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The ruling British Labour Party and the anti-immigration Reform Party lost the Gorton and Denton by-election to the Greens (the genuinely left-wing party) who had courted the Muslim vote.
The Daily Telegraph, which people are calling the Telavivegraph, thinks the Greens have become extremists. They always were, but not because they oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza.
Nick Robinson of the BBC said many will dismiss the result by pointing to a “large Muslim vote still motivated and angry about what happened in Gaza”.
In fact it is not only what happened but what is still happening in Gaza and it is not just Muslim voters who care.
Many, many Christians and some Jews do, though probably few Hindus. Plenty of Conservatives do.
Anyway Muslim voters like everyone else have many reasons not to vote Labour even before you think of Mandelson, McSweeney and Epstein.
This short clip, which I posted before, shows the Reform candidate Matt Goodwin whom I like a lot in many ways, making a chump of himself by defending Israel.
I wonder if it cost him the election.
Masha Gessen told a Ha'aretz interviewer on 8 May 2024 that Biden's support for the Palestinians would cost him the election.
"If he doesn't have the youth vote he has no hope of beating Trump. So that's another brick in the case for the incredible support for Israel. That Biden and his administration are willing to sacrifice the election to ongoing engagement with Israel is heartbreaking, shocking."
No he hadn't.
Yes it was.
His senility led to his being pushed off the ticket, of course, but Gaza lost Kamala Harris the US presidency instead.
It may cost European right-wing populists votes as they all back Netanyahu.
It will also cost 'the West' an incalculable amount.
https://unherd.com/2026/02/how-gorton-beat-denton/
ReplyDeleteAris Roussinos:
Ascribing the process to Muslim sectarianism thus obscures the nature of the ethnic mobilization now in play among Reform just as much as the Greens: as pre-election Opinium polling revealed, among white voters, Reform dominated the contest, with a vote share approximating that of the Greens and Labour combined. Indeed, at 57% of the population, the proportion of white voters in Gorton and Denton exactly matches that projected for the UK as whole by 2050. If the political maps of Britain are increasingly ethnic ones, then we can expect future elections to proceed accordingly, if in less binary form than Northern England. The rise of the Greens and Reform each now accelerate that of the other. The speed and extent of demographic change means that the collapse of the former mass parties of 20th-century Britain now appears baked in, even if neither the Greens nor Reform is likely to remain the ultimate protagonists of British political contest.
“It is permissible, indeed electorally necessary, for progressives to engage in such open ethnic organizing.”
Against this argument, the writer John Merrick, one of the more astute Leftist critics of the Right’s increasingly ethnic framing of British politics, dismisses the observation that the Palestine flag has become a marker of South Asian Muslim ethnic mobilization by remarking that objecting to Israel’s war on Gaza is not solely a Muslim concern. Indeed, he accuses those who have made this observation, particularly me, of attempting to “to lay the blame on specific ethnic groups” for what he terms the “widespread sense of alienation among often young British Muslims”. In that revulsion to the Gaza war is not solely a matter for South Asian Muslims, he is correct. Yet if Green strategy were merely a matter of principled internationalist politics, rather than of appealing to narrow ethnic loyalties, one struggles to imagine why the party should also wave the Pakistani flag in its campaigning, or release Urdu-language videos linking Starmer to India’s President Modi. Both are simply overt examples of ethnic Pakistani political mobilization, which, partly through willed ideological blindness and partly through mercenary electoral calculations, the Left chooses not to examine too closely. It is permissible, indeed electorally necessary, for progressives to engage in such open ethnic organizing: yet it remains taboo for them to remark upon it.
Free from such squeamishness, the Green Party’s Deputy Leader, Mothin Ali, is closer to the mark in noting that Matt Goodwin’s campaigning materials made repeated references to the defense of “Christian” identity, in what Ali termed “something that is quite sectarian that is harking back to those troubles [sic] in Ireland”. This is simply the Ulsterization thesis correctly observed, and applied for political gain, by the Green Party. Gorton and Denton was historic in that it was one of the first mainland British elections to be fought along near-overtly ethnic lines. Like Labour, the Greens mobilized white progressives and South Asian Muslims together against what they portrayed as Reform’s dangerous identitarian politics. As a national spectacle rather than a local campaign, specific political goals took a backseat to “keeping out Reform”, a party whose perception as one focused on narrow ethnic British interests is the unspoken context of all the Labour and Green rhetoric of “hope against hate” and “unity against division”. This is simply ethnic politics for a political system unwilling to name what it has become. Having lost both British Muslims and the white working class, Labour is at least now free to condemn their respective political manifestations.
The clip of Matt Goodwin was jaw-dropping. I really wonder what he had been told beforehand because he's a clever man and this was a very straightforward question, even for the strongest supporter of Israel. I can't imagine any Israeli politician fumbling a question about whether he cares more for any foreign country than he does for his own. Or anyone from any country, if it comes to that.
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