He's shown himself as hostile.

Well he sounds interesting.

Wonder what planet-sized brain Sultana thinks about him?
Or is that sultana-sized brain Zara?

They're the UK franchise of a tiny American group who used to be Trotskyist but then became Stalinist in the 1980s. They often stand candidates in Manchester and usually get about 50 votes.

They have an odd cultish element. They send their members off to get jobs in "basic industry", which as far as I can see mostly means meatpacking.

They often have hot takes that are unusual on the far left. They're very pro-Israel at the moment.

One of the strangest things happened here at the GE. The Green candidate was proudly GC, in opposition to national policy.
The Communist candidate couldn't have been more TWAW if she tried, again opposed to national policy.

I almost feel sorry for the Labour candidate on the doorstep
"Starmer is the best man to be PM, reliable, open, trustworthy"
"But what about him appointing Mandelson despite knowing his previous connections to Epstein, and now it's been revealed, also the current ones?"
Good luck to her answering this.

I don’t because they got it so wrong. Why they sold him in as the ‘grown up’ god knows but it’ll come back to bite.

Because Starmer is not "Cameron May Johnson Truss Sunak".
That's all that was needed, to not be the Tories.

I saw some interesting discussion earlier about Britishness and Englishness.

My DW and I are both Scottish and have lived in England 20 years. We might see our days out here, and would be happy to. At no point will we ever see ourselves as English, that's just not going to happen. And to be fair, most English people would clock our accents immediately and not mistake us for English and surprisingly often, make some shit joke or attempt a groundskeeper willie accent.

Our DD was born in England we see her as oor wee English girl, she's born here, not known anywhere else, she sounds and acts English.

We encourage her to recognise and celebrate her Scots ethnocultural heritage, and she can code switch quite easily at the level of words (she can easily switch between saying bath and baaarth for example) but so far her attempts at a Scottish accent are pure honkin by the way.

I wonder if the rules are just different for moving between the nations of the British Isles, than for others coming in from further afield.

I have a similar thing. I've lived in England quite a few years, but nobody who hears my Norn Iron accent will ever mistake me for English. I'm sure it's softened, though it thickens up again pretty quickly if I've been speaking til family.

Sometime I go out for dinner and waiters ask me if I'm American. Cheeky wee bastards.

I've heard Paul Whitehouse talk about being born in Wales, then his parents moved to London when he was four, so as a small boy he used to switch between accents depending on where he was. I don't know if he calls himself Welsh; I find it hard to think of him as Welsh.

Is it like this with American states, I wonder, at least the ones with strong local identities? If someone from California moves to Texas, can they ever really be a Texan?