PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, takes a look at the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election and what it means for the main political parties. 

In the early hours of Friday morning, we got the result of what may well go down as one of the most consequential Parliamentary by-elections in decades. It will take a while to judge its full impact but there seems every chance that Gorton and Denton may take its place alongside Orpington (1962) which led to the re-emergence of the Liberal Party or Eastbourne (1990) which hastened Margaret Thatcher’s departure from office.

The long-established or “legacy” parties took a battering: the combined Conservative, Labour and LibDem vote amounting to under 30%. I can’t find an English by-election in living memory where these three parties performed so poorly in aggregate. Labour’s vote share halved and they limped into third place in what is, on paper, one of their safest seats in the land.

The spectacular – but unsurprising - winners were the Green Party, who took over 40% of the vote and won their first ever by-election (having never managed to score much more than 10% in any previous effort). Reform’s vote share doubled (roughly in line with national opinion polls) but they fell a long way short of winning the seat (although it is, in fairness a very, very long way down their list of targets).

I have three main takeaways from Gorton and Denton.

First, the result is not merely disastrous for Labour but it offers no obvious pathway to recovery. It will probably hasten the removal of Keir Starmer from office, but that essentially will be a cosmetic rather than strategic change. How can Labour simultaneously win back far-left or Muslim voters who are deserting to the Greens while stopping the bleeding of support of white working class voters to Reform? If they choose a strategy to deal with one of these desperate electoral problems they simply will worsen the other one. I suspect there is now no way for Labour to avoid a huge defeat at the next election and their only realistic option – akin to the Conservatives in 2024 – is to pursue a core vote approach in the hope of avoiding total oblivion.

Second, for those interested in “uniting the right”, there seems to be some powerful evidence that the right-leaning electorate are ensuring this happens by themselves. Clearly, Reform’s Matt Goodwin was the only viable right-of-centre candidate on the ballot and the Conservative vote collapsed as a consequence. As an additional point of interest, Advance UK polled a truly derisory vote (narrowly beaten by the Monster Raving Loony Party) despite having a plausible candidate with strong local connections. Those who believe that a sizable chunk of the centre-right electorate is yearning for yet another option - beyond those of Reform and Conservative - should take serious pause for thought. (I was rather tickled by the Monster Raving Loonies’ immigration policy – to replace Border Force employees with GP receptionists to ensure a dramatic reduction in the number of people getting in!).

Third, there could be (and one hopes will be) some serious repercussions relating to how the election was conducted. Reports from independent observers suggest so-called “family voting” was rife. This rather quaint term is used to describe the coercion of immediate family members in how they vote. Quite how this was allowed to happen inside polling stations is a serious and – thus far – unanswered question. If such intimidation is happening for in-person voting how can we be remotely confident that the 25% of the ballot papers sent in by post reflect the genuine preferences of individual voters? I doubt whether the by-election will be re-run as a result of any complaints but there surely needs to be a much more robust approach in protecting the secrecy of the ballot. The time has surely come to scrap postal voting in all but the most extreme of circumstances (disability, proven illness or proof of an unavoidable absence from the country on the specific date).

Overall, the Gorton and Denton result underscores the fact that we are going  through a profound - and now unstoppable – realignment of party politics. One can only hope it also triggers a meaningful change in how we conduct the democratic process as well.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!