Why Gorton and Denton is still a good result for Reform

 

It was a great result for the Greens, and a terrible result for Labour. Although Reform didn’t win the Gorton and Denton by-election, by coming second with just under 30% of the vote they did pretty well. In 2024 the combined Reform and Tory vote was 22% of all votes cast, and this increased to 30.6% in this by-election.

The remaining vote was almost entirely distributed between Labour and the Green party. As a result Reform could not have won, however that remaining vote was distributed between Labour and the Greens. In the event the Labour vote in percentage terms was exactly halved compared to 2024. But Gorton and Denton is not a typical UK constituency. It is in a large city, and as a result is likely to be far less right wing than the average UK constituency. To say that Gorton and Denton shows how Reform can be defeated is simply wrong.

Only around 100 constituencies in Great Britain had a combination of Reform and Tory votes in 2024 as low or lower than in Gorton and Denton. In getting just over 30% of the vote in this by-election, the right improved their position considerably compared to 2024. But they still lost because they had a mountain to climb. In most other constituencies their task would be much easier, as I show below.

In a post I wrote two weeks ago I said

“Under FPTP, it is highly unlikely that a combination of socially liberal parties (the Greens, Liberal Democrats and nationalists) can win a majority of seats in the House of Commons, even if these parties could form a perfect pact between them to divide up seats before a General Election.”

One comment I received was that “highly unlikely” was too strong. I disagree, and in this post I want to say why, using the Gorton and Denton result as a kind of template. I will ask if social liberal parties do as well as they did in that by-election compared to Labour, what kind of general election result would that produce. I’m not a political scientist and I’ll just be using a spreadsheet in a very crude way, but I don’t think I need anything more sophisticated to make some key points:

1. With current national polling and including their result in Gorton and Denton, the right wing populist bloc (Reform + Conservatives) will be very hard to beat if their within bloc tactical voting is as or more efficient compared to tactical voting among socially liberal parties excluding Labour.
   
   

2. This is partly because our First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system is biased against social liberals.
   
   

3. The best way to prevent a right wing populist victory at the next election is for Labour to abandon its mimicking of Reform, so that social liberals can again vote tactically for Labour, and for Labour to modestly reduce the right blocs vote share.
   
   

Gorton and Denton is a useful template because tactical voting within voting blocs worked so well. The Green party got nearly all of the anti-right and anti-Labour vote, and Reform got nearly all of the votes that had previously gone to the Conservatives. In that sense, tactical voting within blocs, where we treat Labour as its own unique bloc, was almost perfect.

Suppose that result was repeated nationally. Suppose Labour’s vote share in each constituency is half what it was in 2024. Assume that the combined Conservative and Reform vote share increases by 8.5% compared to 2024, which is both what happened in Gorton and Denton and how current polls compare with 2024. Finally suppose that the remaining vote all goes to socially liberal parties: Greens, Liberal Democrats, Welsh or Scottish Nationalists. This is an exaggeration because the very minor parties always pick up a few votes, so our results will be biased towards the socially liberal bloc.

Now suppose that in each bloc there is perfect tactical voting, either because parties actually cooperate or because voters work out which party in their bloc is likely to do best and all vote for that party. It’s obviously an extreme assumption, but it’s not far from what happened in Gorton and Denton.

If my spreadsheet calculations are right, this outcome would result in a Labour wipe-out. Halving their vote in every constituency, and with perfect tactical voting in each of the other two blocs, would mean Labour did not win a single seat. So we can immediately see that this is a very extreme assumption. Parties in government tend to do better in general elections than in mid-term by-elections. But under that unrealistic assumption how would the other two blocs do? [1]

The answer would be that the right wing block would win a majority of about 250 among Great British seats. The average vote share for the right wing bloc in each constituency is just over 47%, which is close to their current vote in the national polls. The remainder of the vote is split between Labour and the socially liberal bloc, and as a result the socially liberal parties get considerably fewer seats than the right wing bloc even though Labour do not win a single seat.

This calculation assumes no tactical voting between the Labour and the socially liberal bloc. But if Labour’s vote collapses to Gorton and Denton levels because socially liberal voters are voting Green, Liberal Democrat or nationalist, it is no longer obvious to social liberals who to vote tactically for. In the scenario above I looked at all the constituencies where the Labour vote was still above the vote of the socially liberal bloc. I could only find one where the result would change if all social liberals voted Labour. This is because the socially liberal party vote tends to be small in constituencies where the right wing vote is very strong, so giving all the socially liberal votes to Labour in those seats does not help.

What about tactical voting from Labour to other socially liberal parties? Take the most extreme and totally unrealistic example of that, where there is perfect tactical voting between Labour and other socially liberal parties. In that case the right wing bloc (also with perfect tactical voting) could be defeated, just. Labour and other socially liberal parties would have a majority over Reform+Tories of just 8, even though Labour and other socially liberal parties have an average vote share across constituencies of nearly 53%. [2]

These calculations, although very crude, do I believe show two things clearly. First FPTP is biased against social liberals, and second that on current polling the right wing bloc is very hard to beat if their within bloc tactical voting is good.

But what about if the Labour vote continues to fall. With the success of the Greens in Gorton and Denton, perhaps half their 2024 vote share is not a lower bound for Labour. Could the socially liberal parties win then? The answer is simply no. Take an extreme example, which is that in each constituency the Labour vote collapses to one tenth of its level in the 2024 general election, and all these votes go to the socially liberal bloc. Then the right wing bloc gets a majority of over 60 among seats in Great Britain.

If the Labour vote continues to decline relative to Gorton and Denton levels, with all these votes going to socially liberal parties, the only way socially liberal parties could win a general election is if their tactical voting is better than the tactical voting within the right wing bloc, or if they start taking votes away from the right wing bloc. The former is possible of course, but more difficult simply because there are more socially liberal parties than right wing parties. On the latter, it is conceivable that some of those currently saying they will vote Tory or Reform could fall in love with Zack Polanski, and ignore all the attacks that are bound to come from the media, but I’d put that possibility in the highly unlikely category.

Which means that to realistically stop the next UK government being right wing, we need the Labour vote to improve by taking some of the votes currently going to the Conservatives and Reform (or, more likely, by current Don’t Knows breaking for Labour), and for Labour to stop mimicking Reform so that social liberals can more easily vote tactically for Labour against the right wing bloc.

That is why the Green victory in Gorton and Denton was important, because it helps strengthen the hand of those within Labour that want to change its strategy. Starmer’s response to their defeat in Gorton and Denton also shows that Labour still has a long way to go in that direction. Those that tell me and others that this will never happen and that ‘Labour are finished’ are in effect saying that a right wing victory in the next general election is very likely.

The best way of stopping a Reform government is to make the next general election all about voting tactically to stop that outcome. I’ve read some people saying that the Gorton and Denton result shows how that can be done. It doesn’t. The right wing vote in that constituency improved significantly compared to 2024, and its tactical split was almost perfect. Reform lost because it is a very left wing seat.

The Green victory in Gorton and Denton is important because it adds to the pressure for Labour to stop trying to ape Reform. That needs to happen, because to avoid a right wing populist government, socially liberal voters need to be prepared to vote tactically between Labour and other socially liberal parties in a way that is at least as efficient as tactical voting between Conservatives and Reform. As long as Labour acts and sounds like Reform on social issues, that is just not going to happen. But equally the anti-right wing vote needs a strong Labour vote, because it is highly unlikely that socially liberal parties can defeat the right without it. [3]

[1] If Labour did better than in Gorton and Denton, and achieved 70% of their 2024 vote in each constituency (current polls have them on just less than 57% of that vote), and with no tactical voting between Labour and socially liberal parties and the right wing bloc support remaining unchanged, Labour would still only get just over 40 seats, but the right wing majority would be around 300 seats in Great Britain.

[2] How can this be the case, when right wing parties did so badly in 2024? The first answer is that the combined right wing vote is better today than it was in 2024. If we do a calculation where the right wing vote is the same as 2024, and there is perfect tactical voting in both blocs and Labour’s vote is equal to its 2024 level, then Labour get about 250 seats, the right wing bloc 280, with the remainder and the balance of power held by over a hundred socially liberal party seats. The second answer follows from that. In 2024 tactical voting within the right wing bloc was almost non-existent, and in contrast there was a lot of tactical voting between Labour and socially liberal parties, because most voters wanted the Tories out of government.

[3] Of course a strong Labour vote is still compatible with the Green party winning a number of safe Labour seats like Gorton and Denton and perhaps with other socially liberal parties holding the balance of power in any future parliament. Just as the Tory move towards Reform may have created a large number of seats for the Liberal Democrats, so Labour’s move to Reform is likely to create a large number of seats for the Green party at the next general election.