The priority is stopping the far right
FEBRUARY 26, 2026
Sally Hayes reports from Gorton and Denton on today’s crucial by-election.
For the past three weeks, the area I live in has been the centre of a much-reported and discussed by-election in Gorton and Denton. I don’t think there is a constituent who is unaware of it. Now writing as voters go to the polls, there is still real doubt as to the outcome and huge numbers of people who are either not saying or not voting, perhaps 30%.
The risks facing us are extreme. We are in danger of a far right Reform MP being elected through a combination of people who have been treated with contempt for years, people who will vote with their feet, and the prospect of a large Green and a smaller but significant Labour vote. And this Reform candidate is the high profile extreme far right Matt Goodwin, a pundit from GB News, supported by the far right extremists who have been a feature of the campaign.
The permitted ‘retirement’ of the disgraced Labour Andrew Gwynne MP which led to the vacancy, together with the subsequent blocking of Andy Burnham personally by Keir Starmer, would surely in itself have caused many local Labour voters to reject a party where their MP showed the depth of his and others’ contempt for their constituents, and the leadership nationally have continued to do so.
This is an area where the Labour majority at the last election was over13,000 and roots in the labour movement run deep, but it is also one with high levels of poverty and election turnout last time was low at 47%. We have seen the complacency and contempt shown towards local people by some of the councillors within Tameside Council covering Denton along with their MP, which was exposed on their “Trigger me Timbers” WhatsApp group. Six Labour councillors in Greater Manchester were suspended over offensive messages, which allegedly included racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, hate speech and even death threats towards constituents. It was genuinely shocking.
In the Manchester wards where I live, the demographics are different. The Labour Group backed moving several wards, as proposed by the electoral boundaries commission, into a newly created constituency with boundaries that no longer made any sense. This was partly to ensure that left Labour branches were split off from Manchester Central and Gorton constituencies.
Longsight ward had previously caused the biggest upset in Manchester Labour by narrowly voting in Shahbaz Sarwar, a Workers’ Party candidate, in an area with a high Muslim population. This was in a ward dominated for many years by a small group which rarely met as a Labour branch and conducted its real business behind closed doors.
I personally left the Labour Party a year ago after finally despairing that the thousands of people on the left who built the Party and elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be drawn back into it again, and when the appalling treachery of the right finally became too multi-faceted and too grave for it to be possible to continue to work for internal change, in my view. It was not an easy choice and the absence of a truly labour movement alternative continues. Building a left within the Party now appears to be such a long, protracted and doomed option set against the scale and urgency of the task. The future creation of a left labour movement party attracting mass support and with union affiliation remains a goal we are all aiming for, however we build it. Conversations between friends and comrades in our community centres on the big question: are Labour really ahead in seeing off Reform?
But is that the case? Young people, students, climate change activists and thousands more have been drawn to the Green Party in this vacuum. While personally not a member, I recognise they have brought together hundreds of activists into a well organised campaign with a real chance of winning the seat. It is by no means a shoo-in, but the parts of the constituency with high levels of professionals, students and Muslim voters are a large part of the electorate and there is also Green support across the rest of the constituency.
Labour has the history, the data, and retains loyalty for some, and they have brought in Andy Burnham to ensure he is seen backing the campaign, along with London Mayor Sadiq Khan. This week, Keir Starmer also visited.
Reform have been largely absent other than through mailouts. Goodwin has used GB News and some far right heavies on occasion but has otherwise been invisible, other than to his own supporters, even failing to appear at local hustings. With no high-profile media coverage and a lot of enthusiasm from supporters coming from Sheffield, Liverpool and further afield, Greens have saturated the area with leaflets, door knocking, a bright, personable, local candidate and tons of energy.
Polling will end today. But the ramifications of this election will be felt locally and pundits will extrapolate endlessly. For most of us the issue is what does it mean to have a united front against the far right? Labour is almost certainly running third, but continue to generate material showing they are beating the Greens, based on a discredited survey of 51 people before the by-election was even announced.
Huffington Post reports: “Labour is embroiled in a dirty tricks row over a campaign leaflet featuring a ‘fictitious’ tactical voting company. It says: ‘The Tactical Choice says Vote Labour. Based on a new prediction made in the last 24 hours we are recommending voting Labour.’ However, no organisation called ‘Tactical Choice’ appears to exist. The offending literature has been put through voters’ doors on the eve of Thursday’s crunch Gorton and Denton by-election.”
“Bookies make the Greens odds-on favourites, followed by Reform and then Labour,” says the report, adding, “ Two real tactical voting organisations – Tactical.Vote and StopTheTories.Vote – have already recommended voters back the Greens to stop Reform winning.”
In 2017, a friend in the Green Party at the time persuaded his local party to not stand a candidate against a left Labour candidate. The result was that the Labour candidate won by 600 votes. He joined the Labour Party in that period. In the following election that agreement was not continued and the Labour MP lost by a similar number of votes to the Tories. The friend subsequently was suspended by the Labour party for being too close to the Greens and after no progress in appealing his suspension he left the Party. Right now, maintaining the position of the Starmer cabal has clearly been shown here to be more important than the damage being done to us by the election of the far right.
Sally Hayes is a local activist and voter in the Gorton Denton by-election.
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Olivia Barber
Left Foot Forward
'There is only one way we will defeat Reform: together.'
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has thrown his support behind the Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer in the Gorton and Denton by-election this week.
Voters in the Greater Manchester seat will go to the polls this Thursday 26 February.
Corbyn has joined fellow Your Party co-founder Zarah Sultana in backing the Greens as a way of defeating Reform UK’s candidate Matt Goodwin.
In a post on X on Sunday, Corbyn wrote: “There is only one way we will defeat Reform: together. That’s why I’m backing the Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election.
“We are a mass movement of all ages, backgrounds and faiths — united in a belief that things can, and will, change.”
An Omnisis poll carried out last week put the Greens on 33%, Reform on 29% and Labour on 26% in the by-election.
It has, however, been criticised for its small sample size. The survey polled 452 voters, but excluding undecideds, only had 265 respondents.
The Greens also remain the bookmakers’ favourite to win the contest.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
The Greens' by-election candidate speaks to Left Foot Forward about why Parliament needs more working class MPs and her mission to restore trust in politics
Hannah Spencer, a working class plumber and the Green Party candidate in Gorton and Denton, says “we need more people who do jobs like mine and from backgrounds like mine” in Parliament.
In an interview with Left Foot Forward ahead of the Gorton and Denton by-election next Thursday, Spencer said that the public is used to “stuffy” people from “the elite and establishment” representing them.
However, she said that if she is elected as the Greens’ first MP in the North of England, as a woman with a trade and who is working class, it “will show absolutely everybody that there is a place in politics for them and I think that will be how we start to change politics”.
Spencer recounts how one voter said to her, “He said, ‘I never thought anyone like you could do that,” she said she responded: “anyone like you as well, it’s not just me, it’s everybody”.
Misinformation and restoring trust
Spencer wants to help restore people’s trust in politics by being “honest with people about what we can and can’t do together. We’re not out there selling people this impossible dream”.
Despite prioritising honesty, Spencer says that during the campaign a fair amount of “misinformation” has been circulating about her and is affecting who people decide to vote for.
She says rumours have spread in Facebook groups claiming that she lives in a £3 million gated community house with her multimillionaire husband, who is a chief executive Astrazeneca.
“None of those things are true,” she adds.
Spencer says that “when things are presented to people in a really believable way, that’s affecting their decisions and it’s a really alarming shift in democracy how rampant that misinformation is spreading”.
‘Money laundering takeaways’
The Telegraph published an article saying that Spencer had once posted a comment online saying how glad she was to be moving out of Levenshulme, which is in Gorton and Denton, due to it being full of “money laundering takeaways”.
Labour produced a video saying that her comments were “dogwhistle” and that the Greens are against the community.
The Green candidate, who originally hails from Bolton, said she is happy to be held accountable for her comments and that she has been open about having lived a challenging period of her life in the constituency.
Spencer went on to say that “There is nothing wrong with aspiration, but aspiration to leave an area is something we’ve all been made to feel.”
She said that people end up having to leave their communities, where they have roots, because they’re not being invested in.
“Life expectancy is the starkest thing, like moving to a different postcode will add years to your life, and I don’t want that for me and I certainly don’t want that for anyone else,” she said.
Reform’s claims about Gorton and Denton
During his campaign, the Reform candidate and GB News presenter, Matt Goodwin, has complained about anti-social behaviour in Gorton and Denton and accused politicians of allowing the area to fall into a state of “managed decline”.
Goodwin also claimed he’d seen children who should have been at school out in the street while campaigning.
Spencer noted that Gorton and Denton has some of the highest child poverty rates in England and Wales, with 12,100 children in the constituency living in poverty.
The Green candidate said she visited a youth centre called HideOut yesterday, which runs activities and provides opportunities to young people.
Spencer said that children are growing up “in really difficult circumstances” and in poverty, and slammed Reform for wanting to reinstate the two child benefit limit so they can reduce the cost of a pint by 5p.
She said of Reform, “They’re not at all interested or bothered about the life chances and circumstances of kids in our constituency, because they’re not coming up with solutions to make life better.”
She said: “We can all have a moan about things, but I’m actually out here trying to come up with ways to fix things.”
Spencer’s pledges to Gorton and Denton
If elected next Thursday, Spencer says she will hold Labour to account on nationalising public services, and better access to the NHS, including free prescriptions, dentistry, eye care and hearing aids.
With her plumber hat on, she wants to focus on insulating people’s homes properly due to help reduce people’s bills and help the climate.
The Greens are currently the bookmakers’ favourite to win the by-election, with Reform second and Labour third.
Asked whether it was really fair to say Labour is out of the running in this by-election, as the Greens have claimed, Spencer said: “It was clear from what people were saying on the doorstep from the outset, we weren’t having to do much convincing.”
She added that “People were sort of coming up to tell us that they couldn’t vote Labour again.”
Left Foot Forward has contacted Labour’s candidate Angeliki Stogia to request an interview.
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