Dreamland? (Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty)
“I’m not voting,” the woman says, queuing outside the Levenshulme foodbank. “They all shit on you.” The constituents of Gorton and Denton aren’t grateful for the media attention in a by-election. They live with stagnating wages and rising prices; poor public services and expensive housing; the substitution of culture with culture war. “Things can’t get worse,” a woman tells me at a bus stop, as if there is nothing left to fight for.
Once a safe seat — Labour won 50.8% of the vote 18 months ago — today, such things have evaporated. This by-election was called after its MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned on the grounds of ill health (he is 51). He was previously suspended from Labour for writing in a local MPs WhatsApp group: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you.” As a paradigm of our fracturing democracy, it can’t be bettered.
Polling currently has Labour coming third, and Reform or the Greens winning, because blood will have blood. Last year, Reform took nearby Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by just six votes: and they didn’t have the help of the Greens, who this week are standing Hannah Spencer, a plumber with dancer’s legs, golden trouser suits and soaring, raging cadences. She begins most speeches with references to herself, because this is the era of politics as personal journey. Reform has Matt Goodwin, an academic-turned-broadcaster who vibrates like a tuning fork, trying to project the kind of wracked reasonableness that used to be native to Tory wets. He is helped by the presence of Advance UK, a Christian Nationalist party to the right of Reform, because they make Reform look like humanists.
But this feels less like a by-election than the frenzied, and thoughtless, herald of a coming war: extremists meeting themselves. To mirror it, this is a constituency in two halves. The west — poorer, nearer Manchester, and with a large Muslim population — is a forest of Green Party signs: 30% of this constituency is Muslim. The Muslim Vote campaign (“Peace in Palestine, Equality in the UK”) has endorsed the Greens: social conservatives will vote with trans advocates to punish Labour for Gaza. To the east, white working-class Denton is all Reform-leaning voters and Union Jacks. And here, in the Red Lion pub, unofficial Reform HQ, they sing karaoke with alcohol-fueled nostalgia. They seem to think in ballads, as if these songs were their politics. A large man rises, and sings:
Home is a love that I miss very much
The past has been bottled and labeled with love
But no one is listening.
An aged veteran talks about betrayal as he slowly gets drunk. He won’t let me record him or even take notes. “You know how I feel,” he says, in mitigation; and it’s true that a lot of people here talk as if they have read the same Facebook posts. The talking points — immigration; stupid Net Zero; the death of British culture — are identical. He shows me a photograph taken after a military parade. It is of him, and three friends. One went home from the parade, he says, and hanged himself. His drinking partner, a woman in her sixties, tells me: “We [the white working class] don’t matter.” She says this very deliberately, hitting the table with the side of her hand. She repeats it — “We. Don’t. Matter.” — and every time she says it, she hits the table. Then, in a blink, she is crying. “You don’t know my story. I’ve taken it from men. I’ve brought up three kids. I’ve worked every day. I’m not represented.”
The hustings in St Andrew’s Church, in Levenshulme, are sullen and angry. Ten candidates are here, including a representative from the Communist League, which feels oddly appropriate — if we are re-enacting the Weimar Republic, let’s do it right — and an Asda cashier standing as a Libertarian who behaves like he has won a prize. Only Sir Oink-A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party is missing, as if it is too trivial for him. But it is hard to mock politics when it feels so joyless.
The candidates sit by a sign that says, “Fishers of Men”. The audience leans Green, but there are three Terfs in the front row supporting the Conservative candidate Charlotte Cadden, a former police detective who is skilled and sensible and looks exhausted.
They give opening statements which, consciously or not, evoke home. Green (Hannah Spencer): “I’ve probably fitted a toilet for some of you.” Labour (Angeliki Stogia, interpreting JFK): “I came here from Greece over 13 years ago, and I found a city that did not ask where I came from.” Liberal Democrat (Jackie Pearcey): “This is a great place to live. I’ve lived here long enough I’ve even managed to pay off the mortgage.” The response to Labour is tepid. Between, the “Dear resident, Fuck your bins”, message, the cost of living, and Gaza, her support has shriveled to a nub.
This constituency has common problems but despite this, and possibly because of it, they decide to talk about Jews for 40 minutes. This by-election deals in fairy politics: the theoretical, the fantastical, and the mad. Jew hatred is only one of many harbingers of collapse to choose from: and Gaza is a continent away. The first question: what is the candidate’s response to the rise of antisemitism since October 7, 2023? Cadden, the Tory, replies: “I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community.” Goodwin finds it “utterly depressing”. Spencer blames “divisive politics and politicians who spread hatred and vile stories about individual groups”.
None of them has anything valuable — that is, analytical — to say about antisemitism, other than they don’t like it: they speak to air. But when a man asks: “Do you agree with the majority of genocide scholars that there’s a genocide in Gaza?” that air turns febrile. Jackie Pearcey says it comes, “pretty close”. Spencer says, “We do not need to wait a decade, or however long it takes for a tribunal to tell us that what is happening in front of our eyes is a genocide.” Angeliki Stogia, trying to hold the seat for the governing party, says in her tiny, gentle voice “it is heart-breaking”, and cries.
The SDP candidate Sebastian Moore, a ruddy boy, says, slowly and with genuine curiosity, “I don’t know if our politics has always been like this. Maybe people that are slightly older than me can tell me. What’s happening in the Middle East, whether I term it a genocide or not, has no bearing on the tragedy that is unfolding there. So, no, I’m not going to answer your question.”
There are heckles, particularly towards Goodwin, and, among some candidates, an overarching contempt for each other. Goodwin accuses Spencer of misrepresenting his tax policy; Spencer accuses Goodwin of misrepresenting her drug policy.
Real politics is soporific here – you can sense the room flagging. But the trans question, or rather statement — the Government is transphobic — ignites it again. Spencer says, inevitably, “I think I was here when the Levenshulme Pride took place!” The Liberal Democrat says she believes that, “trans people are people”, though no one is suggesting they aren’t. She is addressing a void. As we stare into it, Goodwin says he must leave: “I’m meeting pub landlords after this, whose businesses are being completely decimated by the current government.” He is laughed at, though I cannot see the joke.
The next day, outside the Green Party HQ, I meet a Muslim who has driven from Birmingham to campaign for the Greens. He says he joined the Party two weeks ago: “it is [the] first time that I’ve actually joined a [political] party.” He has been in the UK for 64 years. But only recently, he says, has he been asked “‘Am I English?’ ‘Am I British?’ ‘Do I belong?’. You know what they’re saying, but they’re not saying it. You not only fear the color part, but you also fear the part that you’re a Muslim and therefore an Islamist or therefore,” he speaks very slowly, and tiredly, “a terrorist. I have six grandchildren. For my grandkids, the times are desperate. Or will be.”
As I leave, I see a handmade sign: it reads, “Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering. Hannah Spencer, MP.” She is, I see, a bewitching candidate. And as I walk around this constituency and talk to the voters fleeing Labour, this election feels like it is playing in the realm of fantasy. It is not really about racism, though it is everywhere. It is about home, and where it is, and who has one, and who doesn’t. Real politics — the management of competing needs — is hard. Labour asked for a decade to fix the state, but patience has already gone. Instead, voters fall to magical thinking: that voting Green will help Palestinians; that voting Reform will recover the Empire; that you will, one day, find home.
The next day, Advance UK pitch their stall opposite the Red Lion in Denton, in an empty square. A woman tells me, “I’ve got brown skin, but I’m British through and through.” Her parents were immigrants from Jamaica. “I’ve got red, white and blue flowing through my blood.” Illegal immigrants, she says, have homes. They are staying in five-star hotels and swimming in pools, “whereas our guys [are] on the streets. People are getting angry. They don’t want to pay for people in hotels. They don’t want to pay for their tennis lessons and their trampolining lessons.”
Her fantasy is that Reform is, “controlled opposition. They’re paid to do what they do by whoever.” By whom? “I’m not saying. We need change,” she goes on happily, “but Nigel [Farage] is not the one to bring it. His right-hand man is Zia Yusuf. This is a Christian country. We shouldn’t be led at all by a different religion.” I ask her if she thinks there shouldn’t be Muslim, or even Jewish, MPs. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have any different religions, but not in high government positions.” I think of the woman at the bus stop, saying things can’t get worse, and watch Goodwin roll down the street on his Reform bus, which is as clean and empty as a new house. He waves a sign and promises, through his loudhailer, to rid us of Keir Starmer. His promise, if elected, is this: “This seat will never be ignored again. It will never be neglected, and it will never be disrespected.” Dreamland, again.
In the Queen Vic pub opposite, an angry young man points at his teeth. They are also a metaphor. “I need five fillings,” he tells me. “I’m fucked.” It will cost £3,995 privately, he says, and he cannot find an NHS dentist. He has a good job — he is an engineer — but suggests that perhaps, instead, he should become an illegal immigrant? “Do I need to go to France and throw my ID in the fucking bin?” he asks me. “Money shouldn’t be free,” he goes on, “I work seven days a week. Labour wants to tax the air that you breathe. Are you mad?”
Reform is “guaranteed” to win here, he says, from behind his reluctantly political teeth, but in truth it could go three ways. The Greens could edge past Reform, but the Muslim-LGBTQX coalition cannot hold long-term. Labour could still run through the middle, though in such reduced numbers victory will be considered defeat. By-elections are runes: they show us how angry people are, and these are the angriest I have met since Covid, and significantly more hopeless. “The Greens are fucking mad,” he says. “They will do heroin but not eat meat. If you’re a straight white man you’re a cunt. The white person is demonized more than anyone.”
Here ends centrist politics, at least for now, because hope in incremental solutions has gone. If you believe these runes, Reform will be the next government. And if Reform should win the next General Election?
“I’m not convinced governance will be so much of an issue,” Goodwin tells me. “Public opinion will be a challenge. We are living through managed decline, right? And so, the public appetite for change is enormous, but public patience is extremely limited”. He has told Farage that he thinks they may win the election “because we’re just the other guys, right? We’re not Labour, we’re not Tory, we’re just the other guys.” And so, he thinks, “there may not be a honeymoon period at all. There may not be a significant period of support in the polls. It may just sort of prove to be very febrile and very volatile. I’m convinced it will be much more like Trump 2 than Trump 1, and we’ve got so much that’s planned. The untold story about Reform is how much legislation is already drafted and prepared.”
Here, though, the voters do not know that; I am not even sure they care. In the Queen Vic pub, when I ask what will change under a Reform government, an older, red-bearded man, speaks for the first time. “Nothing,” he says. But he will vote for them all the same.
