The Gorton and Denton by-election is not just a judgement on who will run the constituency. It sounds the death knell on an entire political strategy.
You could almost feel the blood draining from the face of Labour Party officials as the announcement came in. The party didn’t even come second. It was battered into third place, with 9,364 votes to Reform’s 10,578. The Greens soared to an easy victory, with 14,980 votes.
In a typically charmless statement upon learning of his defeat, Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin said: “The progressives were told how to vote. Islamists and woke progressives came together to dominate the constituency.” In fact, the precise opposite was true. The progressive vote split between Labour and the Greens, but it still wasn’t enough to let Reform slip through the middle, as they had hoped.
This is a seismic moment for the Greens and an exquisite moment of disappointment for Reform. They ran a vicious, hateful campaign. Even in the final moments, unable to summon even a hint of grace, Nigel Farage was spreading division and grievance, complaining of “sectarian voting and cheating”. But it is also something else: the final development in the long-running saga of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff.
His government career ended earlier this month, when he left Downing Street over the Peter Mandelson scandal. But his overall electoral approach took longer to die. It finally breathed its last in the early hours of Friday morning, with a Green victory in one of Labour’s oldest, safest seats.
McSweeney’s chief proposition was that Labour had to attract Reform voters and should therefore adopt a series of rabidly anti-immigrant policies. It led Starmer to give a speech warning of an “island of strangers”. It led to obscene policies, including ongoing plans to prevent refugees ever really being able to settle securely in the UK and prolonging the period before immigrants are granted indefinite leave to remain, often into multiple decades.
Each of these interventions have been followed by Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, giving speeches in which she actively sought to be as aggressive and dismissive towards liberals and progressives as possible.
Well now Labour can see what the consequences of these policies are and what happens when you speak with this sort of rhetoric. Progressive voters do not have to stay and support Labour. There are other parties who want them, even if the governing party does not.
This is a very dangerous moment for Labour – even worse than it looks. Our electoral system, first past the post, helps the two main parties by a kind of psychological incentive system. It forces the supporters of minor parties to back a larger party out of fear that they will split the vote and let someone even worse in.
This system benefits those two main parties until it doesn’t. The Conservatives have seen their monopoly on the right shatter, to be and are being replaced by Reform. Now Labour are seeing something similar. Progressive voters are looking for which party can defeat Reform and increasingly they are coming to the conclusion that it isn’t Labour. In the Caerphilly byelection last October, it was Plaid Cymru. Today, it was the Greens.
This is a psychologically decisive development. It convinces voters that other parties can win and therefore reduces the barriers to supporting them. Unless Labour stops the bleeding soon, it could be all over for them.
The blame falls on McSweeney, but there is plenty to go round. Starmer employed him. He chose to make him chief of staff. He adopted his strategy, despite the moral abyss it opened up underneath him and the utter lack of progressive leadership it entailed.
He then blocked Andy Burnham, probably the only Labour figure who could have won this seat, from standing in the by-election because of his own sense of short-term personal self-interest. He risked his own political authority by visiting the constituency this week and spoke of a “battle of values” against “toxic” Reform.
How can that possibly make any sense when Labour has moved more than halfway towards Reform’s policy position? Is there really such a vast distinction between retrospectively changing people’s indefinite-leave-to-remain status while they are undergoing the process and retrospectively repealing their indefinite-leave-to-remain status once they have it? No. Plainly not. Once you adopt Reform policy positions you neutralise your ability to counter them or to motivate your voters by speaking about your own values.
The initial briefings to journalists suggest that, in the end, Labour lost votes everywhere. It lost them in the eastern part of the constituency, which is composed largely of older white working class voters who would be expected to vote Reform, and in the western half of the constituency, composed of South Asian and university-educated voters who were more likely to vote Green. McSweeney’s strategy lies in tattered ruins.
There will now be intense pressure on Starmer, as there should be. But the moment of reckoning today is not just about one man, it is about an entire approach to electoral strategy.
Labour must realise the error of its ways before it is too late. The Greens are still beatable. Their votes are clustered in the big cities. In a general election, voters will be more motivated by how to stop Farage getting into No.10. ButLabour must learn the key lesson: that it can lose votes on the left as well as the right. There is nothing to gain by emulating Reform. But there is everything to lose.
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