The last Gorton by-election

Thursday sees the Gorton by-election in what was the safe Labour seat of Manchester Gorton and Denton. 

I was brought up in Gorton (East Manchester) and I was living there in 1967 at the time of another high profile by-election. (Though the constituency’s boundaries have been changed substantially since then.) 

The sitting MP was Konni Zilliacus, half-Finnish, who had worked for the League of Nations between the wars, was very much on the Labour left, and was dismissed as a ‘crypto-Communist’ by George Orwell. 

In July 1967, he died of leukemia. By the time the by-election was called for November, the Labour government was facing a sterling crisis largely because of Britain’s chronic balance of payments deficit, but Zilliacus had bequeathed his would-be successor Kenneth Marks, a former head teacher, a majority of nearly 8,000, having won more than 60 per cent of the vote at the 1966 general election.

Running for the Conservatives against Marks was Winston Churchill. No, not Britain’s wartime prime minister, but his grandson. Labour suffered an adverse swing of more than 14 per cent, but hung on to win by fewer than 600 votes.

In this week’s Gorton by-election, Labour are defending a majority of more than 12,500. In 2024, Reform was their nearest challenger. Turnout was well below 50 per cent.

 

Brexitwatch. Parliament: We demand to be irrelevant!

When Theresa May had to hastily cobble together a White Paper to pretend she had some kind of ‘plan’ for Brexit, even she had to admit that while the UK has been in the EU, Parliament has remained ‘sovereign’, contradicting one of the major lies of the Leave campaign.

But now MPs are busily voting that after Brexit, they should no longer be sovereign. Do they want a say on workers’ rights? No, thank you. Animal rights, then? Certainly not!

And remember the 58 Brexit impact studies that Parliament is supposedly forcing the government to publish? Shouldn't MPs make sure they have a look at them before pushing Brexit through? Oh, no need for that, old chap.

Winston Churchill once remarked that the House of Commons would not be a truly representative body if it did not have its proportion of fools. Well, now the fools are in the majority. More than three hundred of them have been found to vote themselves into irrelevance.

You can understand why. I suspect most MPs realise Brexit will be a disaster, but if we complain to them, they will have the perfect excuse: ‘You voted for it!’ So why speak out and go through all the heartache of being abused by the extreme right and the newspapers they control? Better to just nod it through.

The trouble is: if our MPs keep voting that they should be irrelevant, that is what they will become. And the ‘people’ are likely to start asking what is the point of Parliament.

The Brexit riddle

What is the difference between Boris Johnson and Winston Churchill? Churchill was prepared to sacrifice his career to save his country. Johnson is prepared to sacrifice his country to save his career.