A Manchester By-Election Could Decide the Direction of British Politics

Eleven candidates. Three real contenders. One seat in south Manchester that nobody expected to matter – until it became the most-watched race in Britain.

The Gorton and Denton by-election on February 26 has turned into a test of everything wrong with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. A seat the party won with 50.8% of the vote just 20 months ago is now a genuine toss-up. Betting markets have the Greens as favourites at 68%, with Reform UK at 19% and Labour trailing at just 9%.

That’s not a typo. The governing party of the United Kingdom is a single-digit underdog in one of its own heartland seats.

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How We Got Here

Andrew Gwynne, the local MP, resigned in January on health grounds. He’d already been suspended from Labour in early 2025 over comments in a private WhatsApp group. What should have been a simple Labour hold turned into a circus when Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham tried to run for the seat – and was blocked by Labour’s own National Executive Committee.

The NEC’s decision lit a fire. Burnham was seen as a potential leadership challenger to Starmer, and blocking him looked like the party machine protecting the boss rather than picking the best candidate. Labour ended up selecting Angeliki Stogia, a Manchester city councillor, as their candidate. She’s capable. But she’s not Andy Burnham, and the party faithful know it.

The seat itself is a weird mash-up. It was stitched together from parts of three old constituencies in the 2024 boundary changes. The Manchester end – about 65% of the voters – skews young, diverse, and heavily Muslim (around 40% in some wards). The Denton end, in Tameside, is older, whiter, and more working-class. These two halves of the constituency want different things, and right now, different parties are offering them.

The Three-Way Fight

The Green candidate is Hannah Spencer, a local councillor who ran for mayor in 2024. Green leader Zack Polanski has thrown everything at this race, and the party’s pitch is straightforward: they’re the only progressive option that can beat Reform. Among under-30 voters nationally, the Greens already poll at 37% – far ahead of any other party, per YouGov data. In the student-heavy Manchester wards, that matters.

Reform’s Matt Goodwin – the political scientist turned pundit turned candidate – is running a campaign built around crime, the decline of local high streets, and grooming gangs. Reform chief whip Lee Anderson has been on the ground (though he got in trouble for posting campaign photos actually taken in the wrong constituency). Internal Reform polling reportedly shows them in first, with the Greens second.

📊 Key Stat: Labour won Gorton and Denton with a majority of 13,413 in July 2024. At the last by-election, in Runcorn and Helsby, Reform overturned a Labour majority of over 14,000 – winning by just six votes. (Source: University of Manchester / The Conversation)

Labour’s problem is simple math. If progressive voters split between Labour and the Greens, Reform wins. If anti-Reform voters consolidate behind one candidate, that candidate probably wins. But nobody knows which way it’ll go.

This isn’t just a by-election. It’s a live experiment in whether Britain’s old two-party system can survive when five parties are all polling in double digits.

The Sceptic’s Case

There are reasons to be careful about reading too much into this. By-elections are strange animals. Turnout was already low in Gorton and Denton in 2024 – just 48%, well below the national average. By-election turnout will be lower still, and that makes the result unpredictable.

The one constituency poll that exists – from Find Out Now – had a sample of just 51 voters after adjustments. The pollster itself said the data shouldn’t be used to call a winner. And Polymarket odds, while interesting, are based on thin trading volumes and sentiment, not science.

A Labour loss here would make headlines. But it wouldn’t automatically mean the party is dead. It would mean the party is badly wounded in a very specific kind of seat – diverse, fragmented, and hit from both sides.

What to Watch on February 26

Three things will tell the real story. First, turnout. If it drops below 30%, the result says more about apathy than alignment. Second, the Green vote share. If Spencer breaks 30%, the Greens can claim they’ve arrived as a national force in England, not just a protest vote. Third, the margin. If Reform wins narrowly because Labour and the Greens split the progressive vote, that becomes the template story for the next general election – and the argument for tactical voting gets very loud very fast.

The polls close at 10pm on Thursday, February 26. Results are expected in the early hours of the 27th. Whatever happens, British politics looks different the next morning.

Sources: Bloomberg,Polymarket,PollCheck