The result of a by-election vote in the Gorton and Denton electoral district in Manchester, Great Britain, is bringing home the reality of the political dysfunction in the U.K. This is a district in which Labour won 67% in 2019, and 50.8% in 2024. In the vote on Thursday, Feb. 26, Labour finished third with 25%, behind the winning Green Party candidate with 40.6%, and Farage’s Reform Party, which was a distant second. She will be the fifth Green Party Member of Parliament.
The press is filled with various scenarios and rumors about the collapse of Starmer and Labour, the bigger collapse of the Tories, and the failure of the Reform Party to make significant gains. The “left” media rallies around Starmer, excusing the defeat as a result of tactical blunders and local politics, urging him to make a sharp turn to the left, while the “right” media warns of an end to British democracy (sic). Starmer is quoted saying it is “very disappointing,” but that he will “fight against extremes,” both left and right.
Sticking to profiles, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Allister Heath writes that the vote “marks a new low in our descent into savagery.” Given what he claims is the Green campaign’s appeal to anti-semitism and leftist “anti-rich” demagogy, the result is a “final warning for Britain’s democracy,” as well as a “catastrophic blow to Sir Keith Starmer.” Heath argues that only a “competent, well-organized and tough right-wing government” can “straighten out the mess.”
While this author has not conducted an exhaustive search through British media (ugh!), what I have noticed as missing from the coverage is any reference to the earthquakes disrupting British “democracy” resulting from fallout of the “Epstein affair.” The “Epstein class” which dominates British politics, finance, media, etc. is scrambling in a desperate effort to “re-set” U.K. governance, following the arrests of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Lord Peter Mandelson, and the continuing flow of damaging evidence of the thorough evil rottenness of the U.K. establishment, which is simultaneously engaged in plotting to provide nuclear weapons to Ukraine and support an unpopular war against Iran. There are also warnings that Starmer’s attempt to bring the U.K. back into the EU will not succeed, and Trump is too inconsistent and unreliable for the U.K. to count on American backup.
