FLY-TIPPING, FAITH VOTES, AND THE DEATH OF HOPE

In the perpetually damp precincts of Greater Manchester, where the rain seems less a meteorological event than a form of municipal penance, the voters of Gorton and Denton are being invited this Thursday to perform one of those quaint rituals that still pass for democracy in these islands. A by-election, no less: the sort of contest that normally registers on the national consciousness with all the urgency of a parish council debate over dog fouling, yet this one carries the faint whiff of obituary. For here, in a constituency stitched together like a budget suit from the remnants of Manchester Gorton, Withington and Denton and Reddish, Labour’s long dominion faces the distinct possibility of an undignified eviction. 

One pictures the scene with a certain sardonic relish: umbrellas blooming like poisonous fungi along the streets of Longsight and Burnage, the occasional kebab wrapper eddying in the gutter, and a electorate—28 per cent of it answering the call to Friday prayers, the rest variously resigned, resentful or simply absent—deciding whether to stick with the devil they half-know or sample something newer and shinier from the populist or pistachio-coloured ends of the spectrum. The seat itself is a fresh-minted artefact of the 2023 boundary review, that periodic act of cartographic vandalism by which Westminster convinces itself it is listening to the people. It is England’s fifteenth most deprived constituency, a distinction it wears with the weary pride of a man who has won the wooden spoon at the village fête. Thirty-five of its forty Manchester neighbourhoods sit in the bottom quintile for deprivation; 45 per cent of the children live below the breadline; the average household income in parts of Longsight would not cover a modest season ticket at Old Trafford. Demographically it is a patchwork quilt of modern Britain: 57 per cent White overall, but with swathes where British Pakistanis predominate and the Muslim population reaches 28 per cent. The Manchester wards are young, student-heavy, graduate-prone and aggrieved; the Denton wards are older, whiter, more routinely employed and quietly furious about the state of the high street. 

In 2016 half of them voted Leave, a fact that still causes certain Islington dinner tables to emit a low, keening sound. Manufacturing has long since packed its bags; what remains is the service economy, the benefits economy and the eternal economy of complaint. Into this fertile soil of discontent stepped Andrew Gwynne in 2024, Labour Co-op standard-bearer and former health minister, who secured 50.8 per cent of the vote and a majority of 13,413. It looked solid enough at the time—until one remembers that it represented a 16-point drop from the notional 2019 figure and that Reform, the Greens and even the Workers Party had begun nibbling at the edges like mice in a larder. Gwynne’s tenure proved shorter than a Lib Dem leadership contest. In February 2025 he was suspended from the party after a WhatsApp group—those digital confessional boxes of the modern politician—leaked remarks deemed antisemitic and, for good measure, unflattering about an elderly constituent. 

One can only imagine the private horror in Labour HQ: not the offence itself, perhaps, but the discovery that someone had been so careless as to commit it in writing. Gwynne soldiered on as an independent until January 2026, when 'significant ill health' and medical advice that further parliamentary labours might prove fatal provided the exit ramp every politician secretly craves. He was promptly appointed Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, that glorious euphemism for “you’re out, old boy.” The by-election was called for 26 February, the second under Keir Starmer’s premiership and, one suspects, the one that will be studied in party seminars under the heading “How Not to Lose a Safe Seat.”

The candidates number eleven, a figure that suggests either glorious pluralism or the sort of fragmentation one associates with post-imperial Balkan states. At the centre, or rather clutching the centre with whitening knuckles, stands Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, a Manchester city councillor, former European Parliament candidate and professional lobbyist for the Arup Group, whose selection had all the smooth inevitability of a Soviet show trial. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester and local hero who can actually win elections, had thrown his hat into the ring with the enthusiasm of a man scenting a path back to Westminster and perhaps, whisper it, a future leadership bid. The National Executive Committee, in its wisdom, voted 8–1 to block him—Starmer and most of the high command against, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood abstaining, Deputy Leader Lucy Powell in favour. Fifty Labour MPs protested; Angela Rayner, Sadiq Khan and Ed Miliband were said to be unimpressed. The message was clear: better a safe pair of lobbyist hands than a popular mayor who might remind the membership what winning used to feel like. Stogia now campaigns on government investment, more GPs, breakfast clubs and a crackdown on fly-tipping—worthy pledges that have the authentic ring of municipal PowerPoint. Whether they will move the needle in a seat where the main grievances are rather larger remains to be seen.

Challenging from the right—or at least from the direction currently fashionable—is Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, the academic who discovered that sociology lectures on “British values” play rather better on GB News than in the senior common room at Kent. A former professor, honorary president of Students4Reform and one-time pizza delivery boy in these very streets during his Salford undergraduate days, Goodwin has the air of a man who has read too much Pareto and decided the circulation of elites requires a personal intervention. His literature promises a referendum on Starmer, crackdowns on crime and grooming gangs, tax cuts, more police and stop-and-search. Past remarks on family breakdown, childlessness, fertility and the cultural implications of mass immigration have been denounced, predictably, as everything from misogyny to Islamophobia—a charge that in a constituency with a large Muslim population carries the weight of tactical voting. One almost admires the audacity: the intellectual who once analysed populism from afar now embodies it, clipboard in hand, promising to speak for the people while commuting from Hertfordshire. Reform’s internal polling has them confident; their leaflets, alas, sometimes forget the legal imprint, a technicality now under police investigation. Campaign manager suspended for offensive posts; GB News complaints; the usual circus. Politics, as ever, imitates art—bad art.

From the environmental left comes Hannah Spencer of the Greens, a Trafford councillor, former Greater Manchester mayoral candidate and, gloriously, a 'working plumber'. One cannot help but feel this is the perfect metaphor: a woman who actually fixes leaks now offering to fix the leaks in the body politic. Spencer’s pitch is the full Green prospectus—wealth tax, rent controls, £15 minimum wage, nationalised utilities, free prescriptions, dentistry and eye tests, better-insulated homes and, inevitably, a robust stance on Gaza that has seen her literature translated into Urdu and endorsements roll in from Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Salma Yaqoob and The Muslim Vote. She has knocked on 18,000 doors and claims the race is neck-and-neck with Reform, Labour a distant third. Her opponents mutter darkly of “grubby deals” with non-standing parties; she denies it with the serene certainty of one who has communed with the wind turbines. In a seat where fly-tipping and heating bills matter rather more than net zero by 2035, the plumber’s pragmatism may yet prove her strongest asset—or her undoing when the bill arrives.

The supporting players provide the essential British ballast of eccentricity. Sir Oink A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party; Nick Buckley of Advance UK; Charlotte Cadden, the Conservative former detective chief inspector and trustee of Sex Matters; Dan Clarke of the Libertarians; Sebastian Moore of the SDP; Joseph O’Meachair of Rejoin EU; Jackie Pearcey of the Liberal Democrats; and Hugo Wils of the Communist League. Each will receive their handful of votes, their moment on the hustings, their paragraph in the local paper. The Workers Party stood aside, declaring that a Labour-Reform loss would benefit the working class—an exquisite piece of dialectical reasoning. Your Party urged tactical anti-Reform voting. The field is crowded, the message fragmented, the likely winner anyone’s guess.

Polls, those modern Delphic oracles with the reliability of a wet bus timetable, show the race as a statistical migraine. An Omnisis survey gave Greens 33 per cent, Reform 29, Labour 26. Find Out Now had Reform slightly ahead before apologising for the small sample. Electoral Calculus and others foresee Reform or Greens triumphant, Labour humiliated. Lord Hayward tips the Greens; Robert Ford calls it a pollster’s nightmare. Hypothetical polling with Burnham as candidate gave Labour a landslide; without him, the roof caves in. Whatever the numbers, the story is the same: a safe Labour seat reduced to a three-horse race in which the horse in the red rosette looks distinctly lame.

The campaign has been a joyless affair of rain-soaked hustings, accusations of racism, police probes into sausage rolls offered for poster-sticking (Labour insists it was “ordinary hospitality”), and the usual online bile. Labour backbenchers are said to be despondent, some privately hoping for defeat to hasten the day Starmer is invited to spend more time with his family. Reform talks of a “referendum on Keir”; the Greens of “cutting the cost of living while ending complicity in genocide”. The minor candidates add colour and little else. In the end, turnout will be low, the winner will claim a mandate the size of a postage stamp, and the new MP will discover that representing one of England’s poorest seats involves rather more casework on damp housing than speeches on the floor of the House.

One is reminded of those late-Roman emperors who paraded their triumphs while the barbarians massed at the gates. Gorton and Denton is not the end of Labour, still less of British democracy; it is merely a symptom. A symptom of a politics in which identity has replaced class, gesture has replaced governance, and the electorate has learned, with weary cynicism, that none of the offerings on the ballot quite matches the menu. Whoever prevails on Thursday—plumber, pundit or lobbyist—will inherit a constituency that deserves better than the slogans it is being sold. The rain will continue to fall, the potholes will remain unfilled, and the voters, having done their bit, will return to the serious business of getting on with life. In the grand satirical pageant of these islands, it is hardly the most edifying spectacle. But then, as any student of human folly knows, spectacle is what we do best. The curtain rises tomorrow. One almost feels sorry for the cast. Almost.

OF SHOVELS AND SOCIALISM …

One does not require the meteorological insight of a professional forecaster, nor the dialectical subtlety of a tenured socialist, to savour the exquisite farce now playing out across the five boroughs. New York City, that self-appointed capital of resilience and reinvention, lies under a historic February blanket—eighteen to twenty inches of the stuff, depending on which meteorologist you trust and how much they have invested in the narrative of 'unprecedented.' The year is 2026. The mayor is Zohran Mamdani, sworn in a mere two months earlier on a platform heavy with the usual progressive freight: equity, dignity, solidarity, and the cheerful assumption that human nature can be gently nudged toward the light if only the incentives are calibrated correctly.

The Emergency Snow Shoveler programme is not some wild-eyed innovation cooked up in a Brooklyn co-op. It is, we are repeatedly assured, long-standing. Citizens of goodwill have for years been invited to present themselves at Department of Sanitation garages, armed with two forms of photo identification, a Social Security card, photocopies of the foregoing, and presumably a notarised affidavit confirming that they have read the small print. In return they would receive $19.14 per hour to begin with, rising, after the first forty hours of the week, to $28.71. A rate, one notes, that in calmer weather might have purchased a serviceable oat-milk latte and a single subway ride, but which, in the teeth of a blizzard, proved about as magnetically attractive as a vegan cheese platter at a Trump rally.

The result? Zero. Zilch. Not a single taker at multiple garages in Queens and Brooklyn. The depots stood as empty as a campaign promise the morning after the election. One pictures the scene with a certain Beckettian purity: a lone official in a hi-vis vest, stamping his feet, checking his clipboard, perhaps permitting himself a quiet, unprintable observation on the civic spirit of the people who had, after all, voted the present administration into being. No queues formed. No hardy souls materialised, glowing with the inner warmth of communal endeavour. The snow continued to fall, the ploughs—2,300 of them, including 700 salt-spreaders—laboured on, and 2,600 sanitation veterans worked twelve-hour shifts, but the supplementary civilian army refused to materialise.

Enter the frantic revision. By Monday the rate had been 'increased'—the word 'frantically' belongs to the conservative commentariat, but it will serve—to a flat $30 an hour, with $45 after forty hours. The arithmetic had been adjusted with the speed normally reserved for correcting a tweet that has already gone viral for the wrong reasons. One can almost hear the late-night huddle in the mayor’s office: spreadsheets flickering, aides murmuring, someone suggesting that perhaps the dignity of labour required a slightly higher numerical expression of esteem. The mayor himself, addressing the cameras, maintained the necessary tone of calm urgency. Code Blue remained in effect. The city was mobilising. New Yorkers could still walk into any DSNY garage before 8 p.m., show their documents, and begin earning what was now, by the standards of the original offer, a small fortune.

Two months. That is all it has taken. Two months since the swearing-in, the photo opportunities, the ritual invocation of hope and change. Already the honeymoon is not merely over; it has been buried under drifts deep enough to conceal a double-decker bus. The conservative chorus on X (still the coliseum of choice for public blood sports) has responded with the glee of schoolboys who have discovered that the headmaster’s trousers have fallen down. “Marxists who voted him in are all lazy freeloaders.” “Never in the history of leftism has a lefty volunteered to do anything.” “They expected free handouts, not to be asked to work for them.” The pile-on is merciless, predictable, and—let us be honest—rather enjoyable in the way that all spectacles of exposed contradiction tend to be.

Yet the deeper comedy lies not in the partisan jeering but in the structural absurdity. Here is a political philosophy that has spent decades insisting that $15 an hour is barely enough to keep body and soul together in the Apple, that every form of labour possesses an inherent dignity that must be honoured with appropriate compensation, that the working class is the very engine of history. And when history, in the form of twenty inches of snow, actually asks a few members of that class to pick up a shovel for nineteen dollars and change, the engine stalls. The response is not outrage at the paltry sum but a polite, collective, metropolitan silence. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quip that socialism would take too many evenings; in this case it appears to require too many freezing mornings as well.

The bureaucratic garnish only improves the joke. Prospective shovelers must produce multiple forms of identification—requirements described, without apparent irony, as 'long-standing'. Federal law, we are told, demands it for payroll purposes. Fair enough. Yet the same administration that treats voter identification as a threat to democracy suddenly discovers that shovelling a fire hydrant is a transaction requiring the full panoply of bureaucratic proof. The right, naturally, has seized on the contrast with the enthusiasm of starving men spotting a dropped sandwich. “ID to shovel snow but not to vote?” The hypocrisy is not imaginary; it is simply the usual progressive distinction between sacred rights and secular chores.

Nature, of course, remains magnificently indifferent. The blizzard does not read manifestos. It does not care that the mayor is a democratic socialist or that the opposition is crowing. It simply falls, compacts, freezes, and waits to be moved. The city will clear its streets eventually—partly with union labour at union rates, partly with the newly incentivised civilians who will, one assumes, now materialise once the price has been adjusted to something approaching the market rate for voluntary discomfort. Sidewalks will be the responsibility of property owners by 8:30 p.m. or fines will follow. Life will resume its customary rhythm of complaint and litigation.

In the meantime we have been treated to a small but perfect parable. A progressive mayor discovers that even in the people’s republic of New York, the people retain an obstinate preference for central heating over civic virtue at bargain-basement prices. The right discovers, yet again, that its darkest suspicions about entitlement culture are not entirely without foundation. And the rest of us—those who merely watch from the warmth of our armchairs—are reminded that human nature has a way of resisting even the most elegantly drafted policy. Snow falls. Wages rise. Garages remain, for a while at least, empty.

It is the sort of episode that would have delighted the late PJ O'Rourke: elegant, ironic, and fundamentally human. The world turns, the drifts deepen, and somewhere in Gracie Mansion a calculator is being worked with the quiet desperation of a man who has just realised that ideology and meteorology obey different laws. The snow will melt. The spreadsheets will be filed. And New York, being New York, will survive—slightly poorer, slightly wiser, and no doubt already preparing the press release for the next inevitable storm.

JESSE JACKSON (1941 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, was the last of the great American civil rights orators to speak almost exclusively in rhyme, a habit that began as inspiration and ended as compulsion, rather like a jazz musician who can no longer play in anything but 7/4 time. In an age that preferred prose, Jackson insisted on verse; even his grocery lists, one suspects, scanned.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, he rose through the ranks of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the energy of a man who had discovered that indignation paid better than calm. Operation Breadbasket, the Rainbow Coalition, two spirited runs for the presidency — all were conducted with the solemn conviction that history was waiting for his next couplet. “Keep hope alive” became his signature line, delivered with such rhythmic certainty that audiences half-expected him to follow it with “jive”. There were stumbles. The “Hymietown” remark in 1984 revealed that even the most practised tongue could slip into territory where angels feared to tread. Jackson apologised with the fluency of a man who had apologised before and would apologise again; the episode merely added a minor key to his otherwise triumphant score.
In later years he became a roving ambassador of moral outrage, appearing wherever cameras gathered and injustice was suspected. He counselled O.J. Simpson during the trial of the century, offering spiritual support at a moment when the nation seemed to need less theology and more evidence. The visit was widely noted, though its precise effect on the verdict remains unclear. Immortality of a sort arrived courtesy of South Park, where Jackson featured in an episode that examined the etiquette of racial apology with the delicacy of a sledgehammer. The climax — a grown man literally kissing Jackson’s backside to prove his lack of prejudice — was absurd, unflattering, and, in the circumstances, weirdly accurate.
In the end Parkinson’s disease slowed the cadence, but never entirely silenced it. Jackson kept hope alive long after many had quietly declared it dead. One can imagine him now, ascending, still searching for a rhyme for “eternity”. He will not be easily replaced; very few people, after all, can make a moral point and a metre at the same time.