4 hours ago
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The Gorton and Denton byelection produced Labour’s most feared outcome – the Greens winning and potentially displacing it as the choice of anti-Reform voters. This risk was signposted for months. It is just the latest of the unintended consequences produced by this government: first, a manifesto commitment to not raise taxes that has led to constant U-turns on spending, then a clampdown on immigration that is creating shortages of medical staff, and now an attempt to stop Andy Burnham from challenging Keir Starmer that has super-charged an insurgent Green party.
Clear though the risk was, Labour simply refused to acknowledge it. Until very recently, No 10 strategy, as defined by Morgan McSweeney, was built around neglecting, even insulting, progressive voters, and seeking to win back defections to Reform. Come the next general election, so the argument went, progressives would sheepishly have to back Labour, just as leftwing voters in France got behind Emmanuel Macron when push came to shove.
This strategy relied on setting Reform UK up as a bogeyman and hoping to assemble a “republican front” of voters on the centre and left against it come election day. If voters on the left inevitably came home, then Labour could concentrate instead on “hero voters”: older, more socially conservative residents of “red wall” constituencies in the north of England and the Midlands. Hence, months of posturing against progressive causes and an immigration policy more draconian than anything the past Conservative government had put forward.
That plan has been shattered by the voters of Gorton and Denton. They chose not to get behind Labour when faced with the hardline populism of Matthew Goodwin, the Reform candidate. They backed the Greens instead. Even worse, Reform did at least show they could unify the right – albeit in a constituency where the Conservatives had performed poorly in 2024. Labour ended up with a split left in which it was the smaller party. Just as in the Caerphilly Senedd byelection last year, it had lost its progressive vote to a rival on its left.
McSweeney was half right in the end. Reform’s illiberalism does inspire people to get out and vote against it. As Reform collects an ever more unwieldy set of dubious electoral propositions – banning permanent residence for immigrants, removing renters’ rights, ending the “unregulated sexual economy” – it resembles the game Buckaroo. Each extra bizarre policy makes the electoral donkey ever more likely to kick it off. Yes, Reform could win the 2029 general election, but it seems equally likely that the public will align against it.
But align with whom? The obvious answer to that question should be Britain’s largest progressive party. But the apparent holder of that role, Labour, has been reluctant to accept it. Rather than make peace with an urban voting base of younger graduates in professional jobs, poorer service sector workers and minority ethnic communities, Labour seems to have been pining for the demographic that voted for it in the 1970s – older, manual workers in small towns. But that group was, for good or ill, lost to Labour decades ago. Worse, Labour has tried to win them back by rhetorically giving its new voters a good kicking.
Nostalgia-fuelled electoral strategies don’t work. And the Greens have been much more aggressively effective at finding a new voter base. Far from their old base of environmentalists and nimbies, they have decided to claim Labour’s as their own. And they have been able to do so not just because they have found charismatic leadership in Zack Polanski, and with Gorton and Denton’s winner, Hannah Spencer; they have also succeeded because Labour upset the general public and its own voters to such an extent that a huge political gap opened up for the Greens to walk into.
Labour’s basic electoral problem comes from the fact that left-leaning voters are choosing to vote against rather than for parties. And progressives aren’t just voting against Reform, they are now actively voting against Labour.
