Hannah Spencer of the Green Party won the Gorton and Denton by-election, making history as Labour has held the seat since the Second World War. But not everyone is happy…
As dawn breaks outside the Denton Delights Chinese takeaway, not everybody is happy. One person after another hurries past, head down. “You don’t want to hear what I think!” an elderly man says angrily. Another says simply: “disgusted”. A man in a dark van winds down his window and shoves his phone out. “I am very, very angry is what I am,” he says. “Look at this.” His phone is playing an Instagram video that features Hannah Spencer, the newly minted Green MP for the area. The text is in Urdu.
“What are they saying on there?” he says. “We just don’t know, do we? Speak English. That’s what I’m angry about.” As he drives off, he shouts out of the window. “I want my country back!” It’s the morning after the Gorton and Denton by-election, and after weeks where Reform voters dominated the town square with their opinions, they are suddenly in short supply. In their place, come Green voters grinning ear to ear, who finally feel able to say they voted for Hannah the Plumber in a town that has voted Labour since the Second World War.
READ MORE: Everything you need to know about the seismic Gorton & Denton by-election
Outside Morrisons, Emily Woolley, 34, says she didn’t tell anyone she was voting Green. “Because you know what it’s like with politics and family.” But she adds: “I wish I had spoken about it now. Maybe there are lots of us?” Hurrying to work, 42-year-old accountant Clare Macfarlane says she and teenage daughter, Freya, are “absolutely delighted” with the Green’s victory. Dorian Crowley, 78, a retired nurse, says she stuck with Labour because they hadn’t had enough time yet to deal with the “terrible mess the Tories left us all in. We need to give them more time.”
But Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s graceless loss – which he blamed on “Islamists and woke progressives” and “a dangerous Muslim sectarianism” – has set a tone echoed by some of his party’s followers. Straight from the Trump playbook of undermining electoral integrity, Goodwin’s boss. Nigel Farage called the election “a victory for sectarian voting and cheating”. Locally, this is already being echoed as “a stitch up”, and fury that boundary changes allowed more ‘multicultural’ wards into the constituency.
When I ask a plumber if today is a victory for plumbers, he is less than impressed. “Is she a plumber, tho?” he asks. When I say Spencer has published the certificates online and tacked them to the wall of the campaign office, he says, “that’s just certificates, not being a plumber.” He’s “very, very angry”, he says, about the result.
It was in Denton that Labour MP Andrew Gwynne’s ‘Trigger Me Timbers’ whatsapp group leaked vile bile about local constituents – referring to local people as ‘crackpots, morons and Grade-A w***ers’ – and it is Denton that has ended up punishing Labour.
Meanwhile, a volatile, rain-soaked and, at times, toxic election has done nothing to improve Dentonian or Gortonians views of a politics that views them with contempt. This week’s victory has not been for politics. Rarely have so many doors been knocked and so few people listened to. One man in Denton suggests a ‘blue bins’ protest “where every person drags their blue bin out into the square because it’s so full of hundreds of leaflets – we’ve been under a deluge!”
On the eve of the election in Levenshulme, a metropolitan, multicultural, student-friendly part of the constituency, I met residents wondering what it had all been for. “At times we’ve felt like pawns in a game that was never really about us,” Beth Powell, 36, a youth and community worker, told me. “Despite all this attention, it’s like we’re tapping on the glass saying ‘hello, remember us? It is supposed to be about us. Every vote is actually a real person, a human being who has a life.
“It does feel a lot like we’re just being messed with, ever since Trigger Me Timbers – and then Andy Burnham not being allowed to stand. There’s a feeling that Westminster is laughing at us. There’s been this game happening behind closed doors, we are not included and it has nothing to do with local issues.”
Before the election was called, fed up with having no representation or accountability in Parliament – Gwynne was off on sick leave for months – Beth and a group of local dog-walkers formed a community group called Local Voices as way of bringing residents together to call for change. The group has given her optimism where local politics, she says, is letting people down. “So much has been made about the differences in this constituency, but, in the end, we all want so many of the same things – housing, affordable lives, decent income, better parks, solidarity,” she says.
While party activists have flooded the zone with thousands of leaflets – with some people complaining of a tidal wave of flyers on their doormats – the Local Voices group picked 23 bags of litter over Valentine’s weekend. Now they are planning a neighbourhood assembly on 11th April in attempt to actually hear from local residents. “We’re just people who want to be able to influence the decisions that affect us,” Beth says. “And that means more than a vote every four years.”
Within three minutes’ walk of where we were chatting last night at a bar called Overdraught, is Jabaneez – a Pakistani bridal dress store – Gaijin Dumpling House, a halal supermarket, and an evangelical ‘Hope Chapel’, all of which have narrowly missed being represented by a man who would have arguably been Britain’s most Far Right MP.
Bean Sharp, 33, an academic and researcher, says: “I’m thrilled with the result – but the fact so many in our constituency voted for a Far Right party peddling racist, sexist and transphobic rhetoric in this campaign, means we still have a way to go in terms of bringing communities together and finding common ground. With groups like Local Voices, this work is already underway.”
Beth says the election “has left local democracy in a very precarious position. So, we need to think, how do we turn this situation on its head and put power back in residents’ hands? We’re looking forward to working with Hannah Spencer to do this. I’m incredibly proud of my neighbours for rejecting hatred. But this isn’t about election politics anymore. This is about neighbours. This isn’t over, the work is about to start.”
As droves of imported door-knockers from all parties from across the UK depart from Manchester Piccadilly train station this lunchtime, they will pass posters just outside the station for ‘The Battle’, a new theatre comedy charting the bitter rivalry between 90s Britpop bands Oasis and Blur.
In this election battle, at times Labour have felt like the anthemic northern working-class Oasis – with She’s Electric blaring from campaign events – while the Greens have felt more like middle class indie pretenders Blur. Reform’s one-man tribute band with new backing singers recruited from the Tories came a comfortable second. But this Morning’s Glory belongs to the Greens.
READ MORE: Zack Polanski ‘punched the air’ after bombshell Andy Burnham by-election news
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