Labour escalates Holocaust row in Gorton and Denton by-election as Greens take a lead and campaign turns toxic. Right, so Labour Peer and the party’s Faith and Belief champion Mike Katz has gone public and told voters in Gorton and Denton that a Green Party candidate “demeans Holocaust Memorial Day” and is therefore unfit to represent the seat, while Labour’s own candidate is presented as the only acceptable option. The trigger for that exclusion is a short reply to a photograph of Angela Rayner lighting a candle, where the Greens candidate for the seat, Hannah Spencer wrote “Never again, but still selling arms to Israel”. Labour has not answered the arms sales point and has instead reframed the comment as a moral offence tied to Holocaust remembrance. At the same time, Laura Kuenssberg has been telling Green Party Leader Zack Polanski that talking about Gaza is “divisive”, as if naming mass killing is the problem rather than the killing itself. These two moves are operating together. Establishment party and establishment media. They draw a line around what can be said, who can say it, and who is allowed to stand and therefore attempting to tell you what you are allowed to think. Once a governing party starts doing that this early, it isn’t managing a campaign. It’s desperately trying to reassert control over a situation they know is slipping away. Right, so Keir Starmer’s Labour has decided, more than four weeks before polling day in Gorton and Denton, to make Holocaust remembrance a campaign weapon, and it’s done it in the laziest possible way: take a short, morally charged phrase, lift it out of context, slap “smear” on it, and hope the headline does the work. Mike Katz has put the line out in public: he calls the Greens and Reform “two populist parties”, says Reform’s candidate is “quite similar” to far-right Tommy Robinson, and then claims the Green candidate “demeans Holocaust Memorial Day”, finishing with “Only Labour’s Angeliki Stogia is” fit to represent the seat. That’s the frame: one opponent is the far right, the other is morally filthy, and Labour is the only clean option left standing. Everyone else is irrelevant. Labour wants the election to become a hygiene test, not a competence test, and once you choose that strategy you don’t get to control where the dirt lands.