‘Losing Our Country’: Reform crash in Manchester

Arrogance cost Reform the Gorton and Denton by-election; the same vice hurt Labour too. The contest took place after Labour MP Andrew Gwynne resigned. He had been suspended from the party for retweeting a sexist remark about Manchester Labour MP Angela Rayner, calling a pro-Corbyn MP Diane Abbott ‘a joke’ on a Whatsapp group (‘Trigger Me Timbers’), and replying to a voter asking about bin collections by saying he hoped she’d ‘croak’. Although Gwynne had won the new seat with more than fifty percent of the vote and had a majority of 13,000, such were the party’s difficulties, in Manchester and nationally, that the contest was soon being called too close to call. (In the end, it wasn’t the narrow in journalist predicted; the Greens romping home 4,500 votes ahead of Reform, with Labour a distant third).

At least initially, it seemed that the favourite was Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin. A decade ago, the latter was a well-regarded rising academic, if one with conservative views. He was best known for a book he published with fellow politics lecturer Robert Ford in 2014, a study of those who voted for Reform’s predecessor UKIP, Revolt on the Right. Ford and Goodwin’s book was not without flaws, but it had a simple and compelling message: ‘UKIP’s revolt is a working-class phenomenon.’ They backed up their argument with many pages of statistical data. One way to see Goodwin’s election bid as a hypothesis-testing exercise: in 2026, just as a decade ago, there are tens of millions of right-wing and working-class voters, cultural elites have been wrongly ignoring them. A party which courted them must win.

Yet Gorton and Denton was not the most obvious place to test that thesis. The constituency is a part of Manchester, made up of ill-fitting parts with little shared history. It’s a home not just to northern working-class whites, but also to Muslim voters and students. For Reform, the most important part was Denton, a suburb about 6 miles east from the city centre by the A57 (or thirty minutes on an A201 bus). Journalists from London described the area as deprived. In fact, it’s pretty and well-maintained: unlike many towns these days, almost all the high street premises are occupied. On most economic data, the suburb is aggressively average.

Within Denton, in comparison to Manchester’s city centre with its pedestrianised streets and efficient trams, the car is ubiquitous; on the main roads and in quieter residential streets, the air smells acrid, foul – vehicles rush past night and day, their movements leaving you on edge. Shops and pubs are clustered along main roads, each of which take you somewhere else: to Manchester, or to Stockport. Denton travel agents offer their clients reduced-price holidays to Florida or Lisbon, South African safaris. In Victoria Park, the Royal Legion laid thirty wreaths of plastic poppies in the autumn at the war memorial, by the time of the election they were still there, old, discoloured, ignored. During the election period, very few residents of Denton put up political posters of any description. At one point, I started counting the number of homes I’d passed without seeing any election materials at all. I reached 113 and gave up. Hours after I’d stopped counting, I was still waiting to see my first campaign poster.

‘I’m absolutely fuming,’ Alice said – we met in Denton library. She told me she had been born to a South Wales family of Labour activists, she knew MPs by name, had anecdotes about meeting them. She spoke with pride of having voted for Brexit, remembered the insults progressive voters had directed afterwards at other people who’d voted the same way as her. I asked if she was planning to switch to Reform. She gave a long pause before answering, made it clear that her the choice was rather between Labour and abstention. She wouldn’t vote for Reform, she said (without conviction), although family members would. ‘People want to punish the Establishment – it doesn’t matter to them what weapon they use.’ She hated Labour leaders who couldn’t mix with ordinary people. She hated any kind of middle-class person who thought they could judge how other people lived, reserving her greatest contempt for the Greens, who she called ‘fascists’, and ‘colonial administrators’.

Longsight and Levenshulme are to Denton’s south and west – four miles from central Manchester along the A6. In relation to Denton, Reform had a strategy: targeted Facebook ads showing Goodwin visiting the area. The online campaign would make up for the lack of people actually canvassing for them. In relation to Longsight and Levenshulme, Reform didn’t have a plan. The rest of us are lucky they didn’t. Reform might have appealed to Muslim voters, Trump-style, through talking about the family or morality. They might have found a supportive minority on sectarian lines: it is not as if Asian British communities are without conflict. Goodwin saw no need to try. His message was that these areas were just bad, being full of foreigners, a warning of what Denton would become. Muslims were to be deported, not wooed.

In Longsight, the roads are wide, the car less oppressive. The area is visibly poorer than Denton, with more boarded-over shops and homes. But the streets are busier. The objects you see in shops are cheaper to buy and yet more people are buying them. During the election campaign one restaurant displayed a large Vote Labour poster. Inside, perhaps a better guide to the patron’s politics, there was a Palestinian flag on the counter. I ordered Desi tea.

The restaurants in Levenshulme are named after Iranian, Afghani and Pakistani towns. One shop offers a course in how to pass the Life in Britain test, there’s a Lahore snooker club, a Haji Tours travel agent (‘your journey to the promised land’). Many different people have made this ward their home. Levenshulme was the most obviously engaged district in the election – one in ten homes was carrying some kind of advertisement for the Greens.

Eline, a local anti-fascist, told me she joined the Greens, as a ‘strategic project’. She talked about how councillors have frustrated her with their social media posts which spoke in neutral terms about their ward meetings with police officers, and failed to signal any unease at dealing with the coercive parts of the state. She admired the clips the candidate had shared on Instagram, ‘Hannah [Spencer] is savvier than people give her credit for.’ After we talked, Eline sent me a clip of Spencer shopping in Longsight. The Green candidate looked tired from her campaigning, proud too. ‘Ok, so to everyone who’s coming to the action day here at this Asda in Longsight on Wednesday 11am. I thought given that I’d done many a big shop here in my time I’d let you all know to save time on the day.’ At this she pointed behind her, ‘Pasties, aisle fifteen.’ It was a smart piece of campaigning, a declaration of solidarity with the bedraggled canvasser.

I spoke to Yasmin Clark, a trade union officer from Levenshulme. She told me that Labour’s canvassing effort was being carried by councillors, older people and volunteers from outside the constituency. ‘There are a lot of bitter Labour voters,’ who said that the Green candidate was ‘self-employed, she’s got her own business and she’s racked up here from Hale. The Labour Party use selected negative examples from all over the country of Green failures. But the Greens voted for Palestine hunger strikers. They’ve shown they fight.’

Another Levenshulme resident, Ruth, lived on a terraced, two-up two-down street. She said there were Reform voters, people who since the byelection was announced had hoisted Union Jacks, not seeming to care that their next-door neighbours were black or migrants. Labour she described as outsiders. When a Labour canvasser knocked on Ruth’s door, their opening line was to say that if a Green MP was elected to Parliament, they’d legalise drugs. Doesn’t sound so bad, Ruth replied. ‘No,’ the canvasser told her, ‘the Greens will legalise heroin. They’ll legalise Rohypnol, look it up, it’s a date rape drug.’

Keir Starmer travelled to Manchester to say that the Greens’ plan to legalise drugs were ‘disgusting’, and would turn parks and playgrounds into ‘crack dens’. In the last hours of canvassing, Labour returned to that core message, sending a van through Longsight and Levenshulme’s darkened streets with a lit-up technicolour image saying ‘Labour’ on the side a picture of Zack Polanski on the back and – superimposed against a black background: ‘DO NOT VOTE FOR THE GREENS. THEY WANT TO LEGALISE ALL DRUGS AND TEACH OUR CHILDREN TO USE DRUGS INCLUDING CRACK AND HEROIN AND LET OUR DAUGHTERS BE USED FOR LEGAL PROSTITUTION.’

As pictures circulated of a Labour campaign so desperate for canvassers that they were sending MPs from across Southern England to masquerade as ordinary voters, Labour spin-doctors were briefing the Guardian on the mass campaign. ‘People power,’ they called it.

Other interviewees told me that Labour had hidden reserves of support. I spoke to Ian Allinson, a former President of Manchester trades council who now leads its strike solidarity work. While he gave the Greens a good chance of winning the byelection, he cautioned against seeing the Labour Party’s decline as necessarily continuing at the same pace after. He reminded me that Labour could choose a new leader. He talked of Labour’s ‘resilience’, the thousands of councillors the party had, the prominence it received because it was in national government and because many trade unionists, particularly in the public sector, were reluctant to lose their relationship with a party that often ran local or national government.

Reform’s message has been that if it is elected to government it will be crueller towards migrants than Labour would ever dare to be. One way to see Parliamentary politics in the eighteen months after Labour was elected in 2024 is as a kind of auction, with the two parties vying with each other to offer immigrants the worst future. In August 2025, Nigel Farage pledged to deport 600,000 people: you couldn’t achieve that level of violence without seeing the same processes as in Trump’s United States, the building of concentration camps, the recruitment of snatch squads. Labour’s response three months later was not to defend the need for migrants or the principle of asylum. Rather, the party promised that it would go further than Farage dared, saying that under its plans people – on applying for asylum – would be stripped of their jewels or any other evidence of savings, which would be kept by the state.

Goodwin’s team delivered a letter to residents in a font intended to mimic handwriting. The document broke the rules under which a campaign leaflet is required to include the name and address of the printer of the document, the name of the party being promoted and of the candidate. It claimed to have been sent by a seventy-four year old pensioner, Patricia Clegg. She identified herself as working class. ‘I worked hard, paid my taxes, brought up my family here’. Patricia said she was a Labour voter, ‘Keir Starmer told us things would change for the better. They haven’t.’ She said that the Greens were no better. ‘They have extreme policies like … letting men use women’s changing rooms.’ She ended with the sort of rousing conclusion that perhaps a campaign obsessive might mistake for how local residents talk. ‘For me this by-election comes down to a simple choice: more broken promises from Keir Starmer or real change.’ The leaflet was in accord with Goodwin’s book. It took his idea of anti-immigrant hostility as an expression of class position and repurposed it as campaign material. It also lied about who wrote it and why. It made me think not of Reform in its recent pomp but of the period just after the Brexit referendum, when the party seemed lost, baffled by victory.

Matt Goodwin was endorsed by the far-right activist, Tommy Robinson. Keir Starmer attacked him. Farage said that it was a non-story, that Robinson ‘can do what the hell he likes’. Reform suspended Goodwin’s interim campaign manager Adam Mitula for social media posts including ‘I wouldn’t touch a Jewish woman’. BBC coverage took its lead from Reform’s spin on the incident, playing down Mitula’s proximity to Goodwin, describing him merely as ‘a Reform UK activist’ and failing to explain the derogatory remark which had led to his removal.

Reform’s team pursued residents with targeted adverts. In one, Goodwin claimed to have discovered the phenomenon of Houses in Multiple Occupation, or HMOs, a shared flat or a conversion or student housing, in other words, with more than one household and shared amenities. ‘There are lot of HMOs in the area,’ Goodwin began, and that was true. But, as he went on, he began to lie – speaking as if every single HMO in the constituency was the product of recent immigration. HMOs, he said, were ‘Homes that are full of illegal migrants, asylum seekers and criminals, homes that should have gone to the hard-working British people.’ Migrants are not criminals. What Goodwin was referring to was a reality in which there are so few legal safe routes to Britain that it is almost impossible to come here fleeing persecution except by breaking rules: through obtaining false documents, through visas obtained as a convenience, through hiding yourself in lorries or on boats. But if refugee status is granted to asylum seekers, then no matter how they came here; at that point, their arrival is legalised.

In the year ending June 2025, 110,000 people claimed asylum. We have more than thirty million homes in Britain – more than enough to house them all. House prices are not high because of migrants; they are high because, for forty years, we have had in Britain a system which empowered landlords to increase rents repeatedly. Labour, under pressure from tenants’ unions belatedly acted to slow down the housing market, through legislation – the Renters’ Rights Act, which removes landlords’ present right to evict without needing a reason. Nigel Farage opposed the bill. He told landlords he preferred our present high-rent system, that the legislation was ‘self-defeating’. Reform campaigned for its repeal.

Another Reform advert showed Goodwin walking along one of Denton’s streets talking to an interviewer, David Bull, the latter wearing Reform’s distinctive light-blue rosette. Bull distinguished between the sorts of shops you might see on a healthy or unhealthy High Street, counting among the latter ‘vape shops’ and ‘places where they purport to cut hair’. He was sharing a common far-right talking point, that Turkish barbers were all criminal enterprises. Goodwin recognised the reference. ‘Too many barber shops,’ he echoed. He said, ‘A lot of the energy has been sucked out of the high street’. In front of a store titled, ‘E-Cigs’, Goodwin switched from his campaign’s supposed focus on workers and addressed business owners overwhelmed by the regulation of the economy – too many environmental rules, too many rights for those proletarians Reform was supposedly wooing. ‘Small businesses [are] basically saying to me, “Labour doesn’t really know how to run the economy”.’

At one event in Manchester, Spencer confronted Goodwin, raising the way he has shifted from being an academic who observed the far right to one of its leading participants, ‘You spent so long Matt, I think, researching far-right extremism that you did get a little bit confused and thought what you were reading was an instruction manual.’

He has changed, undoubtedly. Anyone who has watched Goodwin’s television career will remember what he was at its start, a psephologist – an election nerd. He was so confident that he said that if Jeremy Corbyn polled higher than 38% in the 2017 general election, Goodwin would ‘eat my new Brexit book’. Goodwin stuck to his word, devouring the first page of his tome for the benefit of watchers of Sky News. Goodwin spoke at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference, and defended the summer 2024 race rioters from accusations of racism. It was that recent history which won him a gig as a presenter for GB News.

In Gorton and Denton, another Reform advert (‘Labour’s total hypocrisy…’), saw Goodwin adopting the persona of a television celebrity, improving the area by his presence. ‘Guys,’ he began, his arms raised and his lips fixed in a smile. ‘This is Matt Goodwin from Gorton and Denton. I’ve just seen Labour’s latest leaflet-’ For a moment, he seemed to lose control. The problem was his voice, his vowels had absorbed too much of a Mancunian twang (‘Leh-bour’s leh-test’). Goodwin heard himself and paused, turned the dial down. He read out the name of the Labour candidate Angeliki Stogia, showing how hard it was to process such awkward foreign letters, and yet making no mistake with them. He read, ‘I’m standing to be your MP to unite the community and stand up to the divisive politics of Reform.’ Goodwin let his eyes flicker in evident disbelief at such grotesque calumnies. ‘Let’s talk about being divisive.’ Goodwin invited his viewers to do their own research. ‘Go on Google, go on chat GPT and ask it to give you all the information it has about the Shiver Me Timbers scandal’. His face fixed in an expression of sorrow, Goodwin said that ‘a group of Labour councillors, the council leader, two Labour MPs, who were later suspended, were caught absolutely slating the people of Gorton.’ In government Labour had been ‘jamming political correctness down our throats’ but that the party was in reality, ‘racist, antisemitic and vile’. Goodwin was taking the personality traits of which he was accused and ascribing them to his opponents.

There are many things you could say against Goodwin’s campaign – to win, he would need votes in Levenshulme and Longsight as well as Denton, and the Reform candidate seemed scared of leaving his base. The Greens were building a ground army of canvassers, using video to reinforce that relationship rather than substitute for it. Goodwin didn’t seem to want supporters: his films showed him alone or with a single interviewer. He didn’t seem to trust a crowd, even a sympathetic one. In an election, it seems mere good sense to expect that conversations with people will count for more than ones with machines.

Yet, as a piece of propaganda, this film was effective. For Andrew Gwynne did post sexist and racist jokes, did tell a voter he hoped she’d die. Goodwin’s film was a more effective piece of messaging than anything I saw during the by-election criticising him. Gwynne’s bigotry was real and voters undoubtedly remembered it. Some 18,000 people liked Goodwin’s film, 2,000 of them shared it to their Facebook feed. With his shirt, his black gilet, his scrubbed features and freshly cut hair, he looked like the sort of person that the mainstream parties have so often chosen as Westminster candidates. Everything I know about Goodwin made me think that he would be a bad MP, ill-informed, uninterested in learning, arrogant in power. But, on this occasion, he gave every impression of expecting to win.

Goodwin struck a different note, after losing by five thousand votes, saying Reform were beaten by ‘a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives that came together to dominate the constituency. I don’t think the progressives beat us, I think the progressives were told how to vote.’ He said, ‘We are losing our country.’ Let’s hope they are.

D. K. Renton is a barrister and historian.