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.

There's a difference between British as what's on your passport and British/ness as the inherent nature of being in, and integrating into, Britain.
The bigger debate is English/ness. I do believe that as someone with both parents foreign, being English as an ethnicity does not extend to me, just as if I was born in China I wouldn't be Chinese.
And of course there'd be no frayed discussion on English, British etc if those on the left hadn't spent decades both decrying public displays of English/ness ie flags, patriotic displays, positive in our history and culture etc, basically saying English/ness should be at best kept quiet, at worst should be decried for its associations with colonialism and football hooliganism.
And the modern left happy to call anyone who just a few months into being here, calls themself English, and no dissent from this allowed.
The left have devalued to whole idea of English/ness, won't allow it to be considered an ethnicity, and berate anyone decrying non English becoming English.
When you then see that in less than three decades, English as an ethnic ID has dropped from 95% to closer to 80%, a marked chunk of that during the Boriswave of 2021/22, then the hot button topic of English/ness previously buried by the left suddenly has salience, Goodwin's takes are a reaction to this.
British/ness is a wider category, more proceedural/legal.
I've come to my conclusion only in the last decade, from tacit instinct I'm English to realizing that British/Polish Estonian-British better sums me up.

Goodwin has said things many would disagree with. However many people worldwide do think in those terms. Lots of ethnic minorities in England don't think of themselves as English. Sunak himself said something like that.

On the other hand Spencer thinks human biology is not really a thing. That is also offensive to a lot of people including most Muslims. I kind of like Hannah Spencer but she believes some really awful things. Spencer has toyed with ideas like defunding the police who knows what else. I think the Greens foreign policy is awful and might get a lot of people killed.

The fact is it is pretty clear that a lot of people on the left are pretty racist in other ways nowadays. They see minorities in the UK as hapless victims. Ideas like open borders are appalling and disastrous if you think about it more clearly.

This is the problem if your choice is between Greens and Reform. I think the average voter might have serious issues with both. My suspicion is most would prefer Goodwin.

Defund The Police? While at the same time taking on Novara Media about endemic levels of tool theft.
I would say what a tool, but that would be misgendering her, lol.

@fromorbit "They see minorities in the UK as hapless victims"

Yes. From personal experience, some of these people get very upset that I don't see myself as a hapless victim. And that I'm not on their "side".

I like your style.

And I think quite a lot of people who came here as immigrants, or whose parents were immigrants, don't necessarily want to see more immigrants coming into the country.

Exactly. Immigrants aren't a mindless blob, which is how the left treats them. There are plenty of immigrants who don't want open borders and don't want floods of young single men who don't believe in women's and children's rights and don't share British values coming into the country.

They don't want policies that make their children less safe.

Legal immigrants may have their livelihoods and lives (particularly if they live on the southern coast) more severely affected than say, for example, the Westminster political classes by the uncontrolled arrivals.

A failure of the state to keep up with the services required to provide a decent quality of life (e.g. NHS dentistry) affects EVERYONE who is already here. I am sure that immigrants who have legally been here for a while are quite as annoyed that they have to pay hundreds of pounds for dentistry as can't get an NHS dentist as the rest of us.

Oh dear, the use of the term 'racist' to stop people thinking, dissecting evidence and considering nuance doesn't seem to work anymore. Sad times.

Doesn’t really address Goodwin’s position. What do you think it was about the Black men born in Britain that led Goodwin to suggest being British is more than a piece of paper?

Oh dear, the weird parallel universe where we can explore racism on the left but not the right.

You'll have to ask him. If you're born in Britain, then you're British, but not necessarily English. That's my take on this whole tree of chestnuts.
If the media do their job, they can press him on this, as they should Spencer re her belief men can become women.

Yes, of course, you can be a legal citizen of a country without being of that nationality. My son lives and works in Spain, is married to a Chilean who has dual Spanish/Chilean citizenship, and now has a daughter born in Spain who will have the right to apply for three different 'nationalities'...though he remains English and is identified as such by his Spanish friends and colleagues. He'll never be Spanish, no matter how much as he integrates and learns the language.

So, why are we the only country seemingly that doesn't have an ethnicity you can't simply buy into or slot into?
I would be less concerned about what can appear pure semantics if the crescendo of disdain for all things England English/ness Englishmen hadn't been so brazen over the years.

Yes, it really grates. I was born in and brought up in England to parents who were borrn and brought up in England, though both have significant Scottish and Irish ancestry ( as do I, of course). Two of my children were born in Scotland and I lived in Scotland for 8 years. They remain English, as do I.

I've really come to dislike the sort of Scottish and Irish nationalism which is really down on England and the English and feels free to say so at every opportunity.
I guess I'm both British and English, but when I'm abroad I identify myself as English. Why shouldn't English people have an identity that is rooted in the country of their and their ancestor's birth in the way that people of other nationalities do?

It doesn't just have to be about football.

This is a screenshot of part of the latest email from the Green Party. They really want to turn it into a Green v Reform by election and have got action days planned, hoping for a big turn out of volunteers for leafletting and door knocking.

Edit to say that the screenshot was there in the preview so no idea where it's disappeared to.

As the inestimable Harry Hill would ask:
"Which one is better? There's only one way to find out. FIGHT!"

Insane about covers it.

Charitably, I"d say many people were understandably horrified at the casualties of war.

And that was played by people with agendas.

George Galloway not standing means one less misogynist on the ballot paper.

Opinion polls near to the date could have an impact, as people may vote tactically. As I think happened with the recent Plaid Cymru win in Caerphilly.

Realistically the Conservative candidate has not a snowball's chance. So it's Labour or Reform or Green for the tactical voter. I couldnt vote Reform or Green so I'd be looking at the views of the Labour candidate - e,g https://thechesterblog.com/2024/06/16/chester-south-angeliki-stogia-labour-party/

and deciding whether I could vote for her or not. If not I could for the first time in my life vote Conservative knowing she wouldnt win or Sir Oink a lot because he has the best policies.

I voted Monster Raving Loony in 2019. Mainly because I couldn't hack Johnson or Corbyn, but the policies were surprisingly thoughtful.
Perforate the Channel Tunnel so you could get your car washed before reaching France.
Have a curfew outside the school day for teenagers.
Amongst other gems.
Won me over.

Interesting replies there. She apparently ran a very good campaign in that seat.

When my dh was a teenager he was kicked out of a green party conference with an Israeli friend over a Palestine motion- aka they didnt whole heartedly support it. They are both jewish. He is now 35 but only left the party last year. He has campaigned for green party for years, usually with me in tow. Not over this but over polanski wanting to disband nato and give up our nuclear arms and persuade putin with kindness

Double double boak.

I wonder if one of the reasons for this is the awareness many people in the UK have of their very mixed heritage.

Certain people often malign Our Island Story as some horrible racist colonialist book, but it made very clear to generations of children that people came to the British Isles, often as conquers and "others," and over generations they became part of what it is to be British and are included in that today.

So it is very easy to imagine subsequent groups that have settled simply becoming part of what it is to be British too. Certainly I think you could make an argument that many often people who came from India and the Caribbean are already well into that process over generations, for example.

In my experience, the first generation born in a new place have a very in between quality where they feel very attached to both cultures. That tends to become much less in the third generation unless they have isolated themselves.

This is part of the left's attack on English/ness as a unique ethnicity. That the British Isles, England particularly has always had waves of invaders, who then assimilated and became the furniture.
The Normans were effectively invaders to France who civilised and became the elite class. And then invaded us.
But it can be argued that we subsequently had practically 1000 years of steady, unvarying homogeneity after the Norman invasion, there's a myth that cultures came in regularly after that.
Only really in the 20th century did things change more rapidly, starting with the Hugenot Jews, then the cohort from E. and Central Europe after WW2 (my parents), then Windrush, Idi Amin exodus, then free movement 2005+, finally the Boriswave of 2m in 2-3 years from S. Asia and Africa mainly.
It's just a myth that Britain/England was a melting pot for 1000 years after 1066, other than Irish migration.
Despite this, the English ethnicity is not to be discussed. It doesn't exist, while saying the same thing about any number of other countries is fine.
Can you imagine anyone telling a Frenchman that his ethnicity is a dirty word? Or that anyone coming there can ever be as French as he is, or that children born there to non French parents are as French as he is?
C'est poppycock.

@womendeserveequalhumanrights I used to live in the constituency, the part once repped by Gerald Kaufman, it's a cosy middle class fantasy that immigrants & the descendants of immigrants necessarily favour increased migration. Some of my old neighbours' views would make Farage look indifferent on the issue.
The reasons go well beyond access to services - allow me to introduce Operation Enfield as one example; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_child_sex_abuse_ring. You won't hear Tommy Robinson & co banging on about that one though, the perps didn't have enough melanin to attract their attention.