Gorton and Denton byelection shatters Labour strategy of neglecting its core base while focusing on Reform defectors
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The Gorton and Denton byelection produced Labour’s most feared outcome – the Greens winning and potentially displacing it as the choice of anti-Reform voters. This risk was signposted for months. It is just the latest of the unintended consequences produced by this government: first, a manifesto commitment to not raise taxes that has led to constant U-turns on spending, then a clampdown on immigration that is creating shortages of medical staff, and now an attempt to stop Andy Burnham from challenging Keir Starmer that has super-charged an insurgent Green party.
Clear though the risk was, Labour simply refused to acknowledge it. Until very recently, No 10 strategy, as defined by Morgan McSweeney, was built around neglecting, even insulting, progressive voters, and seeking to win back defections to Reform. Come the next general election, so the argument went, progressives would sheepishly have to back Labour, just as leftwing voters in France got behind Emmanuel Macron when push came to shove.
This strategy relied on setting Reform UK up as a bogeyman and hoping to assemble a “republican front” of voters on the centre and left against it come election day. If voters on the left inevitably came home, then Labour could concentrate instead on “hero voters”: older, more socially conservative residents of “red wall” constituencies in the north of England and the Midlands. Hence, months of posturing against progressive causes and an immigration policy more draconian than anything the past Conservative government had put forward.
