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.

Agreed, the Tories lost far more than Labour won in 2024. Indeed add up Lib Dem, Green and Reform votes, you get more votes than Labour.

Yes, but Starmer, and Labour, are to find out why #JustNotTheTories was never going to be enough.

Are you really saying that by virtue of being polticians, Lorna Slater & Ross Greer are "a lot more useful to society" than Professor Alice Sullivan or Professor Jo Phoenix?

Ford has shown himself willing to make valid criticisms that you don't like. You, without substantiating your case in any way, attribute his criticisms to animus. That's merely funny.

Intel Lady nails it 😂

I'm getting major Our Ange vibes from this as well. Hilarious!

Labour MP clearly reacting to arguments in this thread

Matt Goodwin isn’t very British
Britain’s finest hour was a fundamental rejection of petty ethnonationalism. Reform should remember that
https://archive.is/S4fta

Who the heck becomes a Stalinist?!

I don't care either way about his criticisms, neither liking or disliking them. They just don't seem credible to me.

If someone from California moves to Texas, can they ever really be a Texan?

Not in a million years.

Let me guess, this fellow thinks British values are queuing, standing in the rain, waving little Union Jacks at Royal events. Maybe scoffing fish and chips as well.
Next he'll be saying we respect men in women's spaces, and welcome asylum hotels.

I get what the MP is saying, and he's not entirely wrong, but it's a very good example of Labour's ruling ideology of Paddington Bear nationalism.

He starts from a premise that Zia Yusuf's good friend Matt Goodwin thinks only white people can be British (he doesn't), talks about WW2 as a war against ethnonationalism (sort of, but again he's basically insinuating his opponent is some kind of Hitlerite), talks about the contributions of immigrants to building Britain (good), how we can have overlapping communities (yes), he can go to the gurdwara in the morning and the pub in the evening (no problem with that, but that's not an overlapping community, that's you), something something the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.

He's MP for Loughborough. Surely he can't have missed the riots in Leicester a few years back that had nothing to do with Brexit voters. That was Muslims and Hindus kicking off against each other. Dude is a Sikh, he's got no skin in the game, he could mention it if he wanted to.

I think it's a manifestation of a perennial human type. WS Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan had a line about
"The idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone
Every century but this and every country but his own.".

Immigration occurs in nearly every country, so its not Britishness or a british value. What Goodwin in saying, i think, is that if there isnt cohesion, Britain will change dramatically.

The extreme views are that British is be who can trace their ancestry back 1000 years, or that Britain is just a land mass, and whoever is on it, and however they behave is, by definition British.

I dont think Goodwin or the MP is advocating for either extreme, but the MP is pretending that no one is living parallel lives, totally separate from other groups.

Another issue is how much laws, customs, and what is tolerate have to evolve? Do we have to live in a Birbalsingh style country where everyone is forced to compromise, and see the country change?

I don't think we need compulsory Birbalsinghism for everyone. A country can stand small communities living parallel lives. Hasidic Jewish communities are a good example, they have their issues (like endemic sex abuse in the Satmar sect), but basically they keep to themselves and there are only about 30,000 Hasidic Jews in Britain.

It gets trickier when you scale it up. If Loughborough is a model of good integration, that's nice, but there are plenty of towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire that aren't.

I agree with this. Multiculturalism works well when there is a reasonably strong and cohesive majority culture, which accepts and tolerates small groups from other cultures. It stops working so well when those minority cultures become bigger and make more demands, there is more friction with the majority, the majority loses its confidence, there is no sense of a shared national story.

When the minority groups reach a certain size, the only way society can still feel cohesive is if they become well integrated with the majority culture (and inevitably the majority culture will also adapt somewhat), which is only possible if migration happens slowly and if those who arrive do actually integrate.

Nice summary of state of play. It is crazy out there. With what has happened with Mandelson the stakes for Labour are rocketing. A loss could trigger the overthrow of Starmer.

‘It’ll be a photo finish’: inside the Gorton and Denton by-election
James Heale
Burnham’s absence has left a gap the Greens want to fill. This is Zack Polanski’s first electoral test since becoming leader in September and activists boast that membership has doubled. Leaflets cry: ‘Stop Reform, send Starmer a message, make hope normal again.’ Numbers are being traded between the parties like Top Trumps. The Greens claim to have sent out 561 activists last Saturday; Labour promises 1,000 this weekend. ‘It is the biggest north-western campaign day in history,’ says one Labour organiser.
The battle for the right might be the big story in politics at the moment but the conflict on the left is no less brutal. Labour’s digital blitz will intensify in the coming days as the party critiques Green policies on issues like defence. ‘I don’t think there is anyone I hate more in politics than Polanski,’ says a pro-Starmer MP. Countering the positivity of the Green brand is a challenge for Labour campaigners. ‘It’s like kicking a puppy,’ groans one. In Australia, the Labor party took several cycles to work out how best to attack the Greens. The same might be true for Labour here.
Polanski’s party has forged new alliances and is backed by the Muslim vote. Mosques and community organisers are being targeted to help buttress the Greens’ infrastructure; one in three voters here are Muslim. Green candidate Hannah Spencer is a 34-year-old plumber whose four greyhounds dominate campaign HQ. But rivals feel the Greens missed a trick. ‘They needed a raving Gaza lunatic,’ says one.

https://archive.is/KuTul

Oh, for a Mothin Ali.

Alert - Hustings incoming!

It would be awful if a whole bunch of women turned up with awkward questions.

Gorton and Denton Parliamentary By-election Hustings 2026 (Levenshulme Community Association)
Thu 12th Feb 2026

You can email questions in.
https://www.manchesterfoe.org.uk/events/event/gorton-and-denton-parliamentary-by-election-hustings-2026-levenshulme-community-association/

I see what you did there :)

I know so many women would pin Hannah with gender related Qs.
My one to her would be "how do you reconcile your anger over tool theft with your previous stated support for Defund The Police?"
If she claims she doesn't subscribe to this view on the police anymore, what changed her mind?
My guess is she'll blame poverty and those terrible billionaires for the reasons people steal tools (ditto shoplifting), and say that a raid on Dyson etc would lead to tool theft becoming a thing of the past.

A country can stand small communities living parallel lives. Hasidic Jewish communities are a good example, they have their issues (like endemic sex abuse in the Satmar sect), but basically they keep to themselves and there are only about 30,000 Hasidic Jews in Britain.

Not sure I agree. UK law should apply -and be accessible to everyone, everywhere. We don't do a good job of making it feasible for women in closed communities to know and exercise their rights. We don't even do a particularly good job of supporting the ones who are lucky enough to escape or who try to pursue justice without burning their bridges. The scale of the problem may be smaller in the case of tiny minority communities, but that shouldn't make the people in those communities any less entitled to the protection of the UK state or any less accountable under UK law.

Tolerating cultural differences shouldn't mean turning a blind eye. We have laws against FGM, but they don't do much to protect girls. Perhaps I'm a little sensitive on this because I have a friend who works in some of the strict Orthodox Jewish communities trying to help women who need a get because despite their civil legal divorce they remain effectively trapped, unless they are willing to give up their religious identity and everything they contributed financially to the marriage. According to the letter of the law they are divorced and free to move on, in practice they're still bound. I'm not comfortable with that.

I don't pretend to know the solution, but those women would have more and easier choices if we didn't normalise the existence of closed communities with cultural values and practices that are dramatically different from those of mainstream British culture.

Sorry, a bit incoherent

I really try my best not to hate people. Even politicians. Yes, even them. It's not good for the spirit. And I've done my best with Starmer.
But after watching his speech today, again that coached, faux sombre and moral tone that he adopts, now really grates. The hate is rising.
Because what is he saying? That again it's everyone else's fault except his that he approved Mandelson for the post.
Again, he's a passenger at No.10, shows no agency, because no-one told him not to appoint him, yet despite all the glaring reasons not to, he still did. And he didn't even like the man. Starmer isn't a leader, he's not even a decent technocrat instead of leader, he's just a placeholder. Cameron, May and Sunak are giants in comparison.
Starmer is ineffectual, just a facsimile of a cardboard cut-out "leader".
Then there's the cowardice laced in moral tones to deflect us. He "has the back of the Epstein victims".
No Mr. PM, like every politician, you don't have the backs of victims anywhere. The only back you're interested in is your own, as you try and wriggle and triangulate to a survival position, working out who to sacrifice to save your, ahem, back.
And what do we find today showing Starmer absolutely doesn't have the backs of victims?
The fact he's caved to internal Labour Party dynamics, and scrapped the victims voices panel at the forthcoming Mirpuri grooming gangs inquiry.
Yep, more women who don't have politicians covering their backs.
I don't know if the Labour candidate here has a good record on women's rights, it's immaterial now. Labour need to be taught a lesson, banished to third at least, ideally even lower.
Just crush the hated Starmer.

Ik it was just so excruciating for the reasons you state.

I think politics brings out the worst in everyone, but its confusing why Starmer in the HoC at all. He doesnt seem to enjoy or be as ease witg any part of it.

He's like the anti-Boris Johnson, some anti-matter version from a parallel universe.
Both Starmer and Johnson have/had no clique in Parliament, no clan to cheerlead them (if we ignore Nadine D). That means when things going their way, or other MPs see them as helpful to their survival or advancement, they have wide support.
But once the wheels come off, their "support" withers away to nothing. And very fast as well.
Johnson managed to hang on longer than most would as he could still point to the popularity of his personal brand in the country.
But Starmer never had any popularity with the public, no mission associated with him to bring the public with him.
And thus he's on the thinnest ice of all.
Even their reasons for highest office are not totally different. Johnson thought he could do a job. Starmer the same. But neither with any underlying reasons.
And both of them have hated the job, Johnson couldn't take to the buck stopping with him, Starmer believed the state would reflexly revert to correct decision making if only someone like him, someone not a Tory, with no ideological baggage would simply sit at the helm and allow all the good stuff to happen.