Parliamentary Democracy Is Under Threat After Gorton & Denton, But Not For The Reasons You Think

The epithet “they are all as bad as each other” has increasingly become a mantra up and down the country, much to the dismay of canvassers and candidates alike. Green, Tory, Labour, and Reform voters may individually have starkly disparate grievances, but most seem to feel that politics and politicians don’t seem to work for them. If one word were to sum up the national mood, it would undoubtedly be apathy. It is apathy that has led both major political parties to reach their lowest polling numbers in decades, it is apathy that has led to Gorton and Denton a once Labour safe seat having the party finish in third, and it is apathy, together with an increasing appetite for radicals on both flanks, that has culminated in one of the largest challenges to the two-party system since the collapse of the Liberals in the 1920s.    

It would be churlish to blame the green triumph on a single factor. The cost of living, the fear of reform, and Gaza have all played significant roles. Nigel Farage raised observations of family voting as a factor, although the scale of the green swing meant it was unlikely to have been decisive. But it was arguably voter turnout, or more accurately the lack of it, that delivered Hannah Spencer to Westminster with an enviable majority, contrary to pre-election statistics which had the Greens, Labour, and reform barely a hair apart. The experts, it seems, have been proved wrong once again.

Don't get me wrong, the polls have always been faulty. The outcomes of the 1992 elections and the 2015 elections defied the forecasts of even the brightest of the Westminster commentariat. What is so striking about Gorton and Denton, however, is how few people managed to show up. Out of an electorate of 77,000, only 14,000 voted for the winning candidate, and only 36,000  voted at all.  This presents a much larger challenge on a different front to labour. As opposed to just having to worry about disaffected voters switching parties, Labour has to now worry about once loyal voters simply not bothering to turn up at all. 

Third parties such as the Greens and Reform, who finished first and second place in Gorton and Denton, pose their own unique challenges, veering from the bizarre and the eccentric to the downright dangerous. 

Take Reform. Their choice in Gorton and Denton, Matthew Goodwin once upon a time wrote an article in the Guardian accusing UKIP, then led at the time by Nigel Farage, of sharing “more with the far right than it admits”. Thirteen years later, now a member of a party he would have once decried with similar terms, he has become one of its most incendiary members. From questions about the Englishness of ethnic minority Britons, to his declaration that genetics would prove the “inherent differences” between “groups”, Goodwin's rhetoric went so far as to raise alarm bells among some of reform's most stalwart supporters.

Though losing the constituency by over 4,000 votes, it isn’t all doom and gloom for reform. The parties’ showing still saw them double their votes from 2024. Nevertheless As  Sir John Curtice points out, Reform’s low support with ethnic minority voters (ethnic minorities make up over 40% of the constituency), meant that winning Gorton and Denton was always going to be a tall order. If one were to additionally take into account Goodwin's sulphurous views around race and ‘Englishness’, it would not be entirely ridiculous to speculate that, by choosing Goodwin, Farage appeared to be doing away with a future rival as opposed to attempting to expand Reform's ranks in parliament.

The Greens, ironically, like Matthew Goodwin, too, seem to have drastically changed their tune. When asked by journalists from The Times about their concerns in Gorton and Denton, hardly any green voters raised the environment. Under Zack Polanski, the politics of envy and communal divides seemed to take precedence, upheld by a fragile alliance between hard-left progressives and conservative Muslims. 

It's fair to say that Hannah Spencer's campaign was an exercise in palpable incoherence. Scattered statements about the power of ‘hope” in campaign literature and victory speeches sat rather awkwardly with the rest of her campaign. Putting aside a litany of outrageous statements made by Spencer, such as a retort at a BBC debate held prior to the by-election in which she blamed the Manchester Arena bombing on people like Matthew Goodwin, campaign material targeted at ethnic minorities raised further eyebrows. Messaging often appeared to have more on far-away conflicts than economic concerns. One leaflet written in Urdu said that Labour must be ‘punished’ for Gaza, while a video pictured Keir Starmer with Indian Prime Minister  Modi in a not-so-subtle attempt to play to grievances around the India-Pakistan conflict. Far from bringing communities together, the Greens fanned the flames of sectarianism.

The Green Party leadership, suffice to say, fares little better. Deputy leader Mothin Ali praised the October 7th massacre by odiously framing it as the right of “indigenous people to fight back” after the worst attack on jews since the Holocaust. Meanwhile, their new spin doctor outright denied that sexual violence occurred on October 7th altogether. For Polanski's Greens, comments that would have been considered career-ending in any sane society have now become trivial. 

Nevertheless, Polanski's loose alliance has begun to wane with some voters. One green voter who spoke to the Telegraph said that he would have ‘never’ voted Green had he known about the Greens' drug policy, which would legalise substances like crack cocaine, heroin, and the date rape drug GHB. If and when the Greens collapse is an open question, though its seeds appear to have already been sown.

For the conservatives, this by-election poses an interesting dilemma. For one thing, their poor showing of 1.9% in the by-election confirmed that in some constituencies, their reach is simply not where it once was. Alternatively, however, new frontiers are at play. The Labour government's unpopularity, in tandem with Reforms attempt to walk an unviable tightrope, on the one hand trying to please the bond markets about its commitments to the OBR, and attempting to keep its base in line by embracing MAGA-style rhetoric, on the other  will create a chasm in British politics that the Tories could come to occupy. With the Tories only 4 points behind Reform in a recent YouGov poll, it is not hard to imagine a road for another Conservative government in 2029.

For Labour, the implications could not be worse. Since the last general election Labour quietly grinned at the prospect of the Tories being supplanted. Keir Starmer even gleefully remarked, “The Tories, do you remember them?” at last year's Labour party conference. Only 5 months on, Labour party insiders have privately acknowledged the risk of the Green swing in Gorton and Denton being replicated around the country, with seats like Tottenham held by Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy up for grabs. It is Kemi Badenoch, not Keir Starmer,  who seems to have had the last laugh.

If the Gorton and Denton by-election were to carry a single message for Westminster, it is this: parliamentary democracy is rendered hollow when vast swathes of the country find casting a ballot an act of folly. If the major parties ignore this, the existing void will sooner or later become occupied with charlatans with little regard for the norms, standards, and conventions of politics that have been taken for granted and now prove evermore salient.

Image: Flickr/Ian Pattinson

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