“Manchester has always been Labour,” was Angeliki Stogia’s response to suggestions the party was now only a “distant third” in the Gorton and Denton by-election race.
“We are constantly on the doorstep and acting on what people tell us,” the party’s candidate said in an Instagram video where she rebutted critical social media comments.
Yet while the area has indeed reliably voted Labour for most of the last century, the party knows that may not be the case in Thursday’s vote.
Some Labour activists fear that Sir Keir Starmer’s party could come third to the leftwing Greens and rightwing Reform, which have both run energetic, populist campaigns against the party struggling in No 10.
Such a result would be a fresh blow to Starmer, whose position has been further weakened this month by the Lord Peter Mandelson scandal and the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar calling for him to resign.
Streets that were once solidly Labour-voting now contain mixtures of their main rivals’ posters, in a signal that Starmer’s vote is fracturing in both directions.
“I’ve got no other option,” said one young woman with a Reform placard in her front garden, of voting for the populist rightwingers. “I don’t really like Reform,” she added — but hers was a vote against Labour, rather than one for Nigel Farage. Labour had done “nothing for Gorton”.
“The area is a shithole,” she said, surveying her street. “Look at the state of it, there’s a mattress over there. There’s couches over there on that estate. And Labour are doing nothing to clear it up.”
The distance between the constituency’s struggling neighbourhoods and Manchester’s revitalised city centre can feel farther than four or five miles.
Nevertheless, Labour, which runs both councils in the constituency and has held the Greater Manchester mayoralty since its inception in 2017, expresses confidence in its record and warns that only it can keep Reform out.
“We’ve got a much stronger brand” than rivals, said Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell as she knocked on the doors of undecided voters in the suburb of Levenshulme last week.
That includes the “Andy Burnham effect”, she added of the Greater Manchester mayor, who enjoys unusually high popularity for a mainstream politician but was blocked from standing as the party’s candidate in the by-election.
She pointed to transport promises made by Burnham, including a vow to put Denton train station, which currently has only one service a week, on the city’s tram network.
Labour is telling progressive voters that it is the only party able to stop Farage’s rightwing populists from taking the seat.
“People are galvanised to keep out Reform,” added Powell, adding that the party did not represent “Manchester values”.
“They want to know what the right thing is to do to achieve that.”
For some, the answer to that is not Labour but the Greens. The leftwing party, which has not traditionally had any presence in the area, has run a highly visible campaign, leafleting mosques in multiple languages and flooding the seat with placards.
Former Labour voter Mohammed Sarfaz, who has run the Andaaz clothing shop in Longsight for 24 years, has placed a Green Party poster in his window.
He said he had concluded that without Burnham as a candidate he would be voting Green.
“Reform is a racist party,” added Sarfaz, 74, who came to the UK from Pakistan. “No country in the world survives without immigration.”
Debate has raged over whether Matthew Goodwin, Reform’s chosen candidate in the seat, was a wise choice.
His previous comments on race, integration and Islam have been weaponised by his opponents in a constituency that is nearly 30 per cent Muslim.
“That’s really angered people,” said Anwar Choudhury, a former British high commissioner to Bangladesh, as he canvassed for Labour. “We’ve given blood and our lives for this country,” he said of his fellow Bengalis, adding: “He needs to understand what patriotism is. Patriotism is not colour.”
Goodwin insisted his previous comments, in which he said that citizenship alone was not sufficient to make an individual British, had been misrepresented by his opponents.
“Go out and ask British people whether they think the 7/7 bombers felt the same sense of belonging to this country as the people they murdered,” he said. The country needed a serious conversation about integration, said Goodwin, but added: “There are parts of the media setting up this election as this group versus that group.”
Goodwin has sought to make the by-election about local problems, pointing to crime, the cost of living and last year’s scandal in which the area’s then-Labour MP Andrew Gwynne was exposed for insulting and mocking constituents on WhatsApp.
“If you go into Gorton or Denton and ask them what the biggest issues are for them locally, I guarantee they will start with Labour neglect, Labour complacency, cost of living, energy bills, taxes,” he said.
“I’ve spoken to many Muslim voters here who have said they agree with what we’re saying,” he added, referencing the party’s election motto of “family, community, country”.
With days to go, the campaign has already proved not only unpredictable but bad-tempered.
Police are investigating two allegations of electoral law breaches, one involving Reform election literature, the other surrounding a dinner attended by voters and senior Labour figures.
The restaurant in which Reform launched Goodwin as a candidate later issued a statement distancing itself from the party after receiving abusive messages. Complaints of online misinformation have abounded.
Voters, meanwhile, are irritable.
One shopkeeper in Gorton, who declined to give her name, said none of her customers were intending to vote. “And everybody here used to vote Labour,” she added, shaking her head angrily of the party’s record in government.
And while Labour may hope its historically strong electoral record in the city will be an asset on Thursday, others view it as proof that a change is needed.
“Manchester has always been Labour,” said Sarfaz, using the same phrase Stogia had deployed on Instagram earlier that day.
“You know the situation with the Labour Party,” he added. “It’s in tatters. The English word: tatters.”