Somewhere Else To Go

Peter Mandelson once said that left-wing voters had “nowhere else to go”. First at Caerphilly, and now also at Gorton and Denton, Labour has said that voting for it was “the only way to beat Reform”. First at Caerphilly, and now also at Gorton and Denton, Labour has dropped from first place to third, with the winner being a party to its left. Highly problematic ones from the point of view of many of us, but even so.

Will there be a ward-by-ward breakdown of the Gorton and Denton result? At any rate, even if each of the 32 families purportedly observed by the previously unheard of Democracy Volunteers had had 10 members, then that would still have been only 320 people, whereas Hannah Spencer’s majority is 4,402. If Muslim women’s votes were cast by their husbands, then that did not begin yesterday, so the 2024 Labour majority of 13,413 must have been illegitimate. And nothing says Matt Goodwin’s “dangerous Muslim sectarianism” quite like Muslims voting for a white woman whose party was led by a gay Jew.