News of the Greens’ victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election came at 4:30 a.m., but the losers’ excuses were already prepared. The Labour Party had suffered a typical defeat for incumbents but still run a “positive campaign,” reasoned its deputy leader, Lucy Powell. Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK insisted they had won the “working-class” vote, but had been outdone by “sectarian” “Islamists” and by Muslim men pressuring their wives’ choice.
Some of this was a bit of a stretch. Labour’s supposedly “positive” campaign had prominently accused the Greens of encouraging schoolkids to take heroin. The party also photoshopped a fake tactical-voting organization, alongside poll charts telling voters it was in a “two-horse race” with Reform UK (thus cropping out the Greens, who ultimately won handily, with 40 percent support).
Likewise hard to fathom was the supposed Muslim “sectarian” vote for a white, female candidate for a Green party with a gay, Jewish leader. Pundits on Sky and GB News nonetheless talked up such claims, while also insinuating that Muslims in Manchester simply aren’t working-class, or that Muslim women might have voted for a right-wing, anti-immigrant party if not for undue pressure from their husbands.
The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer won by a more than ten-point margin, in a contest that was less neck and neck than it seemed. Incumbents do often lose by-elections, yet this one was called barely eighteen months into Keir Starmer’s government, and at a moment when his ruling Labour Party’s national-level support has collapsed. It was less an “upset” than a snapshot of the national trend, with Labour and the withered Tories outflanked on either side.
Starmer is drastically unpopular. Much of this attaches to the man himself. While centrist admirers endlessly hark back to his pragmatic “Mr Sensible” branding — today wondering if he is just too decent for voters to accept in an “age of…
Auteur: David Broder
