Gorton and Denton is a wake up call, but will leave Labour even more divided

Tom Wilson, Associate Director | Public Affairs and Corporate Communications

The Green Party has won the Gorton and Denton by-election rising from third to win by an unexpectedly large 12% margin over Reform in second, and the incumbent Labour Party in third. The margin of victory is substantially larger than expected.

The result is worse for Labour than thought possible during the campaign. The election was considered an incredibly tight marginal three-way fight in which Labour was quietly confident of holding on. Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself visited during the final week of the campaign to try and land the message that Labour was the best tactical vote to stop Reform. Instead, Labour finished a distant third, 15% behind the Greens.

There are many directions in which recriminations in Labour could develop, and many figures spoke out soon after the result. Angela Rayner, the favourite for next Labour leader, said the party needed to be bolder and remain true to Labour values in a coded attack on the party’s direction. The Andy Burnham aligned Mainstream group called the result ‘an absolute disaster’ and ‘avoidable’ and called for a ‘fundamental reset’ of the party. The result is likely to strengthen soft left calls for more influence in Cabinet and hasten the exit of McSweeney aligned advisors in Westminster. Labour’s difficulty with the Muslim vote, prominent in the seat, may also lead to renewed criticism of the party’s stance on Israel and Gaza.

Conversely, MPs under threat from Reform are likely to attempt to push back against these developments and call for a renewed push to win back white working-class voters who defected to Reform UK. Both Keir Starmer and loyal MPs put out statements reaffirming the need to challenge ‘both the extreme left and the extreme right’. Reform UK show no signs of relieving the pressure on threatened Labour MPs, and so there is not likely to be a new consensus on any direction to take the party.

In the medium term, Labour will now be increasingly split between MPs in seats that need to appeal to working class Reform leaning voters incentivised to continue internally pushing for the McSweeney strategy, and those in more urban seats under renewed threat from the Greens incentivised to push the party more traditionally left. 

As the electorate increasingly operates in progressive vs right wing tactical voting blocks, Labour being divided in this way risks the party being outflanked and defeated on both the left and right, to the Greens in diverse urban areas and Reform in white working-class ones. If instead it reorients itself to pursue a strategy aimed at unifying the progressive urban block, either under Keir Starmer or a new soft left leader, it will face significant internal division and potentially more defeats in the Commons from MPs in white working-class seats facing Reform UK as their biggest threat.

Meanwhile the moment of greatest danger for the Prime Minister remains, following the local elections in May which the Greens will go into significantly buoyed. It is therefore more important than ever for business to understand where in the new dynamic key Labour stakeholders sit and the incentives this creates when pursuing political engagement and expand their work to non-Starmerite figures of influence in the party.