| Gorton and Denton By-election 19:20 - Feb 15 with 21901 views | gtsb1966 |
Greens odds on to win with Reform 2nd and Labour 3rd. Surely that would be the end of Starmer if that happened. One can only hope. I cant see some members of the party waiting for the annihilation in the May elections.
https://www.oddschecker.com/po |  | | |  |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 18:27 - Feb 28 with 1000 views | J2BLUE |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 18:14 - Feb 28 by positivity |
it's pretty low for labour/lib dem and green voters though, and they're the people they'll be wanting to get on board.
don't think they'll be targetting reform voters |
I agree. I still think this by election was a unique situation and they will find it hard to replicate nationally.
I said yesterday I would vote Green if they had the best chance of beating Reform in Ipswich. |  |
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| Gorton and Denton By-election on 18:35 - Feb 28 with 963 views | eireblue |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 17:53 - Feb 28 by J2BLUE |
I'm not wasting any more time on your dishonesty.
I said they want open borders not that it was a policy in the short term. They admit they do. You can try and explain it away any way you want but what I said was factually accurate.
You only have to read that page on their website to see that their version of controlled immigration will be a lot higher than the current level of immigration. I don't think it's a massive leap to say their views on immigration will damage their ability to compete on a national scale when immigration is a big issue in the country. By big issue I mean it frequently comes top of polls on what people care about most. No comment on whether that is sensible, it's just a statement of fact. |
I am not going to agree I am being dishonest.FU.
With open borders, you have egress as well as ingress.
A working class person that has learnt a language will have less chance of working abroad.
Open borders doesn’t just mean people come in, it means people can leave.
And as evidenced, it lead to less net immigration. |  | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 18:37 - Feb 28 with 954 views | eireblue |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 18:00 - Feb 28 by lowhouseblue |
you do realise that free movement between countries within the eu was accompanied by strict rules on entry into the eu from elsewhere.? they are different things with different characteristics.
go through the green proposals line by line and at each one ask yourself 'will that cause immigration to rise?'. that will give you the answer. |
There is a pretty strict border between the World and anywhere else.
Within the EU, people moved around some countries had less immigration some had negative immigration at times. | | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 18:42 - Feb 28 with 918 views | eireblue |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 17:32 - Feb 28 by lowhouseblue |
there is no possible reading of their proposals which doesn't lead to a huge increase in immigration. that is so obvious that it has to be their intention, and, yes, so obvious that your denial is pretty dishonest.
and from another of your posts - i certainly don't want to see a world without borders. without borders you lose cultural diversity and distinctiveness, you undermine social solidarity, and you undermine democratic control of a nation's character, policies and provision. you couldn't sustain provision such as the nhs without controlled borders and strict limits on mobility and rights.
the greens are extreme on this, as you seem to be, and are entirely out of step with the population who do want to see fair and effective control of our borders. |
You don’t lose cultural, diversity and distinctiveness.
As witnessed in the real world.
People can move and maintain their culture, it isn’t difficult.
You are parroting the same sort of rhetoric that Nige used during Brexit, what was it, 100 Million Turks will soon have the right to move to the UK and blah,
Jeez you do realise not everyone moves to the same country, you do realise under free movement of labour the majority don’t actually move. | | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 20:22 - Feb 28 with 840 views | blueoutlook |
The Greens are as mad as a box of frogs. |  | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 21:31 - Feb 28 with 795 views | Swansea_Blue |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 20:22 - Feb 28 by blueoutlook |
The Greens are as mad as a box of frogs. |
Well that’s quite predictable. Is it the environmental sustainability or aspirations for better lives you dislike the most? |  |
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| Gorton and Denton By-election on 22:34 - Feb 28 with 757 views | redrickstuhaart |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 20:22 - Feb 28 by blueoutlook |
The Greens are as mad as a box of frogs. |
In what way?
Give us your best 3. |  |
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| Gorton and Denton By-election on 08:35 - Mar 1 with 664 views | Dubtractor |
Another day, another step towards demonising all foreigners.
This country is heading to a really dark place.
What an utterly disgusting and dangerous front page from the Mail today. Surely by now everyone can see that Reform is a party that thrives on division, fuels anger, and uses the scapegoating of minorities and migrants to gain support. Everyone it seems except the Mail — Peter Stefanovic (@peterstefanovic.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T08:28:04.654Z
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| Gorton and Denton By-election on 08:50 - Mar 1 with 637 views | DJR |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 08:35 - Mar 1 by Dubtractor |
Another day, another step towards demonising all foreigners.
This country is heading to a really dark place.
What an utterly disgusting and dangerous front page from the Mail today. Surely by now everyone can see that Reform is a party that thrives on division, fuels anger, and uses the scapegoating of minorities and migrants to gain support. Everyone it seems except the Mail — Peter Stefanovic (@peterstefanovic.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T08:28:04.654Z
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It followed on from the following headline on Saturday, which was openly Islamophobic.
"Police urged to probe "family voting fraud" in sectarian by-election." |  | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 09:16 - Mar 1 with 591 views | DJR |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 09:22 - Feb 28 by DJR |
This article demonstrates how Labour is losing so-called progressive voters.
https://www.theguardian.com/po
"Green win shows progressive voters are now voting against Labour as well as Reform
Gorton and Denton byelection shatters Labour strategy of neglecting its core base while focusing on Reform defectors"
Despite this, Shabana Mahmood will be pressing ahead despite no evidence that it will win over Reform voters.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk
"Shabana Mahmood vows to stick with hardline migration policies after byelection defeat"
This from another article suggests her approach is also alienating people from the non-white population who would once have voted Labour.
"Since the election, anger at the party’s stance on Gaza has been exacerbated by fury at its approach to immigration. Labour MPs say they found many Muslim voters mentioning the name of Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary and one of the country’s most prominent Muslim politicians – and not in a good way.
“Lots of people were angry at Shabana and our approach to immigration in general,” said one MP. The person added they had encountered a lot of hostility to the government’s plans to make it harder for migrants to earn settled status in the UK. “Several people said these rules would not have allowed their parents to make their lives here.”
[Post edited 28 Feb 9:23]
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I was very surprised that this post led to a discussion about, and critique of, the Greens' immigration policy given my post was focused on Labour, was not confined to immigration and was not meant as an endorsement of the Greens or any policies of theirs.
The point I was trying to make is that a pre-election Ming vase strategy which led to Labour getting only 34% of the popular vote followed by a post-election strategy that led to alienating many who voted for Labour is not a strategy for success, particularly if it doesn't win over those who might vote Tory or Reform because of immigration.
The result is a loss to the Greens which has shown to people that the Greens can win and which does not augur well for a general election where it will often be difficult to tell which party is the best party to vote for to prevent Reform winning.
I also came across this from the Guardian.
"Luke Tryl, from More In Common, said the loss was consequential for Labour because it sent a message to voters about future contests. The party had hoped that the threat of Reform would be enough to unite the progressive vote behind it. “But that argument risks collapsing after last night’s result,” Tryl said.
The result also points to Labour’s wider challenges in areas with high proportions of graduates, students and Muslims, said More In Common.
John Curtice, a professor of politics at Strathclyde University, stressed that the result showed a collapse in support among two pillars of Labour’s traditional support: white, working-class voters and minority ethnic people. “The Green party’s historic success in the Gorton and Denton byelection means the future of British politics is now even more uncertain than it was already,” he wrote in a piece for the BBC." [Post edited 1 Mar 9:16]
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| Gorton and Denton By-election on 09:24 - Mar 1 with 568 views | DJR |
I've also come across this article which articulates the point I was making well.
https://www.theguardian.com/po
Green win shows progressive voters are now voting against Labour as well as Reform
Ben Ansell
Gorton and Denton byelection shatters Labour strategy of neglecting its core base while focusing on Reform defectors
Until very recently, No 10 strategy, as defined by Morgan McSweeney, was built around neglecting, even insulting, progressive voters, and seeking to win back defections to Reform. Come the next general election, so the argument went, progressives would sheepishly have to back Labour, just as leftwing voters in France got behind Emmanuel Macron when push came to shove.
This strategy relied on setting Reform UK up as a bogeyman and hoping to assemble a “republican front” of voters on the centre and left against it come election day. If voters on the left inevitably came home, then Labour could concentrate instead on “hero voters”: older, more socially conservative residents of “red wall” constituencies in the north of England and the Midlands. Hence, months of posturing against progressive causes and an immigration policy more draconian than anything the past Conservative government had put forward.
That plan has been shattered by the voters of Gorton and Denton. They chose not to get behind Labour when faced with the hardline populism of Matthew Goodwin, the Reform candidate. They backed the Greens instead. Even worse, Reform did at least show they could unify the right – albeit in a constituency where the Conservatives had performed poorly in 2024. Labour ended up with a split left in which it was the smaller party. Just as in the Caerphilly Senedd byelection last year, it had lost its progressive vote to a rival on its left.
McSweeney was half right in the end. Reform’s illiberalism does inspire people to get out and vote against it. As Reform collects an ever more unwieldy set of dubious electoral propositions – banning permanent residence for immigrants, removing renters’ rights, ending the “unregulated sexual economy” – it resembles the game Buckaroo. Each extra bizarre policy makes the electoral donkey ever more likely to kick it off. Yes, Reform could win the 2029 general election, but it seems equally likely that the public will align against it.
But align with whom? The obvious answer to that question should be Britain’s largest progressive party. But the apparent holder of that role, Labour, has been reluctant to accept it. Rather than make peace with an urban voting base of younger graduates in professional jobs, poorer service sector workers and minority ethnic communities, Labour seems to have been pining for the demographic that voted for it in the 1970s – older, manual workers in small towns. But that group was, for good or ill, lost to Labour decades ago. Worse, Labour has tried to win them back by rhetorically giving its new voters a good kicking.
Nostalgia-fuelled electoral strategies don’t work. And the Greens have been much more aggressively effective at finding a new voter base. Far from their old base of environmentalists and nimbies, they have decided to claim Labour’s as their own. And they have been able to do so not just because they have found charismatic leadership in Zack Polanski, and with Gorton and Denton’s winner, Hannah Spencer; they have also succeeded because Labour upset the general public and its own voters to such an extent that a huge political gap opened up for the Greens to walk into.
Labour’s basic electoral problem comes from the fact that left-leaning voters are choosing to vote against rather than for parties. And progressives aren’t just voting against Reform, they are now actively voting against Labour. | | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 14:16 - Mar 1 with 467 views | CoachRob |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 21:31 - Feb 28 by Swansea_Blue |
Well that’s quite predictable. Is it the environmental sustainability or aspirations for better lives you dislike the most? |
I've seen quite a few of these one line comments about the Greens on here and then no further commentary on why they have formed that opinion.
On the economics, Lowhouse has informed me that he has found a fatal flaw in the Modern Monetary Theory so the whole thing is off, sorry. I posted this paper and he apparently read it top to toe (He didn't but bear with me).
https://www.tandfonline.com/do
His work was not supported by data, modelling, a chart, but a description of a chart. The chart in question is a Neoclassical derivative of the Hicks-Hanson model or IS-LM model (1937) which was an attempt at a first order approximation of money markets at a time of limited data and no computers.
Hicks renounced his model and wrote a paper in 1980 where he said, "I accordingly conclude that the only way in which IS-LM analysis usefully survives – as anything more than a classroom gadget, to be superseded, later on, by something better – is in application to a particular kind of causal analysis, where the use of equilibrium methods, even a drastic use of equilibrium methods, is not inappropriate."
IS-LM has been used to push crowding out theory (government spending crowds out private spending, convenient that) and austerity. It's fecking classroom gadget.
One of the authors of the paper is Josh Ryan-Collins, a Professor of Economics and Finance at UCL. His boss is world-renowned economist, Professor Mariana Mazzucato. Her work pushes back heavily against crowding out and austerity.
So then we reach a dilemma. Who to believe? Is it the professors at a world leading university or some chap on a football forum with a description of a chart. And this is the crux, how do we stop people believing the crank with some temperature data from a single monitoring station in Greenland claiming climate change is a hoax or the crackpot economics fan from the University of Twitter/X who presents a two-dimensional discrete-time model to a trained physicist who happens to build three-dimensional, multi-order, continuous-time models with feedbacks and interdependence. (I may have snorted some tea when he presented his gotcha moment)
I'm convinced there are lots of people who want to support the Greens, but hear all the scarce stories that if they do support them, then the end is nigh. Carl Sagan talked about the glorification of stupidity and do we need some help pushing back against that. |  | | |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 14:22 - Mar 1 with 458 views | Libero |
| Gorton and Denton By-election on 08:35 - Mar 1 by Dubtractor |
Another day, another step towards demonising all foreigners.
This country is heading to a really dark place.
What an utterly disgusting and dangerous front page from the Mail today. Surely by now everyone can see that Reform is a party that thrives on division, fuels anger, and uses the scapegoating of minorities and migrants to gain support. Everyone it seems except the Mail — Peter Stefanovic (@peterstefanovic.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T08:28:04.654Z
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REFORM: confident and proudly display consistent discrimination, dehumanising and othering of Muslim people (and other minorities)
ALSO REFORM: hey, why aren't the muslims voting for us? they can't vote for parties that will do things in their best interest, that's cheating! [Post edited 1 Mar 14:24]
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| Gorton and Denton By-election on 09:02 - Mar 7 with 178 views | DJR |
Chasing "hero voters" doesn't appear to be working in London.
https://www.theguardian.com/po
Senior Labour figures warn government amid fears of ‘political earthquake’ in London
Exclusive: Senior party figures share data suggesting Green surge could put Labour in fourth place in capital in May
Senior party figures in the capital have warned Labour bosses to urgently address the threat of the Greens. Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, said last week that Labour faced an “existential threat” in parts of the country in May.
“Without a change in course, we risk a repeat of losing large Labour strongholds, like London, just as we did in the 2000s in Scotland. If we don’t unite progressives, we risk opening the door to the darkness and division of Reform,” he said.
Tony Travers, a professor of local government at the London School of Economics, told the Guardian that Labour was on course for a “political earthquake” in the local elections in London if Bombe’s modelling reflected the actual result in May.
“It would profoundly shock London Labour MPs. The national party has taken London for granted for years and invested all their efforts on targeting Reform-prone areas, and they now have this huge flank exposed on their left.”
A Labour source said: “A slow handclap for those self-appointed strategic geniuses who ridicule Labour values and think we can afford to sacrifice our core vote by mimicking the performative cruelty of Suella Braverman.
“The dead end of McSweeneyism must be abandoned before it’s too late. When Labour focuses on the cost of living we can start to win back the progressive defectors we’ve lost and unite the coalition we need.”
[Post edited 7 Mar 9:05]
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