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.

Theres a response from DV to the comment that they didn't report it before polls closed. They said they spoke to staff at a number of polling stations about how they handled family voted but got precisely no where.

This isn't inconsistent with what I know. Shockingly bad council staff are a theme.

I'd love to think that Mr Khan in Birmingham would take into account the opinions of his wife and daughters, and also his mother who speaks no English and can't read, before deciding their interests would be best served by all of them filling out their postal votes for his good friend the Labour candidate.

If we went back to the old system where it was quite difficult to get a postal vote, I'm not sure what would happen to Labour in diverse urban areas.

Most people aren't single issue voters, regardless of the issue.

Going back to that century 21 article, if the green party do win, you can see activists from the Muslim community wanting to have the greens acknowledging their role in keeping them in power. It will then be a dilemma for the blue haired progressives as to whether they'll tone down their Sex Positive LGBTQ+ Ally stuff or risk their vote disappear, likely to Galloways Workers Party or the Corbyn controlled Your Party

Mothin Ali has managed to thread the needle for quite a while because the hippies and Quakers in the party are too polite to ask him where he actually stands on this stuff.

If Hannah Spencer gets elected as basically a Gaza MP and then pivots to the other big Green causes, I wonder how loyal her voters will be to her.

Fallout already underway with labour bods turning against each other.

Sir oink a lot has been spotted in the background at the count

He did a really cool dance. I think he's been enjoying a sherbert or 2.🍺🍺🍸

That's more an issue with postal voting than family voting.
Family voting is where a family member goes into the booth with another person voting, thus removing anonymity and potentially directing their vote. There can be an innocent explanation** but any increase is not good. It would be helpful to know what incidences at a "record high" means though. In theory it could mean previous years there were 2 instances at most and this year there were 5. Or it could mean 500. Any increase is bad and ideally it would be 0. But I think being vague just lets people interpret it according to their own biases so "record high" isn't that helpful..

**My grandma wanted me to come in with her and I said no but she couldn't see why not. There needs to be more education.

This could be the Runcorn moment for the Greens.

This time last year, before Runcorn, before the May locals, the Tories could still plausibly say, we're the opposition and Reform are just a noisy sideshow. Both parties were about neck and neck in the polls then. But Reform won and showed that they were electorally viable, and opened up a gap that the Tories haven't closed even with all the Kemi boosting from the media.

In the same way this is the Greens showing that they're a viable alternative.

This could shift things big time. The legacy parties rely a lot on the idea that a vote for an alternative candidate is a wasted vote. Until voters figure out they aren't unbeatable, and suddenly they become very beatable.

Tim Shipman had a piece in the Sunday Times last year where he quoted a Labour insider talking about their polling woes and saying "thank god the Greens are so crap, if they ever got a charismatic leader we'd be another 10 points down".

I still think there's a good chance Polanski implodes longer term, but this will really send the PLP into a state of panic.

You are assuming that just because someone thinks they could go to hell for drinking/doing drugs/porn/gay sex they care all that much about whether the students 2 streets away go to hell or not. That applies to other religions as well of course. But there are lots of people (Muslims more likely to care than other groups) who would be bothered if their own child were gay but aren't bothered about 2 lesbians they don't know getting married. At least not as much as they care about other issues. See also the Gulf States. Even Saudi Arabia is considering legalising alcohol for foreigners and they're a repressive theocracy. (Of course you get the leadership in Iran who are the opposite - Western lifestyles for their kids, hardcore Islam for everyone else). But it would be a mistake to assume socially conservative values automatically translates to voting for socially conservative parties.

Trans rights might be different of course because that has the potential to directly impact other people in a way gay marriage etc doesn't. Eg biological males in female changing rooms I can imagine would be an issue for some Muslim women. Mind I'm not a Muslim and it's an issue for me.

Regardless of political positions thats a good thing. Politicians should be afraid of their electorate.

The big issue for the Greens though is that British Muslims aren't just socially conservative, they're very very socially conservative. And the political left today isn't nearly as interested in class and economics as it is in drugs and prostitution and genderwoo.

Labour could square the circle for a long time just by controlling councils that dispensed patronage, but I think that's been fraying quite a while. The template for including socially conservative Muslims was the same template that Labour used to have with Irish Catholic MPs in northern cities - they were united on class and economics, and those moral issues were a free vote. Labour today barely tolerates Catholic MPs who take their faith seriously (Mary Glindon is still an MP, but she's 69 and may not stand again) and there were already tensions
with Muslim voters in some areas even before the Gaza business.

Galloway deals with that by leaning into his social conservatism, which is true to who he is and plays well with his audience - I suspect he exaggerates it a bit to make sure the Trots don't try to infiltrate the Workers Party.

Corbyn can deal with it on a "let's agree to disagree" basis, but Zarah Sultana obviously can't, and will actively seek out those points of division to screw over anyone she sees as a rival.

I think this is uncharted territory for the Greens. Importing Mothin Ali from Labour, and tacitly agreeing not to put him on the spot over social/cultural issues is one thing. Trying to square a working class Muslim electorate, with its own beliefs and sensibilities, with the beliefs and sensibilities of GP members, will be quite a challenge. I'm not sure Polanski understands that challenge, or if he shares the common belief on the white left that Muslims just don't take their religion very seriously.

People tend to care about issues that directly affect them. If you have never been in a single-sex space with a trans identifying man then you are probably not going to regard that issue as being all that important (even if you happen to agree that men should be kept out of those spaces). I'm almost 40 and don't think I've ever been in a single sex space with someone I could see is a TIM and that is probably true for a lot of other women.

Yes, and gender neutral toilets are more of a thing in very trendy bars anyway. It's a women's rights issue for me but it's not the only thing I'm concerned with and I can completely see it wouldn't be the biggest issue for a Muslim woman the same way it isn't the biggest issue for lots of non Muslim women.

The Catholic/Labour example someone else gave is different because one of the main sticking points there was abortion. I'm pro-choice but I can understand how if you genuinely believe life begins at conception it can be a red line because from that perspective it's killing innocent life (I think some people are pro-life more for controlling women than anything else but there are people for whom it's genuinely a matter of conscience). Even if you are a really hardcore Catholic (for example) you can ignore/tolerate other people doing things that go against your own religion as it's their business if they go to hell. But where the loss of innocent life is believed to be in play it's likely to be a much harder issue to ignore. And the same goes for other religions too.

Personally I think grudging toleration of other people's differences has always been the glue holding the UK together so it's on trend.

I actually think it's worse that Green won than if Reform had won. Snake-oil salesmen, the Greens. Still, at least it's over and people who don't live in the constituency will stop telling us what we think.

The greens are just as dangerous as reform (but for different reasons)

Very traditional Muslim women will self-exclude from public spaces anyway. Things like public toilets at theatres and supermarkets and leisure centre changing rooms just won’t be as relevant.

Are they? Are the Greens going to abolish the NHS? Are the Greens going to unleash ICE gangs on our friends and neighbours?

But the issue with mixed sex spaces by stealth is that Muslim women (and other religions) can't use them (if they're very religious) because a man (saying he's a woman) could walk in at any time. It's not whether or not this happens, it's the fact it could happen and therefore it is against their religion to use that space. Because of the policy, because they could be undressed and a man could walk in. And they know that.

Wasn't there a staff member in one of the nurse cases who ended up wearing two layers of clothing to work all the time because as soon as she knew the changing room was mixed sex?

This may well be true and is very depressing. But is obviously more likely if those toilets are definitely not single sex.

So anyhow I was completely wrong. My local GPEW candidate posted this morning and I read before my first coffee.

Hannah for GPEW has won handily, 4k above Reform in 2nd.

Labour third, Tories lost their deposit (sad trombone noise).

Wow what a result. The SM feeds were right. The Green hearts meant something.

They do plan to get rid of all nuclear weapons and ask Putin to do the same. Thats about as dangerously naive as it gets, really.

Wow.

Agree. They're totally out of touch with reality and prone to magical thinking. You do not want people who do this in any position of power.