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.

And if I had a choice between ZP and NF running anything NF would win hands down. It's a low bar, I concede, but at least he hasn't tried to con women out of money by selling them the lie they can increase their breast size via hypnosis.

This is true. Polanski is a skilled communicator, he's very energetic and he's made an impression in his short time as leader. The problem is, lots of people have heard of him, but they mostly know him as the boobs hypnotist.

If you apply what the late Scott Adams used to call a "persuasion filter", that's completely predictable. It's maybe the most memorable fact about any Green politician ever. And it means most people are primed to see him as a bit of a joke.

Farage may have been on I'm A Celebrity, but when people think of him, their first thought is "the Brexit man". And even if people think Brexit was a terrible idea, that's still something political, and instantly makes him look more credible than Polanski.

Also, whatever you think of Brexit it was a huge political achievement. Farage did something tangible.

I know a lot of people are very, very pissed off that he achieved that thing. But generally speaking, someone who's achieved that level of political victory is preferable in a leader to someone who's biggest achievement is convincing some women they can increase breast size via hypnosis (which is not the only one of his batshit ideas - men being able to magically transform into women on a whim being another)

You're too hard on Polanski, he achieved something way bigger than Farage did with Brexit.
The Gallon Challenge from 2010.
Has left a deep impression on me that Polanski is the man for 2029.

I see myself as a natural SDP voter, and they have a candidate standing, which is great, but, sadly, I don't think they stand a chance.
About Goodwin, I've not heard anyone object to anything he's said, apart from the Rishi Sunak being British quote. Whenever I've heard him speak, he seems intelligent and thoughtful, and it's sad that all people can do is go on. And on. about the RS thing.

I'm really missing the laugh emoji reaction right now.

Of course, laughs turn to tears.
Imagine you're a Green with a real belief in conservation, a managed move to Net Zero. Chances are you're centre left, but not a radical lefty.
Then, one day your beloved party becomes a home to a wide range of cranks who don't mention the environment once, Gaza/trans/Omnicause 24/7.
And a vehicle or receptacle for the types of entryists that plagued Labour in 2017-19, with side order of political Islam.
All facilitated by a man who doesn't have a single environmental or conservation-minded bone in his body, who's CV reads actor to hypnotherapist with dodgy claims to LD activist to your leader.
Ending up with candidates like Hannah Spencer, who on the one hand raises relevant issues like rampant tool theft, but has historically supported Defund The Police.

Agreed and agreed.

ZP speaks well but his policies and beliefs are 100% lunacy and he appears unbothered by the environmental crisis we are facing.

ZP seems determined to court the radical Islamists and happy to throw his Jewish brothers under the bus for a bash at power (this is why I remain unconvinced at the perceived worthiness of his claimed reasons for his name change) but somehow fails to realise that once he has helped them to power, he will be the first to be disposed of. Just like Iran.

NF comes across like a greasy little man but is rooted in real life, understands business as well and politics and understands the national threat of radical Islam.

The Sunak thing mostly comes from that viral clip of Fraser Nelson on Triggernometry, arguing with Konstantin Kisin.

FN: Well of course Rishi Sunak is British
KK: But he's a brown Hindu!

But the longer conversation they had was more interesting than the clip. Fraser is one of those old-fashioned Europhile pro-immigration Tories, but for him it's not just ideological but personal. His wife is Swedish. He feels strongly that his children are British, though having grown up in London they might lack much of his Scottishness. I think he thinks of national identity as a quite fluid thing.

Kisin, a Russian Jew who's made the UK his adopted home, doesn't see himself as British. He's not an ethnonationalist, but I think he would agree there's more to nationality than a piece of paper.

It just illustrates that these things can get quite fuzzy at the edges, and it depends a lot on where you're coming from.

Most of will know people who, let's say, came over from Jamaica at age 8 and are completely integrated. And then you get Shamima Begum type cases of people who were born here and are obviously not at all integrated.

Rishi Sunak is a Brit of proud Indian heritage, he seems to be culturally far more British than Indian, if there's a criticism to be made of Sunak it's not whether he's "English" in an ethnic sense but that he's a global finance guy who never understood the people who were voting Conservative.

We're not the Soviet Union, where every citizen had their ethnicity on their ID card. It's good that we can be fuzzy at the edges.

Conman Vs Conman.

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction,

A metaphor intended to express,

A man a-kin to all the universe
(Defoe)

It's also interesting that Kisin says he himself isn't English, he's a Russian immigrant. But "Russian" arguably isn't an ethnicity either. Or at least it's MUCH more complicated than that.

It's possible for a word to mean more than one things. Anglo-Saxon could refer to a time period, a language, or an ethnicity. Likewise English has always been most commonly used (in England) to mean a part of the country that's culturally distinct from the other parts. You could always use it to mean an ethnicity but I would argue that's not how it's been used in this country. It was always more common to use "English" to describe something ancestral in America than it was here. (Even for Rudyard Kipling who did talk about "Englishman" as a race tended to define it most in terms of culture-boarding schools,cricket etc. All of which ironically Sunak falls right in the middle of. I don't want to twist Kipling to suite my own views. He was arguing the opposite. But it's interesting that the strongest impression of Englishness he left behind isn't something limited to one ethnicity.)

I think Kissins.coming from a more transatlantic way of thinking about the word (this president or that have English heritage. Meaning blood). I also think he slightly recoiled at the idea of his son being "English" on a personal level which was interesting. Possibly he doesn't want him to put milk in his tea not jam. And he can raise his child how he likes. But I think both men in that conversation had quite personal reasons for taking the stance they did.

I think there may be some confusion here. From what I gather, Kisin considers himself a Russian-Brit, but not English. He may very well have this attitude to his kids. Who may totally disagree with him and consider themselves very English.
Ditto Sunak, he's called himself Hindu/Indian-British. Maybe his kids too. Whom like Kisin's kids may say they're English.
Of course, this wasn't even a talking point, other than the BNP, when we were 95% British by absolute ethnicity or naturalized/born in Britain to foreign parents (like me).
Pretty much up until the 90s.
At that point, political correctness took off, and the left's narrative on anti racism, colonial sins, imperial crimes, to ally to the growing impeding of Brits, more specifically the English, having to couch proud displays of ethnicity very carefully, ideally not at all.
Now, we have 2m Boriswave in 3 years, many potentially naturalized at the time of the next GE. These people automatically become English? Really?

Kisin, a Russian Jew

I've heard Kisin describe himself as an Orthodox Christian

Naturalised isn't the same as a citizen with voting rights anyway
I lived in the Netherlands for a while and had a residence permit and spoke the language. I couldn't vote and would never have considered myself "Dutch" even though of course I respected the rules etc. whereas one of my friends child's was born and raised there and he is undeniably "Dutch" rather than English. In thousands of undeniable ways. So I think it's more than a piece of paper or living somewhere. Bit it's not blood either. Culture is more real to me than ethnicity in that case.

I also knew a guy from the French Carribean (I think it was the Carribean) who was white but spoke with a Carribean accent and was culturally way more Carribean than French. So it goes both ways. It was funny though because he sounded nothing like how he looked. Probably not politically correct to say that. Though now the people getting the most anal about it are on the right so it's gone full circle.

I also heard him say he was born in Uzbekistan, although his Wiki page says Moscow

He may well be. Ethnicity and religion don't always coincide over there, and neither community is very observant.

The clip on Triggernometry was about Englishness, not Britishness. Kisin was saying Sunak can't be English (ethnicity) but can be British (nationality).

Kisin also got into a spat with Douglas Alexander on QT last week about the same point and DA was intent on making Kisin out to be racist because he had referred to Sunak as 'brown'. Surely when talking about ethnicity it's ok to mention these things and shouldn't be used to score points?

It's not racist to say someone's brown. It could be considered racist to say someone can't be English/Russian/whatever is they are brown/Jewish whatever.

For example, there are people in Russia who see Russian as an ethnicity but those people are also not the sort to say that people of Jewish heritage can be Russian. (They are usually not very nice people). So it is a bit unusual that Kissin refers to himself as ethnically "Russian" and "of Jewish heritage" at different times. It's not bad. It probably best describes his own identity and his own sense of his heritage. And that's allowed to be complicated because identity and heritage often is so good for him. But it's arrogant at best (racist at worst) that he is so sure of his ability to offer pronouncements on other people's Englishness. It also opens a can of worms because I have Jewish grandparents on one side and friends and family who are Jewish. I would never have not thought of myself or them as not English. But if Kissin is arguing a brown Hindu can't be English then other people will (and do) argue Jews aren't really English. Or for that matter French Hugeonots like Farage. Or Catholics. It's a massive can of worms he's opening for other people whole retaining the right to define himself however he likes. Hmmm.

I always find it weird when people act as if mentioning skin colour is bad. It's just an observable fact like height, eye colour etc. If you're implying talking about that is bad, surely that's the racist act? People can't change their skin colour (well not easily Rachel Dolezal I suppose tried) and acting as if it's some weird unmentionable thing rather than just an observable fact like many other things (sex, height, hair colour, eye colour) seems much more racist to me.

If you don't think that any particular skin colour is bad (or good) then surely you should be happy to just say 'oh yes, so and so has X colour skin'. I also think it doesn't help children because children do notice skin colour and mention it.

I guess that's my point though. He can be complicated. His heritage and ethnicity and the religion he practices can form part of the complicated mosaic of who he is.

But that's true of pretty much everybody. Including English people. He doesn't have the right to look in from the outside and make very simplistic statements about what other people are/are not.

For me, it's more the people who in 2020 were saying "I don't see colour, saying I don't see colour doesn't make me a racist" are now the exact same people saying Sunak can't be English because he's brown. I guess they got their sight back? And yes, there's a huge amount of double think and purity spiralling on the left. But people like Kissin do sort of prove their point more than I would like.

Kisin also got into a spat with Douglas Alexander on QT last week about the same point and DA was intent on making Kisin out to be racist because he had referred to Sunak as 'brown'. Surely when talking about ethnicity it's ok to mention these things and shouldn't be used to score points?
yes DA came across as a bit of a twat TBH

Kisin will also have, maybe at the back of his mind, the distinction between rossiyskiy (belonging to the multiethnic Russian state) and russkiy (ethnically Russian) which is sort of like the British/English distinction.

Soviet era ID cards used to mark "nationality" (ethnicity), so your ID card would also say if your ethnic identity was Russian, Armenian, Jewish, Buryat or whatever. They've dropped that from the current ID cards, but anyone Kisin's age or older will remember it. It got complicated with children from mixed-ethnicity families, or disfavoured groups like Jews fudging their ethnicity.

If anyone is in the mood for a deep dive on Soviet nationalities policy, Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire is a fascinating read.

Personally I'm much happier with a fuzzy culture of getting along than with the hard categories that the Soviets had, or that American identity politics is reaching by a different route.

The bigger grey area is the children of migrants, those born in this country. That includes me. So, when the country was still 95% ethnically English, it just wasn't an issue. Me born to European migrants who came here after the war, Kisin coming here in 1995, having kids.
This is where I differ from Goodwin and his civ-nat to ethno-nat hot take. Even though I've kinda moved to being happy to consider myself more British than English, I totally have no issues with my best friends having kids who consider themselves English kids than (Moroccan/Irish-)British kids (bit of a mouthful).
I believe this stems from a situation which may be wholly unique to England/Britain.
In recent decades, post war into the 60s and onwards, polite society demanded less and less overt displays of English/ness, associated directly with the sins of British Empire. This occurs in no other country that ran an empire, whether France, US, China, Turkey etc. Noone in those countries tell their citizens to keep proud ethic displays to a minimum. Only England. Exaggerated even further with proud ebullient displays of Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism. Just not England. Only in England is the national ethnicity discouraged.
Now, when England was 95% ethnically English with a small percentage of non English and the kids of non English making up the 5%, this was tolerable, English/ness was still interwoven into society, those 5% of migrants and their kids on the whole integrated and were Brits by passport, and English in so many ways by integration and building a better country. But there was no real belief my dad from Poland despite becoming English in so many cultural ways, was ever English.
And society ticked along ok, migrants incl Hugenot Jews, Irish, WW2 cohort, Windrush, Idi Amin refugees, almost to a man and woman fully integrated.
Why the Tebbit "cricket test" debacle and BNP toxic narrative never took off.
But as that 5% migrant cohort became 25-30% over 30 years, critically 2m Boriswave in 3 years, and society is frayed, and English/ness is less of a thing thru pure numbers, now I'm to simply wave thru 2m new migrants in 5 years as English?
This is not a white replacement argument I'm making, it could be 30% Anglophone nations settling here, and I'd still raise the same points.
To go from 95% ethnic English, where English/ness became a thing to never highlight or express pride in, was a tolerable situation. We've never been a big flag waving nation, had no bloody revolution to define ourselves. As I grew up, that was absolutely fine.
But now, it's even more of a sin to express your Englishness, now the country is 25-30% migrant, and those that are ethnically English are speaking up, saying they won't bury proud declarations of their Englishness, that migrants coming here can never be ethnically English.

It's also important to remember that hardcore ethnonationalism in the UK is really fringe, though it gets amplified on X. This is why groups like the BNP have been defunct for years, and the BNP's offshoots (Patriotic Alternative, Homeland) only get smaller and implode quicker.

It suits people on the left to pretend that there's no difference between someone like Goodwin - who wants lower levels of immigration, better integration of those already here, and deporting criminals - and a lunatic like Steve Laws, who really does want to deport all black and brown people.

I'm probably a bit more liberal on immigration than Goodwin is, but his views aren't really outside the mainstream of public opinion. They are outside the mainstream of what the commentariat considers acceptable, hence the attempts to portray him as next door to being a fascist, which he certainly isn't.