A byelection has been set for February 26 in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton. This will be a big test for Keir Starmer’s Labour party and a temperature check on the state of multi-party politics in the North. Although Labour won the seat comfortably in 2024, some early polls are already suggesting Reform could win.

Byelections are awkward beasts and don’t necessarily follow the usual rules. What makes things harder in this case is that Gorton and Denton is a new constituency. It was formed by boundary changes in 2024 from parts of three different Manchester constituencies (Gorton, Denton & Reddish and Manchester Withington).

When we try to understand what might happen in a byelection, we rely on the constituency’s past election results as a marker, which is obviously limited to just one election in this case. Gorton and Denton is also “a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster”, as my colleague Rob Ford has written.

It has an elongated shape and combines areas with huge socio-demographic differences. Its Tameside wards are predominantly white, with a sizeable working class while its Manchester wards have a much higher student and Muslim population.

Labour has everything to lose

Ordinarily, this would be a constituency which Labour should easily win. Manchester is a Labour heartland through and through. Its other five constituencies are all held by Labour MPs, it boasts all but a handful of seats on the City Council and Andy Burnham trounced his opponents in the city’s last mayoral elections with a 68,000 majority.

But byelections are difficult for governments and Keir Starmer’s track record so far is not good. Labour lost a byelection in the Cheshire constituency of Runcorn and Helsby in May 2025 to Reform’s Sarah Pochin. Pochin won on a narrow margin of just six votes but had managed to overturn a majority of over 14,000. That makes Labour’s majority of 13,000 in Gorton and Denton look less than secure.

The real danger here is that Labour finds itself in the squeezed middle. It risks losing voters to Reform on the right and the Greens on the left. This is what happened in the Caerphilly Senedd byelection in November, which saw Labour pushed back into third place behind Reform and winners Plaid Cymru.

Reform has everything to prove

Nigel Farage’s party has the momentum at the moment. Polls suggest they are outperforming Labour nationally right now and the recent high-profile defections of Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman have increased the size of their parliamentary group to 8 MPs.

The Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, former university academic and GB News presenter Matthew Goodwin, may be the most recognisable candidate to voters, but his political views may not go down well throughout the constituency.

His views on the white working class being left behind may resonate in some of Manchester’s Tameside wards, but his extreme views on immigration and what it means to be British will not play well in others, something the Greens in particular are trying to capitalise on.

Pitching the byelection as a “referendum” on Starmer’s leadership is a sensible strategy by Goodwin, especially as a recent YouGov poll showed that 76% of voters in the North think the prime minister is doing a bad job. Reform may struggle to bring together enough voters ready to sign up to all the party stands for, but may be able to borrow the votes from those who nevertheless want Labour out and would benefit from a split on the left.

Victory in Gorton and Denton would not only mean that Reform will equal the SNP in party group size in the Commons, it will be a further pull for disgruntled or panicking Conservative (or Labour) MPs, ahead of the May 7 deadline Farage has imposed on MPs thinking about defecting to his party. But there is a sizeable chunk of voters across the UK who say they would never vote for Reform, and who could vote tactically for Labour just to keep Reform out.

Green performance could be key

The Greens did not perform brilliantly in Gorton and Denton at the 2024 elections, but nationally the party received 7% of the vote and they hold over 800 seats on local councils. Since the election, they have elected a new leader, Zack Polanski, who has been instrumental in raising the Green voice in the media.

Their candidate is Hannah Spencer, a councillor in the region who stood for mayor in 2024 and finished in fifth place, behind Reform.

Polanski is confident that only the Greens can beat Reform in Gorton and Denton. And while that’s a bold claim, his supporters will be buoyed by the seat they took from Reform in a Derbyshire local byelection last year.

And even if they don’t win, a solid Green performance could be very bad news for Starmer.

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