I have seen the scale of the mountain Labour has to climb in Gorton and Denton – but also the way it can do it | Polly Toynbee

4 hours ago 2

The great gulf between left and right yawns deeper and wider. One way or another, the Gorton and Denton byelection this week will reveal this profound tribal divide. Those in the progressive bloc – Labour, Lib Dem, Green, SNP, Plaid – are very different kinds of people to the blues, with diametrically opposed attitudes. In more centrist days there was some shifting across the red/blue line as both main parties stole some votes from each other. That’s over. Everyone now is in one or the other trench (or a non-voter), though many are undecided which party to back within their bloc. Ever since what psephologists call the “Brexit realignment”, the split has become unbridgeable.

Labour has been getting this near-catastrophically wrong in the past 18 months, pursuing voters who will never support the party, while at the same time chasing away its own supporters. The architect of this blunder, Morgan McSweeney, is gone, though the leader is responsible for where his party is led – or misled. No more of that hippy-punching strategy that avoided anything sounding too leftwing. It was designed to attract the right but, of course, it didn’t.

The chasm dividing the two tribes is revealed in Britain’s Party Members research by Prof Tim Bale, Prof Paul Webb and Dr Stavroula Chrona. Reform voters are no closer to Labour on economic than on social and migration issues. They are planets apart on everything and Labour needs to see it. A majority of Reform members and voters want to cut tax and cut public spending, while the progressive bloc overwhelmingly chooses the opposite. On the climate crisis, 86% of Reform supporters would abandon net zero, while progressives back it, as does 69% of the wider public.

Be afraid at how Trumpian the blue bloc has become when you look at the qualities they want from a leader: “prepared to break the rules in order to get things done”, “prepared to hurt the feelings of others without worrying about the consequences”, “I like self-confident leaders who regard themselves as exceptional individuals” who “need to be able to dominate people and show a bit of aggression now and then”. These attributes are rejected by progressives, who overwhelmingly choose “strong moral compass” as their prime quality for a leader. On immigration 98% of Reform members and 92% of Tory members say it’s too high, but only 34% of Labour members.

“Take polarisation seriously”, the research concludes, as “the divisions between the members of our political parties risk becoming irreconcilable.” Democracy is in serious danger when the strength of political identity and cultural allegiance eliminates any space for compromise.

This is sounding the alarm, not a call for compromise in some mistaken idea of national unity. Not enough shock, disgust and fear confronts the far-right drift: many politicians have recently said things that previously would have seen them ejected by respectable parties and attacked by rightwing media. When Reform’s Gorton and Denton candidate, Matt Goodwin, says you can’t be English even if you are born here, because it’s an “ethnicity” reserved for those who trace “roots back on these islands hundreds of years, if not thousands of years”, a chilling extremism comes to mind. It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody British,” says Goodwin, relishing the shock to progressives.

Questioning the rights of citizens and immigrants has a sordid history. Nazi Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared someone with three or four Jewish grandparents was not German. “Remigration” is now a part of conventional politics. Farage pledges to deport 600,000 people in his first term and official Tory policy is the mass removal of 750,000. The Nazis began by terrorising Jews to leave, then forced expulsions and the rest, and we act like it couldn’t happen again. Tommy Robinson backs Goodwin, who doesn’t demur. Katie Lam, a Conservative MP sometimes tipped as future leader, says some who are legally entitled to live in Britain “need to go home” to ensure the UK remains “culturally coherent”, meeting with no rebuke, let alone expulsion, from her “respectable” party.

Both Tories and Reform would create a force, which the Tories say would be modelled on the “success” of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Rupert Lowe launched Restore Britain, backed by Elon Musk and the Tory London mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, with the slogan “millions must go”. Go where? What’s that whiff of nazism? That’s the way it goes.

Labour is not sufficiently out of this arms race: while Reform would abolish all indefinite leave to remain, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, proposes that refugees could wait up to 20 years for permanent residency. All governments must do what they can to control their borders but, in over-emphasising migration, Labour sheds more voters than it attracts.

Better by far was Keir Starmer’s rallying cry: “We must come together to fight Reform, with everything that this movement has,” at the last Labour party conference. He was right, the threat is real and terrifying. But it can be resisted: there are more progressive party voters than Tory and Reform. For a sign of that resistance, I listened in to a More in Common focus group in Bristol of former Labour voters who have shifted left or who are undecided. They were vitriolic against Labour, and Starmer in particular, beyond all reason, ferociously calling him “insincere”, “slimy”, “rubbish”, with very little credit for good things done, struggling when prompted to think of renters’ and workers’ rights, free childcare and the minimum wage rise.

Yet despite their present disillusionment, here’s the reason for optimism. They were adamant about the overarching need to keep Reform out at all costs. To stop it, they would vote for anyone, even a Tory. (Take note Tories, and shift back from the far-right precipice.) When Farage grins wolfishly that Reform is parking its “tanks on the lawns of the red wall”, it really isn’t. Labour has been wrong to think so. Labour seats are indeed highly vulnerable to Reform if the progressive vote splits, even if few Labour voters defect to Reform itself. The real danger is that anger with Labour alienates progressives to such a degree they fail to vote tactically when they should. To stop Reform, Labour needs to please and appease all those it has disappointed.