New Endings

How Starmer Lost Gorton and Denton

Green candidate Hannah Spencer won the Gorton and Denton by-election in a major defeat to governing Labour. Photo credit: Temilade Adelaja

Britain’s Labour Prime Minister is an accidental genius. Having won a comprehensive election victory in 2024 for not being a disturbed, sociopathic Tory leader, Sir Keir Starmer is now engineering his party into a position of electoral defeat and obituary-laden oblivion. Sclerotic, static, inert, incapable, his Labour Party government risks suffering a most deserved annihilation at the next general election. What they will be replaced with remains the fat, troubling question.

Predictions in politics are always hazardous, and there is nothing to say that Starmer will not gasp across the finishing line when the time comes, should the Labour Party permit him to do so. But there is something to be said about losing the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, regarded as the 38^th safest in the 2024 election not only to the winner, a Green Party candidate, but outmatched by the populist, anti-immigration Reform UK Party. In terms of the by-election figures, Hannah Spencer from the Greens won 14,980 votes (40.7% of the total), with Reform UK gathering 28.7% of the vote with 10,578. Labour limped through to third place with 9,364 votes. The swing against Labour since 2024 was a goggling 25%.

Spencer’s background is worth noting, suggesting a savvy tilt from the Greens. Far from being a chic champagne swilling eco-warrior from urban privilege and trendy sympathies, she trained for blue collar work in a traditional Labour seat. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a politician,” she stated. “I am a plumber. I am no different to every single person here in this constituency. I work hard. That is what we do.”

The Greens leader Zack Polanski was admirable in praising Spencer’s individual qualities. She was, he remarked, “really authentic”, “just a woman who got into politics a little bit later, so she’d had real jobs.” But the individual personality of a candidate is not necessarily a significant factor before the cruel, mechanistic forces of political economy. This is not to say that voters are distant or cerebrally soft, merely that most are never politically engaged in the way the cadres of expert commentators, party strategists and bumblers suggest they are. Many do not so much vote for a standing figure as much as against others. (Starmer should know better than most.) They are picked for being different from the dunghill that preceded them.

The British PM presented a target of vulnerability in the Gorton and Denton campaign. His poll ratings are a caricature of horror and were not helped by the ongoing revelations from the Jeffrey Epstein files that deeply implicated his choice of ambassador to Washington, Lord Peter Mandelson. Mandelson, who was appointed despite Starmer’s knowledge of the Labour grandee’s links to the late convicted paedophile, sex trafficker and financier, is currently being investigated by the European Anti-Fraud Office and the Metropolitan Police for disclosing confidential government information to Epstein.

Starmer is also facing rumblings of a challenge within his own party. Labour’s chances were not improved by his blocking of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, another potential contender for the Labour leadership, from standing in the seat. The by-election campaign was also one of desperation, leading to accusations by Polanski that Labour’s approach had debased politics, diplomacy and democracy.

There is also no indication that Starmer is reflecting about his own position and role in the debacle, revealing, yet again, a near absence of political judgment. In a muddled letter to his MPs following the defeat, he vented his spleen at the “divisive, sectarian” politics that the Greens had allegedly taken from George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain. These were “not the harmless environmentalists they pretend to be”. They had such “extreme policies like legalising all drugs and pulling out of NATO that most voters strongly reject”.

Yet, despite not being so harmless, they were harmless enough not to pose a national threat, despite “splitting the progressive vote so that Reform come through the middle.” The Greens were unable to mount a general election campaign, as “they simply do not have the resources, the activist base or the local knowledge to replicate this victory across the country.”

Nothing to worry about then, except that there is. The unions are certainly prodding Labour to acknowledge the electoral reality and the collapse of their vote. “Workers and families are hurting,” stated Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. “We have a cost of living crisis largely being ignored and investment in jobs for the here-and-now being blocked by a Treasury that doesn’t seem to understand the basics of what is needed to build Britain.”

UNISON general secretary Andrea Egan offered a simple explanation for the Greens victory: “Many traditional supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully abandoned.” If the Starmer government wished to survive, it needed, as a matter of urgency, “to stand up for workers and defend our fundamental values.”

To date, the Labour strategy has been one of holding the vote against the dark attractions of Reform UK. Foolishly, the Greens were neglected as a relevant force from the progressive left. Starmer now finds himself adopting the language of extremes, with him the sober, reliable figure in the political centre always ready to, as he periodically likes to state, roll up his sleeves to fix a problem. In assailing the Greens and Reform UK as the “extremes of the left” and “extremes of the right”, the PM is sailing dangerously close into waters the 2016 US Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton found herself when she labelled half of Donald J. Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables”. This approach is a perfect recipe to make you unelectable.

The result in Gorton and Denton was appropriate punishment for Starmer’s distant, estranged, incapable leadership, a government that has seemingly not governed where it needed to, and now facing a calamitous reckoning. There is still time, though not much. While by-elections are not necessarily good indicators of future trends, both the Greens and Reform will be glorying in the moment and relishing their chances in other seats. The Labour-Conservative duopoly is collapsing.