The forthcoming Gorton and Denton is going to have considerably less star power than once seemed likely. Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing, which in turn rendered redundant a promise by former MP George Galloway to stand against the Greater Manchester mayor. And Green Party leader Zack Polanski, like Burnham currently without a Westminster seat, has disappointed many of his party’s new members by pulling out too.
The Greens are already in full campaign mode, but those who know the constituency well believe Polanski made a wise decision. To hold off Reform, a party of the left will need as broad an appeal as possible, and while Polanski was hopeful of peeling off former Labour and Lib Dem voters, insiders say he may have concluded that many of the nearly 4,000 voters who backed Galloway’s Workers’ Party in 2024 – a considerable percentage of them Muslims – are unlikely to vote for a gay Jewish man this time round, however sound he might be on Gaza.
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The Greens’ campaign for the seat features using tactics cribbed from Polanski’s old party, the Lib Dems – who he angrily quit after not being selected as a by-election candidate for the Richmond Park constituency. They are circulating a dubious bar chart portraying the seat as a two-horse race between themselves and Reform, with a “Labour have blown it” caption showing the incumbent in first place.
Labour’s remaining online activists say the chart, based on an “estimate” of the vote change since the last election, is cheeky at best, given Labour took 18,000 votes in the seat in 2024, versus just 5,000 for the Greens.
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