Labour won Gorton and Denton with a 13,000 majority in 2024. Jon Trickett MP argues that to win it again, the government must urgently change direction.
Jon Trickett is the Labour MP for Normanton and Hemsworth
In the wake of Starmer’s decision to block Andy Burnham’s bid to be Labour candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, polling showed that the vast majority of Manchester voters opposed the move. But life moves on quickly and the focus is now on the by-election itself. Journalists report that the people who work in the dark in No. 10 expect Labour to lose the by-election. Yet, there is no iron law of politics that guarantees defeat in a seat the party won with a 13,000-vote majority just 18 months ago.
Putting aside the personalities for the moment, there are things the Government can do to break out of the unpopular cycle into which it has entered. And that requires the government to change direction and deliver the social justice which is so lacking in our country currently.
This week’s figures from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) should stop the government in its tracks. Poverty in Britain is at shocking levels. The incomes of millions are far below what is needed to survive. Acute poverty is now at record highs. Child poverty has hit an unprecedented scale. Even basic essentials are out of reach for huge numbers of people who are in work. This is not just a social crisis. It is a failure of leadership of Britain’s political elite.
It’s hard to forget Dickens’ line “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” Beyond the millions who suffer poverty there are millions more who hover just above the poverty line. They are not living in misery but in a state of anxiety which is also debilitating.
Keir Starmer came to power promising “change”. But the reality exposed by the JRF data is a country still trapped in decline. The Labour leadership chose the wrong economic story and imposed it from the above. They chose to reassure the bond markets but to offer little comfort to the wider population.
Even when Labour chooses to act, it is often too little, too late and appears like a u-turn. The cut to winter fuel payments is a clear example: a decision driven by tight fiscal thinking, pushed through without proper debate, and only reversed after public outrage. The damage was already done. Working-class people saw a government more worried about balance sheets than about whether pensioners could heat their homes.
This economic failure and the related lack of social justice provokes dissent which then leads to Starmer’s increasingly authoritarian leadership style. Power inside the party has been centralised to an extraordinary degree. Debate is closed down. Members and local communities are ignored. Popular, trusted figures are treated as threats rather than assets – as seen in the decision to block Andy Burnham.
That same instinct runs through the government. Decisions are made by a small group at the centre, with little input from those who understand poverty first-hand. The result is policies that look tidy on paper but brutal in real life.
Working-class voters understand this. They do not need graphs to tell them things are getting worse. They can see it in their energy bills, their rent and their food shopping. They hear a Labour leadership talking about restraint while their lives become more precarious. That is why Labour’s support is weakening in the very communities it was created to represent.
The JRF data is a warning siren. Poverty on this scale is not inevitable. It is the result of political choices – shaped by Starmer’s determination to prove Labour can be trusted by the establishment, even if that means failing the people who need Labour most.
Changing the leader alone would not solve everything. We need a fundamental change in direction – away from timid fiscal rules, away from top-down control, and towards real redistribution and investment. Otherwise, poverty and a pervasive sense of injustice will remain locked in.
It follows then that in the face of poor polling results the political imperative is that the government urgently needs a change of direction. There is no iron law which says that Labour must lose in the by-election or in the upcoming May elections. And so the Labour movement must insist on a new direction driven by political will, which has sadly been lacking in recent times.
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