Green Party shakes up the Gorton by-election as a local plumber takes on Labour’s machine politics and Reform’s media grift in ManchesterRight, so the Greens have just selected a local plumber, Hannah Spencer as their candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour has of course blocked Andy Burnham from standing, and a privately commissioned by-election poll by one of their donors managed to circulate allegedly without ever being properly published, the sample size being so small as it was, yet is now growing to be a bigger and bigger scandal for Labour in a seat they already had only a slim chance of defending. What we have now is a locally chosen tradesperson, someone who literally fixes stuff for a living, standing to fix the constituency, up against Reform UK’s TV pundit from Hertfordshire and a leadership-managed nominee from Labour, by the name of Angeliki Stogia. The assumption that politics is just brand versus brand simply doesn’t fly here now when an ordinary working class person is on the ballot and ticks all the boxes to push back against that. And once polling becomes something that appears when it’s useful and disappears when it isn’t on top of that, well we have a contest on our hands. It’s very much grafter vs grifter.Right, so Keir Starmer doesn’t get to pretend this by-election is a local issue anymore, because the moment Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing, they turned Gorton and Denton into a test of who actually controls the Labour Party, and whether the party is still capable of reading a working-class seat without treating it like a spreadsheet. It’s already become the sort of contest where you can feel the machine panicking, because the machine has realised something basic: it can’t rely on habit and it can’t rely on deference, so it’s trying to rely on procedure, and the procedure is starting to look like the problem.The Green Party selecting Hannah Spencer has poured petrol on that, not because it’s some grand strategic masterstroke in Westminster terms, but because the optics are brutally simple and they don’t need explaining.