Eamon Dyas

The only thing we can glean from this election is that Gorton and Denton is a constituency than is in an area which has experienced the classical manufacturing decline that’s typical of the old Labour heartlands. 

New Labour, under Blair, when confronted with the trajectory that Thatcher had established for the economy, instead of attempting to formulate policies that might have provided an alternative consistent with its social democratic traditions, choose instead to adapt the party to what he and his team saw as the future. It did this by basing itself on the interests of the consumer rather than the manufacturer. It was in that context that he opened the floodgates to cheap immigrant labour as a way to ensure lower prices for the consumer. The result has been a victory for a low-wage/low-price economy that in turn has left it open to even lower priced imports. 

In the interim the sectors of the economy that thrived were in the low-employment financial sector and (relatively high) service industries – something that tended to accelerate the already existing economic disparity between the south-east and the north.

Having abandoned its natural affinity with the northern working class the Labour Party became the party of the future by attaching itself to the youth. This wasn’t only confirmed in Blair’s policy of getting over 50% of young people into university but in the way that policies of climate change, inclusiveness and diversity were expanded to be dominated by a world fashioned around the young and trendy. “Cool Britannia” provided the base-line of how the party now decided to relate to the world. No more cloth caps and more virtue-labeling became the order of the day. 

In the meantime, the old Labour heartlands continued to decline but the tradition of the old working-class families continued to provide the votes for a party that had long forgotten them but which they continued to hope would eventually remember them. Time after time they turned out to vote for Labour and Labour initially was saved a place in their souls by the fact that its betrayal was now concealed behind successive Tory governments since the days of Blair. Labour could hide its betrayal by pointing the finger at the Tories as the cause of their plight. 

Corbyn partly offered them a genuine alternative to what the party had become. Yet, even though what Corbyn offered was no more radical than what the Labour Party under Harold Wilson had offered, it was not the kind of Labour Party that the architects of the New Labour Party wanted – in fact it was the kind of Labour Party that they had hoped they had put in the waste-bin of history. So, Corbyn’s idea of the Labour Party had to be destroyed. The architects of the new Labour Party knew they could not call on arguments around policies to achieve that aim as such a strategy would have exposed their antipathy to Labour’s old social democratic values so instead they aligned themselves with the Zionist element in the party to concoct the anti-semitism charge. 

Starmer is the result of that victory but it was a victory that came with the cost of converting his and New Labour’s policies into reality when they won the 2024 general election. The verdict of the Gorton and Denton constituency is a verdict partially delivered by the old working class but it’s also a verdict on a Labour Party that has for over a quarter of a century given up on the working class interest as its lode-stone and instead turned to a form of politics that is based on fashion and the impulses of the youth. Gorton and Denton shows that in such a political world there are always political expressions that can out-bid you.