Reform sent packing: The Greens win in Gorton & Denton
Hannah Spencer elected as MP for Gorton & Denton as the people reject Labour and Reform in a election that turned nasty.
Last night I went to sleep thinking that Matthew Goodwin - of Reform - would be the new MP for Gorton & Denton and I was wrong.
I thought that the Greens would have their vote split by Labour. I thought the narrative of the boats and what is being so widely condemned as a reckless drug policy by the Greens would be too much. It wasn’t.
I woke up to a video of the Greens co-deputy leader Mothin Ali crowd surfing and the news the Greens had done it.
On the run up to the election, there had been several cases of alleged cheating. Reform - sending a letter from a local called Patricia Clegg calling for her neighbours to vote for Reform - when the letters had come from a distribution centre in the south.
Labour left it late, which probably signified the panic. Zack Polanski claimed that Labour invented a fake tactical voting expert company to tell people to vote for Labour to avoid Reform.
But perhaps the most insidious, disgusting, whatever word you want to use was that Labour hired a small van with LED screens to drive around the constituency saying the Greens want “our daughters used for legal prostitution”. Are we living in an episode of Black Mirror?
Honestly - this reflected my experience on the ground. When I wanted to speak to Reform’s representatives, door knockers, whoever, I was told that they don’t speak to independent journalists and my questions were propaganda, showing all the Trumpian qualities you’d expect from them. Are the concerns from women up and down the country saying that Goodwin’s proposed tax on women without children is misogynistic not legitimate? Would a party with such clear ambitions for government not want to clear the air that potentially disabled women may not face an additional tax that no man would ever be subject to? No they didn’t and it was frustrating.
Labour were useless. All canvassers were placed under strict instructions not to speak to any media and when I spoke to their press coordinator, I was told they’d have people available for interview in an hour. An hour later, they didn’t pick up their phone. An hour after that I was told I’d be sent a schedule for me to interview someone - it never came. The party in power of this country were not showing any transparency.
And then there was Hannah Spencer and the Greens. I asked Hannah how she was feeling on the run up to the election. She said she was nervous, nervous because of how much at stake there was. In the end, there was no need to be nervous - the Greens won with 40.7% of the vote share. They won by having an enormous grassroots campaign, people travelling from all over the country to support something worth believing in. And because the Green canvassers believed it, the people of Gorton and Denton believed it. The positivity was contagious.
But as the saying goes, the hard work has only just started. It’s time to show the people what belief in the Greens looks like.
Zack Polanski told us that it’s the lowering of bills. It’s about tangible policies, not just abstract concepts of hope. Bringing water companies back into public ownership, ending shareholder profits, universal free childcare (I think a leaf taken from Mamdani’s book, why not?) and no donations from multi-nationals.
If I’m going to draw a conclusion to be drawn from this, I think it’s that The Greens did something radically different to Reform and Labour. They didn’t result to cloak and dagger electoral techniques, they actually presented a version of the future.
One of hope, not hate.