Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Vote Green in UK Gorton and Denton By-Election
Today, the people who reside in the constituency of Gorton and Denton (near Manchester) will vote in a by-election to replace their sitting MP Andrew Gwynne, who claims to be leaving the House of Commons for health reasons. The race appears to be done to the Labour Party (of which Mr. Gwynne is a member), Reform and the Greens. Labour does not deserve the seat given the way the government led by Sir Keir Starmer is failing to function. Reform is a bad joke that is possibly turning into a nightmare, The Greens are a credible alternative to Labour for lefty voters, and that is to whom their votes should go.
Mr. Gwynne has been unwell throughout the 21 years he has been an MP, and one genuinely hopes for a speedy recovery if at all possible. At the same time, it is impossible to deny there are other considerations. PoliticsHome, a UK political site situated in Westminster, reported:
Gwynne, a former health minister, was suspended from the Labour Party in February last year after offensive WhatsApp messages were leaked. He has also been the subject of an investigation by the parliamentary commissioner for standards.
He apologised at the time for his "badly misjudged" comments and any offence caused.
The question, which matters less now that he has retired, is whether there is something else coming down the pike.
Regardless of how Gorton and Denton got here, the majority Mr. Gwynne enjoyed was 13,413 at the last general electin, making this a fairly safe Labour seat. There are a couple of preference polls out, but a constituency poll is difficult to do as the size of the samples tends to be small. For instance, a Find Out Now poll was discussed on the Week in Polls on Substack, which stated:
We have had the first by-election poll for Gorton and Denton. But it had a sample of just 143, and once 'don't knows' are excluded, that falls to 51 people -- which causes me to come up with a new rule of thumb: beware of polls where the sample is smaller than the number of Liberal Democrat MPs …
About a poll from Omnisis, the same author wrote: We also have a by-election poll with a more typical sample size (452), this one from Omnisis and carried out by a mix of phone and online. Excluding undecideds (who are 27% of the original sample) and those who say they would not vote (13%), and after weighting, this comes out as a sample of 265 with: Greens: 33%, Reform: 29%, Labour: 26%
This seems quite typical of a by-election. First of all, the governing party is not way out ahead even in a safe seat. There is a massive "don't know" and "won't vote" segment of the electorate. Finally, protest parties do better than legacy parties; that is, Reform and Green (and elsewhere, LibDem, SNP and Plaid Cymru) candidates get more support than usual at the expense of Labour and Conservatives.
If Labour should hold the seat, it will boost Sir Keir and his government going into the May 7 local elections. If Reform wins, the Labour government will be wondering if it has any seats where Reform cannot win because they will have turned out voters who do not usually turn up. If the Greens win, Labour will have to decide how to win back those lefty voters. In the next two months, it is difficult to see what they could do to get those voters to return to the fold.
This by-election is not going to change the arithmetic of the House, where Labour still has more than a 150-seat majority. What it will do is shift the discussion of the current state of the parties ahead of the local elections. If those go badly for Labour, a leadership challenge becomes plausible.
© Copyright 2026 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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