Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Sir Keir Starmer has launched a scathing attack on Reform UK’s candidate for next month’s Gorton and Denton by-election, claiming that Matt Goodwin would fight a campaign based on the politics of “toxic division”.
Goodwin, a former academic who in recent years has become a vocal campaigner on the populist right of British politics, hopes to seize the seat from Labour in what would be another blow to the authority of the prime minister.
Starmer claimed that only Labour could beat Reform in the Greater Manchester seat, arguing that a vote for the Greens — who are also expected to run a strong campaign — risked handing victory to Nigel Farage’s party.
“There’s only one party to stop Reform,” Starmer said en route to Beijing for a four-day trip to China and Japan. “And you can see from their candidate what politics they’re going to bring to that constituency: the politics of division, of toxic division, of tearing people apart.”
Goodwin, who started out as a political academic, grew up in Manchester and studied for his PhD at Manchester university.
At the launch of his campaign on Tuesday, Goodwin said that “I’m not a career politician”, as he described the February 26 poll in a historically safe area for Labour as a “referendum” on Starmer.
Goodwin’s comments on Islam, race and immigration have often proved particularly controversial. This month he argued the UK had “shut down” debate on Islam and has previously argued that being born in the country is not sufficient in itself to make a person British.
In April 2024, he wrote on his Substack that “millions of British Muslims — millions of our fellow citizens — hold views that are fundamentally opposed to British values and ways of life but point to the longer-term problem facing Britain”.
In the summer of 2024 Labour won the constituency with a majority of more than 13,000. Just under 30 per cent of voters in the Gorton and Denton area are Muslim, census data from 2021 suggests.
The stakes for Starmer at the by-election were raised after Labour blocked Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Greater Manchester and seen as rival to the prime minister for the Labour leadership, from contesting the seat.
Farage claimed that Burnham could have won and that, thwarting his attempt to stand, had “massively improved” Reform’s chance of victory, which would give the party its ninth MP.
Starmer insisted that a panel of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee blocked Burnham because the party did not want to waste money and effort in fighting an unnecessary by-election for the Manchester mayoralty.
“The fact of the by-election was the issue,” Starmer told reporters. “We’ve got really important elections in Scotland, in Wales and across England.
“I was pretty certain that we would retain Manchester, of course, but the point is in order to retain it we’d have to put our resources, our money and our people into an election we didn’t need to have.”
The upcoming by-election was triggered by the retirement of MP Andrew Gwynne, who was suspended by Labour last year after leaked WhatsApp messages showed him insulting constituents.