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In three weeks, the people of Gorton and Denton will head to the polls for their byelection. And the rest of the UK will be watching. The attention given to this vote will be huge. The main talking points are the verdict it gives on Keir Starmer’s premiership, the decision to stop Andy Burnham standing, Reform UK potentially taking the seat and the Greens being the current favourites. It is both an important election in its own right, and a microcosm of the biggest political questions facing the country.
Given the state of flux that politics seems to be in, you might think it would be hard to predict what is going to happen. Luckily, there is a very good indicator of what we can expect: at the end of October, there was a byelection in the Welsh parliament seat of Caerphilly – the similarities between that vote and Gorton and Denton are stark.
Both areas had been safe Labour seats for a long time (though Gorton and Denton and its boundaries were created for the last election, its previous forms have been mainly Labour). Both were set against the backdrop of a deeply unpopular Labour government (in Caerphilly’s case, it was the Welsh Labour government in Cardiff Bay). And in both, Reform committed huge resources towards winning the seat. And finally, in both cases a left-of-centre party besides Labour appeared to have the best chance of stopping Reform. In Caerphilly, it was Plaid Cymru, which won. In Gorton, the Greens’ early polling numbers are strong.
I will never forget sitting in the count at Caerphilly on 23 October last year. Nigel Farage had been swanning around the area all day ready for the coronation of his picked man, Llŷr Powell (whom Farage calls “Welsh Dave” because Llŷr is seemingly too hard). When it became clear that Reform was coming second, Farage was straight back down the M4.
There are lessons in what happened in Caerphilly ahead of the Gorton and Denton vote. The first is a brutal lesson that Labour is about to learn the hard way – once you are no longer the best vehicle for stopping the right, a lot of people you counted on as supporters leave. In Caerphilly, Plaid Cymru went from 28% of the vote in 2021 to 47% in 2025. Labour, by contrast, went from 46% to just 11%. A large part of this swing towards Plaid was because it was seen as the best way to stop Reform getting in.
In the 2024 general election, much of Labour’s support was based on getting the Tories out, rather than any great love of Starmer. In Gorton, the bookies seem to think that the Greens are the favourites, followed by Reform. Though no poll has put them in the lead yet, Labour needs to be incredibly wary of this narrative developing. If it permeates into people’s consciousness that if you want to stop Reform, you need to vote Green, Labour is in big trouble. This was exactly what drove such huge numbers for Plaid in Caerphilly and that “we are the only way to stop Reform” message is now central to Plaid Cymru’s campaign ahead of May’s Senedd election.
A second lesson is that high spending doesn’t automatically equal victory. In Caerphilly, Labour spent £98,000 trying to avoid the party’s first parliamentary defeat in the area in decades. Reform spent £96,000. Plaid spent just £47,000. Labour spent more than £26 for every vote it got, whereas Plaid spent just £3. It is worth taking a second to also reflect that however much money you spend, if it’s spent wastefully it won’t help you. Labour spent £25,000 on Airbnbs including some in Hirwaun. If you are not au fait with the geography, that is 50 minutes’ drive from Caerphilly …
Third, Labour must learn to not treat the voters as idiots divorced from reality. During the campaign in Wales, the Labour candidate called on people to vote for his party in order to “save our libraries”. There were indeed proposed library closures in the area. They were proposed by the Labour council. So we ended up in the farcical situation where a Labour candidate wanted to get elected to a Labour-run Senedd, to tell a Labour-run council to spend UK Labour-provided money, to not close libraries that that very same Labour council was trying to close. People simply didn’t buy it.
In Gorton, it will be a Labour candidate in an area already run by a Labour mayor. Don’t fall into the trap of saying you are a change candidate when your party is literally already running everything.
Finally, there is turnout. While byelections are often associated with low turnout, when people feel it matters, they get out and vote. The drive by people on the left to stop Reform led to a turnout higher than in the previous election. In Caerphilly in 2021, it was under 44% whereas this time around it was 50.4%! This is more than the average for the whole of Wales in 2021. Any strategy that relies on this upcoming election looking like previous byelections will get it wrong.
The stakes are very high. We saw in Caerphilly how defeat can make parties on the hard right of politics such as Reform lose interest. The likes of Nigel Farage base much of their persona on the idea that they are infallible winners. What Caerphilly showed was that he and his party can be beaten handily. Since then, Reform’s interest in Wales has fallen significantly. I see this in its messaging and direct conversations with people within the party. These byelections can stop the first domino from falling.
And whatever the result, if Keir Starmer takes one thing from both Caerphilly and Gorton, it needs to be about the voting system. The archaic dog mess that is first-past-the-post needs to be ditched. It allows outright majorities based on a minority of voters. In a bitterly divided society, a system that bakes in outright victory to the party that loses the least just forces us all further down the spiral of division. Voters should be able to vote for whom they want, not feel obliged to vote for the person best placed to stop the extremists.
Will they learn these lessons? Starmer’s Labour has been many things but introspective doesn’t seem to be one of them. If he fails to learn this lesson, his party faces being crushed under the rubble of its own “red wall”.
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Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics
