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By Alek Yerbury

Party Leader, NRP

 

I spend a significant amount of time in the Gorton and Denton constituency, so I have been able to watch the by-election play out first hand, and have engaged with people from most of the political parties involved. The result was predictable, though I fully expect that most of the losers will draw all of the wrong conclusions.

 

Who won?

 

The Greens won by a significant margin, taking the seat from Labour (which previously held a huge majority). Despite the claims that Reform UK was equally likely (or more likely) to win, they trailed far behind. Labour came in third, and every party but those three received negligible amounts of votes.

 

Why did they win, and why did their opponents lose?

 

This is the important thing to understand. Anyone can look at the numbers, but what matters is to understand why those numbers are what they are.

 

These are the myths:

 

1. The Greens won by pandering to ‘sectarian’ votes. In other words, by pandering to immigrants. This is objectively untrue. Just engaging with immigrants that voted doesn’t constitute ‘pandering’ to them, and nobody can really blame Asian voters for wanting to vote with a party that adopts a more hostile stance to Zionism than Labour. In fact, the Greens campaigned with the least sectarian approach of any major party involved; they made a point of canvassing every single house in the entire constituency, regardless of demographic, multiple times. Nobody was ignored, even people who said they didn’t want to vote for them or the people they didn’t expect to receive votes from.

2. That there was widespread electoral fraud. There is no doubt that there WAS some instances of electoral fraud, but the majority is so large that fraud could never account for it. The result, in effect, is legitimate regardless.

3. That immigrant voters in a constituency that is 50% white British were more likely to support ‘left-wing’ parties for racial or ethnic reasons. There is no real evidence that this is the case in large enough numbers of people to matter. Whilst you have organisations like ‘The Muslim Vote’ or religious or ethnic organisations that promote a particular candidate, there is no evidence that voters take note of these things in great enough numbers to significantly change the outcome. In other words, for every non-white voter who voted for a particular candidate because their religious or ethnic leader told them to, there are 10 who used their own judgement (if they even voted at all, and there IS evidence to suggest that foreigners are less likely to be on the electoral register to begin with).

 

 

These are the realities, which anyone who actually experienced this election first hand cannot deny:

 

1. The Greens won because they worked the hardest out of any party, and converted their ideological views into useful proposals (rent controls, job creation, welfare improvements, etc) that actually gave people a reason to vote for them. They didn’t just turn up on doorsteps selling people ideology.

2. They also won because they were the most genuine and approachable party. They were the only ones who made the effort to at least TRY and persuade people who didn’t support them to vote for them. For the other major parties, it was an operation to mobilise voters that their ‘data analytics’ told them would support them. They didn’t genuinely care about winning anyone over or making the case as to why they deserved to be voted for. They had up to 400 people a day out for 8 hours a day, for weeks. No other party did this. 1000 from Reform on polling day – too little, too late. Labour, negligible by comparison for such a large party.

3. Reform performed below the expectations of its supporters, because of a lack of genuine effort. It wasn’t Labour or the Greens fault that election hustings had biased audiences against Reform, it happened because Reform’s supporters chose not to turn up. Reform made very little effort to even campaign inside the M60 (the Gorton wards) because their analytics told them not to bother.

4. Reform also suffered from a lack of genuine alternative. They offered absolutely nothing to even a white British voter (the ones who they expected to vote for them). ‘Stop the Boats’, or, ‘Ending Wokery’ – someone living in Gorton and Denton has heard that for 50 years and they would have to be born yesterday or a complete nihilist to believe it. It isn’t that people disagreed with the slogans and rhetoric from Reform – it is that people are wise to it and recognise that they are the kind of party who will say absolutely ANYTHING in order to get a vote out of you.

5.  Labour haemorrhaged votes to the Greens because the Greens represent something which is ideologically similar to Labour, and thus can be used as a protest vote against Labour by someone who would otherwise support Labour. They also lost votes to the Greens because Labour, like Reform, didn’t genuinely try as hard. Most of their activity didn’t start until the last two weeks.

6. Advance UK, which managed to accumulate tens of thousands of members in only a few months, got just over 150 votes, out of 75,000 potential votes. This happened because internet outrage does not translate into the real world, and social media is not real organisation. Their candidate was a good candidate, his party was not. It offered even less substance than Reform, and thus a voter had even less reason to care.

 

 

There are three major lessons to learn from this:

 

Firstly, that it is not possible to bypass the hard work of creating genuine political organisation. This is true for both Reform, who try to use PR stunts, data analytics and celebrity gimmicks as a substitute for genuine work, and even more true for Advance UK, who try to use social media clout as a way of bootstrapping themselves into power. On this point, the prospects of ‘Restore Britain’ are even worse than those of Advance, because they have this same problem on an even worse scale.

 

Secondly, that the average person is more likely to vote for someone who tells them what they think is true, regardless of whether the voter wants to hear it, compared to someone who tells the voter what they want to hear, but is believed likely to be lying. I experienced this directly with a Greens canvasser, who had no issue with telling me his own views on subjects like immigration, race, religion, whilst I told him mine and of my own work with the NRP. At no point did I believe that this man was telling me things he didn’t actually believe, and at even though I didn’t agree with him, he didn’t just tell me what he thought I wanted to hear. It’s impossible not to recognise the difference between this and the ‘populist’ approach of just pulling tropes out of a mental tombola to try and persuade people.

 

Thirdly, it demonstrates exactly why the National Rebirth Party is taking the right approach by actually creating a political movement in the correct order. Which is firstly, to create a coherent political programme, secondly, to develop organisational and administrative abilities with which to advance that programme, and finally, after that, to translate those things into political capital through election campaigns.

 

We will NOT make the mistake of the populist right, the terminally online right, and the old nationalists, of doing these things in a different order, or sacrificing a coherent programme for the sake of immediate flash-in-the-pan support.

 

The battle for Gorton and Denton was not won or lost by ideology, it was won and lost by differences in organisational abilities and work ethic. The local mass of people with clipboards who went around doorknocking in their work clothes roundly defeated a party of hacks who armed themselves with PR, marketing galore, and expensive analytics.

 

Many people in the sphere of Reform, and especially the sphere of ‘nationalism’, will gaslight themselves and pretend otherwise, because if they admit this then it means admitting that more work needs to be done and more effort needs to be made. But if they refuse to recognise this, then endless failure awaits them, and eventually through pain and suffering they will learn.

 

Victory belongs to those who do the work.

 

Help us realise the National Agenda of the National Rebirth Party:

 

nationalrebirthparty.org.uk/agenda

 

By getting involved TODAY!

 

nationalrebirthparty.org.uk/Join-as-a-Member