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.

At the very least Welsh or Scottish first, British second.

When he can produce evidence of his knighthood i'll call him Sir.

I think I'm safe to call him Mr. He just identifies as Sir.

You gave quite a long and preachy non-sequiter in response to a comment about a book you didn't know anything about.

But no, I don't think Marshall, Victorian that she was, or the generations of British kids, or the many British historians throughout the 20th century who credited her with sparking their fascination for British history, would agree that what she wrote was some kind of leftist agenda.

Yes, but if you use the word "English" to refer to all of Britain.

No, i didnt.

I think we are talking a bit at cross purposes...
You said that in the past English people could use the terms English and British almost interchangeably and noone really cared. I was just adding to that to say that, for people in Scotland and Wales etc there already was a bit of a bone of contention there. And people (not you) getting the terms confused tended to spark angry rants from people like my dad.
Just like people in Manchester have a problem at times with the focus on London (also partly why Andy Burnham is popular and why London/Westminster deciding he can't run is controversial). In fact a lot of the defensiveness around it as an identity is positioning it against London/the lanyard wearing classes. Who are themselves often English. London being in England. But not England. And Westminster is in London. But not London.

The centre and periphery is a real thing, and yes, England being so dominant in the UK means English people - and there's usually no ill feeling behind this - just take England as default, and that will annoy those of us who aren't English.

It plays out the same way in England. Londoners often don't realise just how hated London is out there in Angleterre Profonde. And even within London, Sadiq Khan's philosophy of government is basically "fuck the outer boroughs, they don't vote for me anyway".

Burnham is a bit cheeky, because as is often pointed out, he's the man who hates Westminster so much he spent 20 years there and wants to go back. But he's not entirely cheeky - he seems much happier as mayor than he ever was as an MP.

And even within London, Sadiq Khan's philosophy of government is basically "fuck the outer boroughs, they don't vote for me anyway".

There was a AIBU thread recently about whether Sadiq Khan was a good mayor. Quite a few London residents on that thread said that no-one should comment unless they lived in London, as if residents in the rest of the UK had no right to an opinion on the running of the capital city.

The voting was actually more interesting than the thread. Virtually every comment was along the lines of Khan being amazing and anyone who didn't think so was a vile racist. Anyone voicing mild disagreement was shouted down. The final vote was something like 55:45 though. Lots of silent voters, just like IRL

I don't spend much time in London now. So while I'm entitled to an opinion it's probably worth less than the opinion of someone who lives there.

I do love those AIBU threads where the comments and the voting are completely different. Pollsters and political scientists should study them 😀

English people are English and British (and from the UK)

English people calling themselves English and/or British isnt the same as saying English a synonym for British.

It doesn't help that our US cousins struggle to understand the difference

Thank you, you've stated that so much better than I've been able to do.

Not at all, there's a Rob Ford article linked earlier in the thread, Ford is a former academic collaborator of Goodwin's, from before Goodwin scented the possibility of fame beyond the Academy, & has written quite a bit on Goodwin's descent into shady stats & unsubstantiated assertions. He's not the only one.

There's no evidence one way or the other this is tittle tattle. Goodwin certainly can appear to be thin skinned, but that may just be his way. Yet, I can imagine there's a ton of snobbery in academia, especially for the rightist academic, someone working in a backwater compared to Oxbridge etc. We really believe in Goodwin going to the dark side of alt right politics because his ego was bruised as an academic isolated by his peers, and his move to more overt soapbox politicking is payback?
My politics has changed a lot in 10-15 years as the left imposed a culture war socially, why couldn't Goodwin's?

That's a spctacularly odd interpretation of what I wrote, worthy of a Queer Theorist in its departure from the actual content.

I think it depends how long your family has been in this country and how much intermixing has happened. It also depends whether you are talking about ethnically English or culturally English.

I am (ethnically) half Jewish and half English. The Jewish side of my family came here three generations ago. Nevertheless, I would still only consider myself half English. Ethnically, that's what I am. If you look at my Ancestry report, that's what it says.

Don't be so coy, lol. You know there is a spat between Goodwin and what he considers an elite cadre of academics that have not accepted his move from originally centre/centre left to right. With added frisson of a dinner invite that went out to others on a panel discussion but not him. The point is, it's all "he said, she said" tittle tattle. Goodwin views attacks on him as unreliable re his stats from Ford, Portes etc as bad faith, biased by their dislike that an academic could go from centre to right, and that he's victim to jibes that he's spinning narratives and dog whistles etc.
As Goodwin goes thru this contest, this will get more and more coverage.

With added frisson of a dinner invite that went out to others on a panel discussion but not him.

That's a story that's been put about a lot, and it says more about the people putting it about than it does about Goodwin.

Goodwin emailed Alan Rusbridger to ask why his invite got lost in the post, and Rusbridger chose to make that public and mock him for it. The idea seems to be that this low clarse pundit was foolish to believe that he deserved the honour of dinner with national treasures Alan Rusbridger and David Aaronovitch. Wonderfully, the purpose of the debate was to allow Aaro to challenge Goodwin's idea that there is a left-liberal elite.

It only works, of course, if you see Alan Rusbridger as someone to be looked up to. My abiding memory of Rusbridger is that it was on his watch as Guardian editor that Roy Greenslade was allowed to smear rape survivor Mairia Cahill on behalf of Greenslade's allies in the IRA who had covered up the rape. Eventually Rusbridger and Greenslade apologised, with considerable ill grace, then went back to pontificating about media ethics.

Not at all, there's a Rob Ford article linked earlier in the thread, Ford is a former academic collaborator of Goodwin's, from before Goodwin scented the possibility of fame beyond the Academy, & has written quite a bit on Goodwin's descent into shady stats & unsubstantiated assertions. He's not the only one.
Seeing as i haven't got the faintest idea who RF is, that comment has rather less heft than you obviously think it does.

Yes, somebody recently made a comment trying to make a point that far right groups are seen as the second highest risk to our safety while conveniently forgetting to acknowledge which group are the highest risk by some margin.

You're a font of knowledge, re that story about Greenslade.
I seem to vaguely recall that IRA connection.
I think this was the time I realized the media wasn't this fearless purveyor of all things truthful, even the broadsheets.
Re the Goodwin snub, the likes of Aaronovitch involved. I really think they the media gatekeepers don't get how the ground has fallen away from beneath their feet.

It's interesting how many migrants, mixed migrant/British totally get English as an ethnicity, to be celebrated, and British as a nationality.
The only ones who don't are the culture warrior left who both decry the English declaring they're English while so happy for English to be an identity one can simply absorb by osmosis or transmute to, simply by being here.
There is no issue for them in many of the 2m Boriswave who came here 3-4 years ago relentlessly becoming English before the end of the decade.

It's not up to me to defend Goodwin's character. I've met him, but we're not friends or anything. I regularly disagree with him.

Lots of people have issues with him politically, or don't vibe with him because they find him brash and abrasive. That's all perfectly reasonable.

The thing I do keep noticing though is that whenever there's a discussion of his political evolution, none of the pundits ever asks whether he might have a point. They just assume he doesn't have a point, and go on to speculate about his psychology - he's in it for the money, or the fame, or he's so incredibly petty he would change his views out of resentment at being snubbed by the great Alan Rusbridger (who was totally right to snub him).

He says he changed his mind because of things he was observing around him. The critics don't even ask if his observations are wrong, they just ask what motives an intelligent man could have for taking up low-status positions. Why didn't he choose the same high-status option as his old mate Rob Ford, of being a Labour-supporting professor with no opinions incompatible with the Westminster consensus?

I genuinely think the gatekeepers are in such a bubble that they don't even know they can't gatekeep any more. It's a bit like when the editorial board of National Review thought they could gatekeep Trump voters out of the Republican Party.

The murmur over Goodwin from the chattering classes is quite amusing. They always play the man, not the ball.
It's laughable really, he's such a bad man for making the journey to the dark side. Not why he went, but that he went at all.
They truly are gatekeepers, but the gate has been kicked off it's hinges.