‘If we can win here, we can win anywhere’

‘If we win this, when we win this, I think it will be existential for Labour, because if we can win here, we can win anywhere.’ So says Matt Goodwin, the man vying to become Reform UK’s first Manchester MP.

We’re talking ahead of the by-election this week in Gorton and Denton, where the academic turned pundit turned populist firebrand intends to make history – and send an already under-fire Labour into a tailspin.

Sat in Reform’s campaign HQ, in a bright, lofty warehouse space in a business park in Denton, an enormous heater keeping the February chill at bay, Goodwin is surprisingly bullish about his chances.

While Reform continues to ride high in the national polls, you’d be hard-pressed to find a seat more Labour than this. The party has won every General Election in this seat, under different boundaries, for generations.

And yet Labour has almost gone out of its way to lose it – led by the most unpopular prime minister in polling history whose finger prints would be all over a defeat. The race began with Keir Starmer blocking popular Manchester mayor Andy Burnham from standing, for fear of opening the Commons henhouse to his rival.

‘The fact that we’re even talking about [a Reform win] is kind of absurd, right?’, Goodwin tells me, reclining in an office chair, in blue jeans and a dark quilted jacket.

‘That it’s this competitive, it shows you just how rapidly Labour has imploded… we are witnessing the redrawing of the political map. And we are part of that story. We’re a very big part of that story. So, yeah, we can win.’

This would have been unthinkable just 19 months ago. Reform came a distant second in Gorton and Denton at the 2024 General Election, with 14 per cent of the vote. It was one of 70 constituencies where Labour won an absolute majority of votes, with just over 50 per cent.

But politics has changed – and so has Reform. You can see it – the old ramshackle, trestle-table UKIP energy of yesteryear replaced by a slick, Trump-esque operation. A giant Nigel Farage and Goodwin grin from a hoarding in one corner. A giant PVC Union Jack hangs overhead.

‘This is the best ground game Reform has ever operated’, Goodwin says. ‘To give you an example, last weekend, we collected more data in two days than we did during the entire Runcorn and Helsby campaign.’ (Sarah Pochin snagged Runcorn for Reform last May.)

Goodwin now seems to see Gorton and Denton as a straight fight between Reform and the Greens, between himself and Hannah Spencer. ‘On paper, it’s a three-way race. In reality, I don’t think it is. I think the Labour vote is weaker than Labour would have us believe.’

Even with the backing of Burnham, even with cabinet ministers sent up from Westminster to campaign, Labour candidate Angeliki Stogia, a councillor in south-west suburb Whalley Range, appears to be up against it.

Labour’s campaign has certainly smelt of desperation. When Goodwin was unveiled as Reform’s candidate, Labour put out a clip, purporting to show him slagging off Manchester, telling a crowd he was ‘unfortunate enough’ to be in the city ‘a few days ago’. He was actually talking about being at the Tory Party conference, held in the city in October.

Reform reported Labour to the police over the video, accusing it of breaching Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, which prohibits making false statements about candidates’ conduct. Greater Manchester Police took no further action.

‘One thing about going from writing and commentating to being in it’, Goodwin says, ‘is you see firsthand the true scale of misinformation, and the extent to which the parties that preach about the dangers of misinformation deliberately misinform voters… It’s wild.’

But while Labour is flailing, tactical voting could be a danger for Reform. Is Goodwin worried about a rerun of the Caerphilly by-election for the Welsh parliament last October, where an anti-Reform vote coalesced around Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle to keep the Faragists out?

‘I’m wary of the Caerphilly comparison’, he says, ‘because there you had Plaid, which is a very different entity to, say, the Greens… You had a very popular local leader with Plaid [in Whittle] – I mean, literally a local legend. Nobody really knows who Hannah Spencer is.’

Will this prove to be hubris? Time will tell. But he is right to say Spencer, despite being a local, is not well-known. She is also very much in the image of Green Party leader Zack Polanski, in the worst possible sense.

She went viral last week for a staggering performance in a televised BBC debate, in which she appeared to blame the 2017 Manchester Arena terror attack on the ‘division’ caused by people like Goodwin – rather than bomber Salman Abedi and his Islamist ideology.

The Friday before, three ISIS supporters were jailed over a plot to kill as many of Manchester’s Jews as they could with AK-47s, in what could have been our most deadly terrorist attack since the Ariana Grande horror.

The demographics of this constituency provide more than a hint as to why Spencer is spooked by the I-word.

Denton, where we’re sat, is largely white and working class, fertile ground for Reform. But Gorton, where the Greens are focussing their efforts, has higher numbers of graduates and minorities – particularly Muslims, who make up 40 per cent of the inner-city wards.

Spencer sits in a long line of ‘progressives’ who have come to the grim conclusion that speaking too frankly about Islamist terrorism risks ‘alienating’ Muslims. The Greens are also leaning into the Islamic sectarianism that has reared its ugly head in Gorton since 7 October 2023.

Zack Polanski has openly admitted he intends to use anger with Gaza, combined with a campaign painting Reform as a bunch of Islamophobes and extremists, to win over Muslim votes. One Green leaflet shows a keffiyeh-clad Spencer, posing in front of a mosque.

On one side, there’s a message in English:

‘Stop Islamophobia. Stop Reform.’

One the other, a message in Urdu:

‘Labour must be punished for Gaza. We have to defeat Reform and vote for the Greens. To give the Muslims a strong voice, give your vote to the Greens.’

‘They are clearly going fully down the sectarian road’, says Goodwin. ‘They are leafleting in Urdu, they are talking about mobilising the Muslim vote, and then they’re lecturing everybody else about division.’

The Muslim Vote, the sectarian organisation whose name leaves little to interpretation, endorsed the Green Party before Spencer had even been chosen as its candidate. The Polanski-ites appear to be cementing their place as the woke wing of the Islamo-left alliance.

George ‘Gaza’ Galloway’s Workers Party has also stood down, despite winning 10 per cent of the vote here in 2024. The Workers Party hasn’t explicitly endorsed the Greens, but it may as well have, urging its supporters to give both Labour and Reform a bloody nose.

Still, Goodwin reckons he is more competitive in Gorton than the psephologists would have us believe. ‘I would be wary of some of the narratives around the by-election’, he says. ‘There will be Reform-friendly, adjacent voters, and we’ve gone in to peel them off.’

He’s certainly going to need them. White working-class Denton only accounts for about a third of this ungainly, L-shaped constituency, which was created in 2024.

Goodwin says the portrayal of the populist Reform UK as ‘divisive’, due to its opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism, turns reality on its head:

‘We’re the only campaign that is talking about all of Gorton and Denton, that is talking about representing all the people of Gorton and Denton. The hypocrisy among left progressives is very visible and quite striking.’

His opponents have tried to tar him as ‘far right’, with much of the campaign consisting of Goodwin having his more controversial statements thrown back at him, particularly those about the thorny issue of ethnicity: he has argued that Englishness is primarily a matter of ethnicity, as distinct from Britishness, which he sees as open to those willing to assimilate into British society.

Goodwin insists this isn’t about excluding minorities from the national community, contrasting himself with Reform’s more vociferous critics on the online, hardcore-ethnonationalist right.

‘This is probably the dividing line between me and some vocal people online’, he tells me. ‘There are clearly lots of people to the right of Reform, noisy but largely insignificant in the real world, who view Britishness simply through the lens of race, ethnicity and ancestry.’

He has been attacked on X for campaigning with minority Brits. This has really got his blood up, it seems:

‘I’ve had British Sikhs canvassing with me. We’ve had Hongkongers, British Hindus. There are people to the right of Reform who would say, all of those people should be removed from our country. Yet those people have campaigned with me harder than anybody I see complaining about the state of our country online.

‘In fact, I would go further. They probably believe in this country a lot more than some of the people to the right of Reform, who are very good at making noise online, but I’ve never once seen knock on a door…

‘I don’t want any part in a politics that is just saying: we want all these people out… It’s BNP politics, it’s the National Front in 1979, and that’s what they’re going to run on. They’re going to run on, basically, racial exclusionism, which they’ll soon find is a vote-loser and appeals to about two per cent of the country.’

We’re speaking a few days after Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe – pushed out of Reform last year in questionable circumstances, following an almighty spat with Farage – launched his own party, Restore Britain. Whether or not this was Lowe’s intention, its launch has been welcomed by precisely the kind of X-dwelling, race-obsessed rightists Goodwin is taking aim at.

So, is Restore Britain headed down this ‘exclusionist’ road? ‘From where that particular party has started, which I don’t think will be very significant in British politics, it doesn’t have anywhere to go’, Goodwin says. ‘Its entire ecosystem is filled with the wrong kinds of people, who hold the wrong kinds of ideas.’

‘The people who are criticising Reform from the right’, he concludes, witheringly, ‘are an assortment of amateurs, egomaniacs, Zoomers with very little political experience, and inexperienced ideologues who don’t really have any grip on political reality’.

The way forward for Reform, he says, is ‘building and mobilising a broad-based coalition of people who believe in the principles that separate us from the establishment. That is a very different offer from what the uniparty has put forward.’ Any party of the populist right is doomed to fail, he argues, if it appears hostile to ethnic minorities, a third of whom voted Leave in 2016:

‘The question I would have for some people on the right is: what do you think would have happened with Brexit if you’d run a Rupert Lowe-style campaign?… It wouldn’t have got anywhere close to 50 per cent. Because we know one third of minority Brits came out and said: no, we want national sovereignty, we want to end mass immigration, and we want to put the tax-paying, hard-working majority first. What would their version of that campaign have looked like? It would have been a five per cent campaign.’

We turn back to Labour, and what he thinks a Reform win would spell for Starmer’s creaking administration:

‘If we win here, I suspect Starmer will have to resign. It will blow apart the Labour hierarchy. It will set off a civil war. It will almost certainly set off a leadership race of some description. It will be the perfect backdrop for the local elections for us, and it’ll be the perfect backdrop for the next by-election and the next General Election.

‘Already, I think, to be frank, we’re demonstrating we can go into Labour’s backyard and terrify the Labour Party. The question is, how hard will we push them? And I think the answer to that is exceptionally hard.’

With that, we part ways, and I step out into Denton.

Is this Labour heartland really ready to take a chance on Reform? There’s certainly no love lost for Labour, which has become a byword for dysfunction and entitlement.

The seat became vacant after Andrew Gwynne, Denton’s MP since 2005, was revealed to have made crass jokes in a WhatsApp group, one of which mocked complaints made by his constituents: ‘Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote.’

Gwynne resigned in January, on grounds of ill-health.

It was a private jibe, hardly a hanging offence. But it resonated on Denton’s neglected, red-brick-terrace-lined streets. In the local Morrisons Cafe, Brian tells me he’s rarely seen the town so clean and tidy. He reckons ‘they’re putting an effort on because it’s all on telly’.

His friend, Alan, is going to lend Reform his vote: ‘They’re the only ones who haven’t had a chance yet.’ But Brian is not convinced. He hasn’t voted before, and doesn’t intend to this time: ‘They’re all thieving bastards.’

Sharon and Sharon – no relation – are similarly split. ‘I am going to vote Reform, definitely’, says Sharon 1. ‘He can’t do any worse, can he?’ But Sharon 2 says she’s ‘heard it all before’. She is keen for it all to be over.

Few here in Denton seem as confident as Matt Goodwin of Reform’s chances on Thursday. But if there is a path to victory for him, it is one paved in Labour failure.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.