Gorton and Denton: welcome to Balkanised Britain

So the race everyone said was too close to call wasn’t so close after all. The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer has won the Gorton and Denton by-election with 14,980 votes, nearly 41 per cent of all those cast in the Greater Manchester seat. Meanwhile, Reform UK has pushed a flailing Labour Party into third place, taking 10,578 votes to Labour’s 9,364. That noise you can hear in the background is blood vessels bursting in Downing Street.

This was Labour’s race to lose, and it has done so spectacularly. Keir Starmer’s reverse-midas touch has proven even more formidable than anyone dared think. This race began with the prime minister blocking popular Manchester mayor Andy Burnham from standing, to avoid giving his rival a place in Westminster, leaving Manchester councillor Angeliki Stogia holding the bag. It has finished with a 26.4 per cent swing from Labour to Greens. The Zack Polanski clown car is now officially the go-to vehicle for disaffected ‘progressive’ revolt.

If Labour can be humiliated here, it can be humiliated anywhere. At the General Election just 19 months ago, Labour won more than 50 per cent of the vote in the constituency. Gorton and Denton was its 38th safest seat. It had held it for generations. Now it has become a neat demonstration of this Labour Party’s ability to haemorrhage votes in all directions. Graduates and Muslims seem to have broken to the Greens, while white working-class voters plumped more for Reform. Once-coveted voter blocs are abandoning Starmer left and right. The Labour coalition has disintegrated.

This is a stunning win for the Greens. No one can take that away from them. But the manner in which they won bodes ill not just for Labour, but for our fractious nation, too. Spencer effectively rode Britain’s crisis of integration to victory – campaigning on Gaza, TikToking in Urdu and leaning into the Islamic sectarianism that has metastasised since October 7. It proved a potent combination in the inner-city wards, where as much as 40 per cent of residents are Muslim. Rather than appeal to voters on the basis of shared interests and a shared civic identity, the Greens didn’t even assume their voters spoke the same language. The Muslim Vote group endorsed them. George ‘Gaza’ Galloway stood down his Workers Party to give the Greens a clear run. In the future, we can expect more and more elections to come down to this depressing demographic headcount.

The Green Party has been shameless in ginning up anti-Israel grievances, even before Polanski hypnotised the membership. At the last election, 20 of its candidates were exposed in the press over their pondscum Israelophobia. One of them praised a ‘pro-Palestine’ march that disrupted a Holocaust remembrance march… at Auschwitz. Naturally, he was also the party’s diversity coordinator. Mothin Ali, the Greens’ new co-deputy leader, fond of chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’, posted a video on 8 October 2023, the day after Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel, saying ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’. The Greens are now Britain’s preeminent Islamo-left party, the party of choice for those who think Labour isn’t Jew-baity enough.

But in this the Greens are only screaming out loud what was previously whispered. Labour has long practised this kind of pork-barrel identity politics, quietly pushing leaflets through doors appealing to minority voters off the back of faraway conflicts and intra-ethnic tensions. (The Tories’ hands haven’t been totally clean on this front, either.) Now Labour has been bitten by its own divisive, multicultural politicking – first by the ‘Gaza independents’ in 2024, now by the Polanski-ites.

For all the talk of Reform UK creating ‘division’, candidate Matt Goodwin’s mildly controversial comments about Britishness pale into insignificance when set against the Greens’ unabashed grievance politics. While everyone knew Reform’s best hopes lay in the white working-class Denton end of the seat, Goodwin ran on putting all of Gorton and Denton first, telling me in an interview for spiked last week he could peel off at least some voters in the more multiracial, inner-city Gorton. While this campaign has proven to be a tough lesson in expectation management, Reform’s second-place finish still puts down a significant marker, in a place that should never really have been in play for it. (Reform-friendly Denton makes up just a third of the seat.) Still, in my brief time there I detected something of an enthusiasm gap, between Reform-curious voters tempted to give Goodwin a go and Reform-deranged voters desperate to keep the supposed ‘far right’ out.

Gorton and Denton is hardly a typical constituency – an L-shaped seat, created in 2024, linking wildly different groups and areas together. But in its way, the campaign has been a grim little microcosm of Balkanised Britain. Demographics pitted against one another. A fractious, multiparty politics to fit our fraying, multicultural age. We desperately need to put the pieces back together again.

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