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Sir Keir Starmer has launched a scathing attack on Reform UK’s candidate for next month’s Gorton and Denton by-election, claiming Matt Goodwin will fight a campaign based on the politics of “toxic division”.
Goodwin, a former academic who has in recent years become a vocal campaigner on the populist right of British politics, is expected to snatch the seat from Labor in what would be another blow to the prime minister’s authority.
Starmer claimed that only Labor could defeat Reform in the Greater Manchester seat, arguing that a vote for the Greens – who are also expected to run a strong campaign – risked handing over victory to Nigel Farage’s party.
“There is only one party that can stop reform,” Starmer said as he traveled to Beijing for a four-day visit to China and Japan. “And you can see from their candidate what politics they are going to bring to that constituency: the politics of division, of toxic division, of breaking people.”
Goodwin, who started out as a political academic, grew up in Manchester and studied for a PhD at the University of Manchester.
At his campaign launch on Tuesday, Goodwin said “I’m not a career politician”, as he described the 26 February vote in an area historically safe for Labour, as a “referendum” on Starmer.
Goodwin’s comments on Islam, race and immigration have often proven particularly controversial. This month he argued that Britain has “shut down” the debate on Islam and has previously argued that being born in the country is not enough 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 long-term problem facing Britain”.
Labor won the constituency in the summer of 2024 with a majority of over 13,000. 2021 census data shows just under 30 per cent of voters in the Gorton and Denton area are Muslim.
The stakes for Starmer were increased in the by-election after Labor barred Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Greater Manchester and seen as the Prime Minister’s rival for the Labor leadership, from contesting the seat.
Farage claimed that Burnham could have won and thwarting her attempt to stand, “massively improving” Reform’s chances of victory, which would have given the party a 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 fighting an unnecessary by-election for the Manchester mayor’s post.
“The fact of the by-election was the issue,” Starmer told reporters. “We’ve got really important elections in Scotland, Wales and across England.
“I was absolutely confident that we would retain Manchester, but the issue is that to keep it we would have to put our resources, our money and our people into an election that we didn’t need.”
The upcoming by-election was triggered by the retirement of MP Andrew Gwynne, who was suspended by Labor last year after leaked WhatsApp messages showed him insulting voters.
