Gorton and Denton

[fillyboy]

Was talking to a visiting political journalist last week and asked him his thoughts on the by election. Most friends I've spoken to assume Labour will win because of the huge majorities they've enjoyed in the past. He surprised me by saying he thought Reform were in with a 50/50 chance, he spoke highly of their candidate Matt Goodwin.
My thoughts were Labour are in a weak position because it's going to be a vote on Starmer's record so far and anger over the Andy Burnham saga, but I assumed the Greens would take a lot of the votes.
I'm not so sure now.
One thing I am sure about, IF Reform do win, I'd put them odds on to be the next Government.

 

[Lower]

Matt Goodwin is trying to frame the by-election as a referendum on Starmer and the labour government in general, as well as focusing on local issues. Seeing as it's been a safe Labour seat for a long time and he's going around knocking on doors and actually talking to the locals rather than taking them for granted, i think he stands a very good chance taking advantage of the public extreme dislike of labour.

Labour also didn't do themselves any favours with their out of context edited video designed to show Matt Goodwin appearing to say negative things about Manchester, when in reality he was actually referring to the Conservative party conference being held there. After the BBC trump editing, you'd have thought they'd have known better.

Still a long way to go until the next election though.

 

[motorbiking]

Labour candidate seems to have cost the tax payer a fair bit when she pedestrianised some bus routes and got sued.

Can’t have been cheap to close roads, pay legal costs and then open them up again.

Starmers approval rating seems to go up every time he leaves the country.

I think she might get in with a slim majority. But then since everyone knows who is in power either way, there is no need for cautious voting.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

I'll stick my neck out... Reform will win this seat. Matt Goodwin is a really decent bloke, and he's from the area. I've been watching his political analysis on YouTube since long before he joined Reform. He actually thinks, analyses and talks logical sense - something you'll never hear from the current crop of evangelist loonies that seem to have taken over Labour. If he's out and about talking to people and they're listening then he'll win.

But a lot depends on the "Muslim" vote, which is 30+% of the local population (and rising). I hear unelected "community leaders" talking about their people in really derogatory terms, in which they often imply that they all do as they're told by their mosque. I really hope, for the future of the UK, that this really isn't the case, and that they're actually free-thinking people and some are as concerned about the craziness of the current government as much as so many of the white population.

But hopefully "the left" will split in two between Labour and Green. People on the centre-right are now understanding that voting Tory will let Labour in so will vote Reform instead. And a vote for Lib Dem is just a waste of a vote, as it always has been in most places. Plus there are a bunch of other nothing parties who may as well not bother.

 

[SPLINE]

Reform deserves to win, but one mustn't discount the Green Party, which has been fully trojan horsed and is now effectively another party of islam like Labour. G&D is a strange constituency, a mix of two very different areas. Gorton, in Manchester, is a hell-hole full of muslims and Africans (i.e. people who should not have the vote) and the smell of cannabis is everywhere. Denton, which is in Tameside, is a fairly pleasant, clean and tidy area which doesn't have the decay and menacing atmosphere of inner Manchester, although bordering it. Incredible that the former should have any influence over the latter.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

My prediction of Reform winning is based on hope, that the Muslims aren't as daft as their self-appointed leaders tell us that they are. If they really are a mind-controlled blob then we have long-term national problems on a far bigger scale than one MP by-election.

 

[MNW67]

I'll stick my neck out... Reform will win this seat. Matt Goodwin is a really decent bloke, and he's from the area. I've been watching his political analysis on YouTube since long before he joined Reform. He actually thinks, analyses and talks logical sense - something you'll never hear from the current crop of evangelist loonies that seem to have taken over Labour. If he's out and about talking to people and they're listening then he'll win.

I didn't know that much about him before.

But the impression I get from reading comments in the papers, from those who know him well, is that he is a sad little opportunist with a fragile ego, who felt slighted when he couldn't land a job at one of the top universities. Going back a decade he was thought of as a promising academic, who did ground breaking research into the far right. But he seems to have ended up with Stockholm Syndrome, prompting him to go on a 'journey' to join those he once opposed.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

the papers

Let me guess - The Guardian, the labour party internal magazine and central plank of its brainwashing program?

 

[noseall]

brainwashing

That's one thing the RWR don't need to worry about.

 

[fillyboy]

Reform deserves to win, but one mustn't discount the Green Party, which has been fully trojan horsed and is now effectively another party of islam like Labour. G&D is a strange constituency, a mix of two very different areas. Gorton, in Manchester, is a hell-hole full of muslims and Africans (i.e. people who should not have the vote) and the smell of cannabis is everywhere. Denton, which is in Tameside, is a fairly pleasant, clean and tidy area which doesn't have the decay and menacing atmosphere of inner Manchester, although bordering it. Incredible that the former should have any influence over the latter.

I think the Green party will take a lot of the vote.

 

[blup]

Vote Green vote plumber!

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

Plumber? I doubt that anyone in the Green party has actual practical skills or has ever done any useful work.

 

[fillyboy]

Plumber? I doubt that anyone in the Green party has actual practical skills or has ever done any useful work.

Zak Polansky can enlarge breasts using hypnosis.

 

[MNW67]

Let me guess - The Guardian, the labour party internal magazine and central plank of its brainwashing program?

The Times:

During the 2010s he wrote a series of prescient and quite successful books about the rise of populism and the far-right in Britain. But at some point along the way, he became a populist right-winger himself. Critics have suggested that after years of studying Farage and company, Goodwin “went native” and grasped the opportunity for fame and fortune offered by surfing the rising tide of ethno-nationalism.

“His motivation is and always has been the same, which is the promotion and advancement of Matthew Goodwin,” says another former colleague. “He never stops, never quits. And the cause is him, his name, up in lights.”

The reinvention of Matt Goodwin, from professor to Reform radical

The Faragist candidate for Gorton & Denton has been on a remarkable journey into right-wing politics

web.archive.org

 

[MNW67]

Another couple of quotes from the same article:

Everyone who knows Goodwin mentions how driven and determined he has always been. After finishing his PhD he raced up the academic ladder and became a professor of politics.

The Cameroon project was in the ascendancy then and Goodwin’s centrism was in tune with the times. He was particularly concerned about anti-immigration sentiment and xenophobia. On the Conservative Home website, he expressed concerns about the “worrying levels of public hostility towards Muslims”. Writing in the New Statesman in 2013, he argued that “the more we stoke public anger and distrust on immigration, the more we threaten the stability of our political system”.

Goodwin’s mounting radicalism has made some in his orbit uncomfortable. “I’ve looked on with some unease at his trajectory in the last year or two,” says one friend. “His Substack has become more and more glib and tabloidy. There is something slightly creepy, slightly Mosleyite about it all.”

In some ways the central question asked about Goodwin is the same as that asked about JD Vance in America, or indeed Robert Jenrick back home. Is this a sincere ideological journey? Or the cynical self-advancement of a fame-hungry egomaniac?