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.

cough Holyrood has PR. cough

And look at our glorious beacon of democratic accountability, transparency, and statespersonship! Longlife to our esteemed ministers and overmasters! Vive la list vote that hath delivered us the hitherto unexpected gift of Maggie Chapman! Blessed be the Modified D'Hondt!

Innit.

The PR arguments are usually that one gets more coalition building and more representation of minority views. Did the Greens worsen or improve the SNP govt?

It's a mystery.

I think there are some Brits who look on certain foreign countries with rose tinted glasses and make big assumptions about their political systems. There's a certain type of Sensible Pundit who likes to big up Germany as being Europe's grown up nation, based mostly on nostalgia for leaders like Helmut Schmidt or Willy Brandt. While your actually existing German state is in the middle of a massive energy crisis and is rapidly losing its industrial base, but it's devoting its attention to important matters like dragging pensioners into court for tweeting the poo emoji at Green Party leaders, something even Keir Starmer hasn't attempted.

Also, ask me sometime about the brown envelope culture in Irish politics, which almost makes Scotland look like a model of good governance.

I honestly still think the scottish system is a decent improvement on pure FPTP but I respect that this is massively debatable. I grant that the list system can be gamed by the parties to push candidates that wouldn't normally survive a constituency contest.

There's a fair bit of that in the UK too, with the possibility for nepo babies, partners, fixers, donors and well connected entryists getting given a "safe seat" by the party machine. It's far from a perfect meritocratic system itself.

I guess one issue with PR is that there are so many flavours and even deciding which choices to offer the electorate is a massive game to be hedged and fixed by the big parties. The main benefits of FPTP are of course 'we can get rid of you' helping keep the MPs' feet to the fire, and not forgetting the fact that it's simple, straightforward and almost universally understood.

Yes this and the Greens in Scotland argument. We seem to be holding against those extremes somewhat.

Pollsters were saying it's too close to call. I think BC election today were not allowed to speculate further (?)

Someone who was there this week gives me a guess of 1. Green, 2. Reform and 3. Labour, but qualifies that by saying (a) it's likely to be very close between the top three, (b) the level of postal votes is low so it will all depend on GOTV today and (c) if any party is likely to have shy voters it's Labour.

Labour folks certainly believe they have shy voters out there, which is why they're throwing the kitchen sink at it.

Goodwin is going all out to win, which is just his character, but there are some Reform folks who say they'd be happy with a close second - if Goodwin is going to be a significant figure in the party they'd rather have him in a defensible seat than sitting on a tiny majority where he's very vulnerable to tactical voting.

Good piece from Annabel Denham in the Telegraph Gorton and Denton shows the future of broken Britain

Agree. That was an informative but disturbing analysis.

I drove through denton over the weekend and saw more green posters in windows than i have ever seen before in any election/by election...

I just saw the Reform poster with STOP THE BOATS in the telegraph article.

Now I cannot stop hearing it in the same voice as the guys from Southpark saying "Took Our Jobs"

Reform will "Sterp th Berts"

Maybe we are focusing on the wrong gods though in our analysis though. What if current American politics is down to Zeus [Trump} and Hera [Clinton/Harris] squabbling and cursing each other and using humans as pawns it makes a lot more sense if you see it that way.

In other election news Corbyn's slate crushed Sultana 14-7 in the voting to control Your Party central committee.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5480020-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread-part-3?page=2

Labour posts are met with green hearts. Very few red ones. Maybe they’re feeling too embarrassed to put support, I guess we’ll see.

Yes, it's very funny. I'll remember that next time another woman is sexually assaulted by one of the new arrivals staying at one of the camps.

If Reform are saying they would see a close second as a win now, that suggests they now think they won't win maybe and are prespinning the outcome. I don't want to make any guesses, it too close to call but it's interesting that they have made that guess. I guess we'll see if they are right...

I'm not telling you what the party are spinning, just what I'm hearing from contacts in the party who knew at the outset that Labour's 6th safest seat, where a third of voters are Muslim, where 77% of votes at the last election were for left wing parties, was always going to be a bit of a long shot. On paper (Rallings an Thrasher fundamentals) they shouldn't even be in contention.

The same people (with experience of Runcorn) are confident that they've got the best ground game and may do surprisingly well in the Gorton wards. It helps to have a hyperactive candidate. It probably doesn't hurt having online Rupert Lowe fans calling Farage a race traitor for employing too many Muslims.

FWIW I've got a sneaking suspicion that the Greens are a bit overpriced and have made some unforced errors, but I suppose we'll see soon enough.

What I can't figure out is why on earth Labour allowed Starmer to go there. Is there nobody at HQ willing to tell him he's not exactly going to juice the Labour vote? Is Labour now in a sort of Ceausescu space where aides are constantly telling Dear Leader how popular he is?

Two years ago in this seat, reform and greens had 14% and 13% of the vote, labour 50%.

Either party coming a close second will see it as win of sorts. Forcing it to be a three way fight will be positive for both, too.

Even if labour win, they wont want this fight while running a national campaign.

In the weekly council by-election results across the country it's become a regular thing to see Labour drop 20% or more in seats they're defending. That might even be a bit of a conservative estimate.

And it's not just that they're losing different demographics to different challengers, it's also that there's a definite "anyone but Labour" sentiment in former strongholds. Andy Burnham is very popular, and we know at his last mayoral election he carried all but one ward in Greater Manchester. That one ward he lost was to independent candidate Nick Buckley (formerly Reform, now Advance) who, bizarrely enough, seems to have picked up the Gaza Independent vote in Oldham. I don't believe for a moment that Buckley campaigned on a pro-Gaza platform, it might just be that he was the only visible anti-Labour candidate in a ward that wanted to punish Labour.

Yes it’ll be a swing away from Labour which they won’t like, plus as @SionnachRuadhsays this is happening nearly everywhere.

Tbh given the angry rhetoric coming from Labour and lack of accountability whilst blaming everyone else it’s not surprising.

In terms of the demographic shift the UK is probably a couple of decades behind some other European countries. There are working class neighbourhoods in Milan and Turin that reliably voted Communist for 30 to 40 years after WW2. That started slowly eroding in the 70s and 80s. By the 2000s they were voting Lega Nord. The gentrified Italian left has never figured out how it lost the working class.

Whoever wins Greens and Reform have all had a huge amount of publicity in the run up to the elections in May. This seat is nice to have but Reform/Greens winning a bunch more councils is more significant, not to mention Reform might do really well in Wales and even in Scotland while Greens might do gain ground in London.

Labour are going to be fighting on all sorts of fronts. There's a whole council election in Birmingham, and there is no way Labour will hold their majority there. Similarly in Bradford.

In London I suppose all the attention will be focused on the Greens in the inner boroughs, but east London could be a real shocker for Labour, with Greens, Reform and Gaza candidates all gobbling up their traditional base.

This all matters because, when it comes to the general election, your councillors are not just your main source of candidates, they're your footsoldiers who are the backbone of the branches. The main reason I don't write Labour off in Gorton is they've got zillions of councillors there and that institutional heft has to count for something.

But just a trend from local by-elections - since May the Tories have lost half the seats they've been defending. Labour have lost three quarters.