How sectarian is London’s politics?
If the by-election in Gorton and Denton is a seismic event, then the aftershocks will be felt by Londoners in borough elections across the capital in May, writes James Ford
By-elections are often exceptional, aberrant outliers from normal politics. The full attention of party campaign strategists and the national press are ruthlessly trained on a single seat of around 70,000 voters for a short, intense and often testy burst of political activity. As such they are a rare opportunity to cast a protest vote and a chance to give a serving government a bloody nose. But, whilst they are usually too distant in time or too different in scale to offer meaningful lessons for the next General Election, they do provide a useful snapshot of where UK politics – and public opinion – is at a given moment. Given we are just weeks away from borough elections across the capital, the Gorton and Denton by-election does offer some juicy political takeaways that will shape how the campaign in London is fought and, even more importantly, how it is pored over, dissected and interpreted. There are three questions that Londoners should keep to the fore over the coming weeks:
Firstly, how sectarian are London’s politics? Reform UK have been very quick – almost indecently so – to blame their defeat on dirty tricks and ‘sectarian politics’ (which is thinly coded language attacking the Greens for effectively mobilising Gorton’s significant Muslim population to back them). This language, coupled with allegations of ‘family voting’, will make Islam the prism through which the results will be judged. According to the 2021 Census, around 16 per cent of London’s population is Muslim and in a number of east London Boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Newham and Redbridge) Muslim voters make up more than 30 per cent of the electorate. Never mind that London is the most diverse region in the UK or that race and religion are not the same thing, expect the borough elections to be accompanied by an increasingly intemperate parallel debate about multiculturalism in the capital. Expect every leaflet in Urdu and every passing reference to Gaza to be shamelessly amplified, weaponised and editorialised.
Stop Labour or stop Reform?
Secondly, will Londoners be voting against Labour, against Reform or both? In Gorton and Denton, Reform pitched that they were the obvious choice for voters keen to punish the government, whilst Labour claimed to be the party of choice for progressives desperate to keep Reform from winning the seat. In the end, voters decided that, by voting Green, they could achieve both objectives with a clear conscience. The Greens will do very well in London if they are able to pull off that same trick again. And the difference between the Green and Reform tallies of seats gained will provide the proof of what Londoners were truly voting against.
Thirdly, will a terrible night for Starmer hide a bad night for Badenoch? The spectacular defeat that Labour suffered in Gorton and Denton last week masked a similarly terrible result for the Conservatives in the same seat. Sure, Labour lost a seat they had held safely for nearly a century. But the Conservatives dropped to just two per cent of the vote and lost their deposit in what many think is the party’s worst ever by-election performance.
There is ample evidence that a Labour ‘annihilation’ across London on May 7th may well overshadow a very bad outcome for the Tories in the capital too. Whilst Conservatives are quietly confident that they could regain control of flagship boroughs like Wandsworth or the City of Westminster (once-impregnable true-blue bastions that fell to Labour in 2022), they face a much tougher fight in outer London. Previously the capital’s outer boroughs were the party’s suburban heartland; the ‘doughnut’ that elected Boris Johnson as Mayor not once but twice. However, it is these outer London boroughs that Reform is targeting. Regaining Westminster might give Kemi Badenoch something to brag about but, if it comes at the price of losing Bexley and Bromley then Tory claims of a genuine recovery in the capital will ring hollow.
This year’s local elections are a big deal. They are as significant and impactful to decision makers in Westminster as the US mid terms are to power brokers in Washington. If Labour loses their grip on inner London to the Greens and Reform UK takes a big bite out of the Tory doughnut, it will pose an existential threat to both old, established parties and make the 2028 battle to decide who controls City Hall much harder to predict.
James Ford is a former adviser to Boris Johnson during his time as Mayor of London.