If you’re unsure whether you’ve crossed the border from Manchester into Tameside, the Reform posters will probably give it away. In windows, on walls, and staked on garden posts, Denton is awash with turquoise blue as the 26 February byelection looms.
Near the town centre, Ian Singleton and his wife, Irene, have one of Reform’s turquoise banners standing proudly in their front yard. Ian was born in Gorton, in Manchester, but for the best part of the last three decades, the couple have lived on the other side of the constituency, in Denton.
Since then, Ian, 68, who served in the army and used to work in the building trade, has seen the high street decline.
“You’ve [only] got two pubs,” he said, adding that social spaces have been replaced with “more hairdressers, nail shops, takeaways and barbers”.
“I think the government, between these and some of the Tories, they’ve killed the little businesses,” Ian said. “They’ve killed the pubs.”
“Not only that, everything’s just gone so expensive as well, hasn’t it?” Irene, a 66-year-old former textile worker, added.
The couple have two children, in their late 30s and early 40s, who are renting houses. “They find it virtually impossible to buy one,” Ian said.
He also thinks England is missing a strong sense of identity, and national pride. “You look at the Welsh, you know when they’re Welsh,” he said. “Them flags and them dragons are flying high.”
The Singletons’ disenchantment is symbolic of a community that is only six-and-a-half miles from Manchester city centre, but sometimes feels much further. Greater Manchester’s Metrolink system has bypassed Denton, the congested routes out of the town make buses slow, and the railway station was named Britain’s least-used for 2023-24, with only one return train service a week.
Council tax rates have gone up, but bin collections have been cut, roads are scarred with potholes and streets near the centre are scattered with fly-tipped rubbish. It has all contributed to a sense of malaise, of Denton being left behind. “We are the forgotten little town,” one resident wrote on Facebook, noting that while seasonal decorations go up elsewhere, Denton misses out on lights at Christmas or poppies in November. “Nothing,” he wrote. “The little lost town. Forgotten. It’s just the way I feel. There are lots of good people in Denton who feel the same.”
The Gorton half of the constituency has seen rapid change in recent years – median house prices in the Levenshulme area rose at twice Manchester’s overall rate between 2013 and 2023. With almost twice as many votes as Denton, it is playing host to a straight fight between Labour and the Greens, who each argue they are best placed to beat Nigel Farage’s party.
But that division leaves an opportunity for Reform’s candidate, Matt Goodwin, if he can pile up votes on the Denton side. He has positioned himself as the person to come to residents’ aid as “a very loud champion who will draw attention to those issues” he said last week.
“I used to be a staunch Labour supporter,” Ian said. “With Labour, it was the party of the working people, and it just turned its back.”
At the same time, though, he is uncomfortable with some of the sentiment behind the St George’s flags that have been strung from buildings and lamp-posts since last year. “I think sometimes people who use it are racists, and are anti-foreign people,” he said.
Another Denton resident, who did not want to be named, said it was the economy that had pushed him to back Reform, similarly nailing his colours to the mast with a poster in his garden.
But he said a relative had warned him to “put it at the back, in the bush, because if people see it they’re going to think you’re a bigot or a racist”.
“To be very honest with you, hand on heart, there’s a lot of Reform’s policies that I’m not happy with,” he said. “For example environmental policies, and I don’t want to see people that are legally contributing to society being sent back.”
“I’ve had to sacrifice some of my beliefs, I think, to support Reform,” he added.
The Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, rejects the idea that only Reform can persuade Denton’s voters.
“I don’t think any party has got any area in the bag,” she said. “And it was a mistake I think Reform made by assuming a white working-class community was just going to vote for them.”
By the same token, there are pockets of support for Reform in Manchester, too. Flags that have started appearing since September have in some parts led to tensions, with hostile reactions in local Facebook and WhatsApp groups. “These streets belong to everyone who lives on them,” one resident wrote on WhatsApp, saying “flags that make people feel unsafe” have “no place” in Levenshulme.
But the rapid gentrification has, in some quarters, pushed people towards Goodwin’s party. “Reform all the way,” one resident wrote in a local Facebook group. “Leve [Levenshulme] was built with proper people, not you weirdo Chorlton [a leafy, high-income Manchester suburb] wannabes.”
In the Levenshulme, one of those “normal, bog-standard” pubs that once filled the high street, one drinker said: “I’m voting for Farage, because we need a change, don’t we?”
Another punter was also voting Reform and said “a lot of people I speak to are voting the same”.
“All you see round here is all these Green [posters], I don’t know where they’re coming from, they seem to be in every garden,” he added. “Liberal lefties, they can all piss off back to Chorlton.”
However, Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said that finding their supporters in the area may prove tricky for Reform.
“I think the challenge for Reform is logistical and organisational,” he said. “How do you find those voices and engage them?
“I mean, some of them may show up anyway,” he added. “These are areas where if you go knocking on doors you might find one receptive voter for every five or six hostile voters, and that’s potentially quite a bruising experience if you’re a canvasser.”
In the end, Ford said, Reform’s path to victory could “come through the middle on a divided vote” – if support for Labour and the Greens splits evenly, “then Reform don’t need to win overall”.
But he added: “Anyone who tells you what’s going to happen in the wee small hours of Friday morning two weeks from now is either a fool or a fanatic. There really is no way of knowing.”
Whatever the overall picture, Ian Singleton is clear on his hopes: he views Goodwin as the most likely path to political change – as a “lad from around this area” who, along with his party colleague Lee Anderson could be “the voice of the working person”.
“Let’s put it this way; I don’t think they can do any worse, I really don’t.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
