People are saying the Gorton and Denton by-election will be a showdown between the Greens and Reform. Between Zack Polanski’s barmy army of End is Nigh graduates and Nigel Farage’s insurgent movement of people peeved with the old order. I hope they’re right, for that really would illuminate the new battlelines in British politics.
The Greens will seek to build an Islamo-left alliance. A union of Muslim voters and middle-class graduates who are as one in their curious loathing of Israel
As Labour loses the will to live, and the Conservatives wither one defection at a time, it feels like the east Manchester seat will fall to one of those upstart parties. The area has been a Labour stronghold since before the Second World War. Labour won it with a 13,000 majority in the last General Election. But a lot has happened since then.
The Starmer machine’s blocking of Andy Burnham could play into the Greens’ hands. Polanski is banking on it. He gloated over the Burnham fracas, calling it further proof that ‘the Greens are the only progressive party capable of taking on and beating Reform’. Green activists are already swarming Gorton and Denton, so if any residents have seen odd-looking outsiders in keffiyehs and ‘Trans women are women’ badges, now you know why.
Reform has named its candidate as the redoubtable Matt Goodwin. A good choice: he has strong beliefs and good diction, both alarmingly lacking in politics today. The digital left is already dragging up old comments Goodwin made about Englishness to try to tar him as a ‘racist’. I look forward to their interrogation of Green Party members who celebrated the mass murder of Jews on 7 October and referred to rabbis as ‘animals’. Silly me, I forgot: they don’t care about Jews.
In many ways, Gorton and Denton is the ideal place for an epoch-shaping clash between the Greens and Reform. The south of the constituency has a large Muslim population and huge numbers of students and graduates. The north is more white and more working class, where few have darkened the door of a university. You don’t need a PhD in 21st-century politics to know where the Greens and Reform will focus their energies.
The Greens will seek to build an Islamo-left alliance. A union of Muslim voters and middle-class graduates who are as one in their curious loathing of Israel but a tad more divided on issues like trans. Polanski is the only remaining leader of a mainstream party who bows to the cultish post-truth belief that a woman can have a penis. It will be interesting to see how that plays with conservative Muslims who know very well what a woman is and insist on keeping them well away from the fellas during Friday prayers.
The Muslim Vote, the activist group that helped to get the ‘Gaza independents’ into parliament in 2024, has lined up behind the Greens. We can expect high levels of Israelophobic canvassing, as the Greens’ bourgeois door-knockers try to find common purpose with down-at-heel Muslims. ‘Hate Israel? Vote Green!’, will be the dodgy, sectarian subtext of much of the party’s agitation up there.
It will be the post-class left summed up. Having turned their backs on the ‘gammon’ of the white working class, who they view as a Europhobic, transphobic blob of hopelessness, the graduate left as typified by Polanski and his London fanclub is forced to fashion a new constituency. It will be a fragile pact between religious traditionalists who adhere to Koranic beliefs and moneyed youths who adhere to luxury beliefs. How long the glue of hating Israel will hold these two camps together is anyone’s guess.
Reform, meanwhile, will seek to connect with the left-behind working classes of Gorton and Denton. As they should. For so long defamed as ‘low-information’ racists who dragged Britain to hell with their vote for Brexit, these people need some proper, respectful representation. We are about to find out if Reform really can position itself as the new party of the working class.
My advice to Mr Goodwin and his team is to go light on the grievance politics and emphasise aspiration instead. Let the Greens play the politics of victimhood among their strange base of religious conservatives and credentialed leftists. What the isolated working classes of Gorton and Denton need is positive patriotism – a reminder that it is not ‘racist’ to take pride in one’s community and one’s nation.
These people are crying out for both economic security and cultural security. For some protection against the privations inflicted on them by a downturning economy and the humiliations inflicted on them by a remote elite that sneers at their way of life and their love of country. Here is Reform’s chance to tell working-class voters how they will improve their lot, both monetarily and morally.
This is the new divide, then. On one side, the luxury beliefs of an activist class that can afford to obsess over such untrue things as the ‘genocide’ in Gaza and the coming heat death of the planet courtesy of mankind’s hubris. And on the other, the grounded, true concerns of flesh-and-steel communities who want more growth, not less, along with stronger borders and a little more national pride. The moral stakes could not be higher.
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