The attempts of the establishment an its media to foster the illusion that Labour was still in with a chance of winning the Gorton & Denton by-election inevitably failed. It was always a two-horse race between Greens and Reform, and increasingly, as I have set out before, that will be the case in coming elections, too. In Scotland and Wales, that will take the form of a two-horse race between SNP and Reform, and Plaid and Reform, respectively. The only question in this by-election was whether Greens or Reform would win, and by how much? In turn, as Reform has, now, peaked that turned on just by how much Labour's vote collapsed.
In the end, it wasn't even close. The Green's secured 40% of the vote, the kind of figure that, in a two-party system, is required to win elections. They won by 4,000 votes, thereby, also cutting off any rational basis for the inevitable attempts to claim that they only won, because of some ballot rigging and shenanigans, or that it was all due to the Greens mobilising some sectarian Muslim vote. Reform, of course, has still tried to do that, digging up some “independent” group that no one had heard of called “Democracy Volunteers”, who, after the vote had ended, claimed they had witnessed instances of “family voting”.
As the professional election officials in Manchester noted, if the “Democracy Volunteers” had witnessed such activity, which is a criminal offence, why did they not draw it to the attention of the responsible officials as it was occurring, including, thereby, the police? Anyone who has worked on polling duty, or who has been a candidate in an election, knows that its highly unlikely, because the officials have to hand ballot papers individually to voters, and are able from their seats to monitor the voting booths, to be able to see if anyone else other than the voter enters them. There will, no doubt, be some further investigation of the claims, but it also invites an investigation into just who the “volunteers” were, who made these belated claims.
The size of the Greens win, however, means that not even Reform have been able to claim that, were they valid, they would change the result. That Reform has still pressed them simply shows them up as bad losers, and more concerned to simply whip up Islamophobic hysteria. They have not been alone, however. Labour, also, as it must have known it was going to lose, looked for excuses and scapegoats. They attacked the Greens for putting out literature in Urdu! In the past, not only has Labour put out its literature in the language of the communities whose votes it was seeking, but so do local councils, and other organisations. If you are serious about wanting to be inclusive, then, why would you not seek to communicate with those communities in their own language, in order to include and integrate them? But, of course, the media, also, fell in with the meme of suggesting that there was something unusual and sinister in such actions.
Labour also showed that its desperation has reached new levels, leading to its politics and methods sinking even further into the sewers. As it saw its strategy and its vote collapse to the Greens, it put out a leaflet from a made up organisation, to claim that the latest polls suggested that only a vote for Labour could beat Reform. Together with sending a van around the streets with a picture of Polanski and Spencer, claiming that they wanted to turn over families daughters to prostitution, they also, put out leaflets claiming that they wanted to lead them into drug addiction by legalising all drugs. That's the same argument used by the old reactionaries to claim that arguing for legalising abortion amounts to encouraging it, or encouraging girls to have sex, and, before that, it was used to argue against sex education, and contraception.
Labour also attacked the Greens for putting out leaflets of Starmer with Modi and Netanyahu. But, if Starmer and his government are proud of their relationships with these vile reactionary nationalist regimes, why would they object to anyone publicising them. Those behind Blue Labour, of course, seemed to have no problem with using similar images of Jeremy Corbyn, standing alongside representatives of Hamas, Hezbollah and so on. Labour, also, seems to have forgotten that it put out election leaflets showing Boris Johnson standing alongside Modi, with an explicit message attached to it.
Labour has sunk to new depths, and to try to cling on, it simply lies each time it opens its mouth.
As I wrote recently, all this shows is that class remains the basis of political interests and ideas. The petty-bourgeoisie, formerly, provided the core support for the Conservatives, but the Conservative Party, in government, never represented their interests, other than in the sense that the petty-bourgeois, always looked up towards the bourgeoisie, and hoped to join them in due course. The organised working-class always formed the core support for Labour, but it never represented their interests in government, other than in mollifying the worst aspects of their exploitation and oppression, and a continual promise of “jam tomorrow”, based on the idea that the interests of workers was, also, for a successful expansion of capital.
That relationship has not changed, it has simply changed the labels on the parties. The petty-bourgeoisie, hugely increased in numbers, but also driven, since the 1980's, into increased levels of poverty and precarity, lost hope in its interests being pursued by the Conservatives, and so it split away to be transformed into Reform. Blue Labour sought to chase after a mirage. It confused poverty with class seeing the least affluent, most precarious sections of society, the petty-bourgeois, with working-class, which they never were or will be, any more than, in the past, the peasantry were part of the working-class. Their ideas, their interests are and always will be, self-centred, individualistic, and determined by their relation to the means of production, the fact that they own them, but that, given their dwarfish nature, they are always led to the most crude means of being competitive. They are, inimical to the interests of the working-class.
Yet, Blue Labour made the quest for the votes of these reactionary, petty-bourgeois, and their associated layers within the ranks of the lumpen, and backward sections of unorganised workers, the centre of its strategy, if it even merits such a designation. The idea that the vote for Brexit could be equated, in the so called “Red Wall” seats, with the vote of working-class, Labour voters, was always a fallacy. In those seats, the working-class, Labour voters, much as elsewhere, voted overwhelmingly to Remain – around 60-70%. Those areas voted Leave, not because of support from a majority of working-class, Labour voters, but because of a solid vote from that petty-bourgeoisie, including many who usually do not bother to even vote.
By chasing an illusion, and, so, when Farage says “jump”, Starmer has simply asked “how high?”, Labour failed, inevitably, to win the votes of that reactionary petty-bourgeois mass that has never been the base of the Labour vote, and which simply transferred from Tory to Reform, but, also, turned away in their droves, the actual working-class base of Labour support. By even abandoning the mild social-democratic agenda of Labour of the previous 80 years, Starmer's Labour cut off any chance of securing that actual working-class base, seen in the fact that, whilst Corbyn brought much of that support back, in 2017, Blue Labour has dissipated it all.
The only thing that saved Starmer in 2024 was the fact that the rebranding of Toryism into Reform was not complete, so that the petty-bourgeois, Tory/Reform vote was split, allowing Labour to win, with an historically low number of votes, and low share of the votes. That process is now playing out with Labour too. Gorton and Denton shows that the old inertia, together with the efforts of the media to portray Labour as still having hope of winning, enabled it to retain support. But, that illusion has been shattered. It went from winning the seat with more than 50% of the vote (in the past it had 60% of the vote) in 2024, to third place, and its vote share being halved. The fate of the Tories simply shows it the future. The Tories lost their deposit.
In election after election, now, the argument that only Labour can defeat Reform cannot credibly be made. On the contrary, the argument, now, becomes, only the Greens (also read, SNP, Plaid) can defeat Reform, and a vote for Labour is a wasted vote. Reform, much as with Trump in the US, has peaked, as the support for such petty-bourgeois parties always does. But, that does not benefit Labour which has simply attempted to present itself as its pale shadow. It means that, in the period ahead, in elections at least, it will be the Greens that play the role that, in the past, was played by Labour.
