However much I love Vince Cable, I can’t let his comments urging people to vote tactically for Labour in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election pass without comment. He told the I Paper:
He pointed out that in previous by-elections and at the last general election, the Lib Dems had benefited from tactical voting by presenting themselves as the main anti-Conservative force in certain areas.
Cable – who was business secretary in the coalition government before leading his party from 2017 to 2019 – said: “First of all, the Lib Dems are not going to win here.
There is a flipside to tactical voting – the Lib Dems have benefited from perfecting organised tactical voting, and there is a reciprocal side of it that when we stand no chance of winning, we have to be honest about what we would do instead.
We do have a duty to get behind the candidate – and the sense I get, we’re all floating in the unknown here, is that whether it’s local surveys or the kind of feedback our people are getting on the ground, is that, for all the problems of the Labour Government they are still strong enough to present the main challenge to Reform and we have got to therefore get behind them.
Where he is right is that we do, of course, encourage tactical voting when we are in a position to win a seat. Squeezing the third, fourth or fifth place candidates’ votes is a legitimate campaign tactic. We need those people to vote for us if we are going to do well.
And I suspect that many Lib Dems vote tactically to stop other parties at the same time as campaigning in target seats to ensure other Lib Dems win. And I’m not going to judge them. However, it’s not for us to pro-actively encourage our supporters to vote a certain way. It’s for the party who wants their vote to persuade them. We might, by the size of our campaign in a particular area not stand in their way but we should always be about encouraging people to vote Lib Dem.
The party spokesperson who responded to Vince’s comments did so with respect, which was good.
Vince Cable has made an invaluable contribution to the party over the years and he is entitled to his own view.
As a party we’ll always make the case for voting Liberal Democrat, and that’s why we’re standing a candidate in Gorton and Denton and fighting for every vote.
For me, though, there are no circumstances in which I could vote Labour at the moment. There is a time when I might have considered voting tactically for them. The closest I ever got was in 2015 to counteract the SNP surge. However, I voted Lib Dem because I didn’t think my Labour MP was worth saving.
Not now, though. Labour are clearly worried about the Scottish Parliament elections because they canvassed me a couple of months ago. I told them that they had disappointed so much on various things, such as the two child payment, Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech and the way they had thrown trans people under the bus that I wouldn’t even give them a preference in a Council election (we have STV up here).
I don’t necessarily have a problem with the idea of voting for another party to stop Reform. Farage’s party is the ultimate nasty party that brings the worst of Trumpian politics to Britain. And we only have to look at innocent protesters being gunned down by barely trained thugs on the streets of Minneapolis, people being ripped from their families and sent to prison in another country without due process, the blatant corruption (Trump has enriched himself by a minimum of $1.4 billion) in the first year of his second term and the dismantling of the international order and democracy itself in the US to know that we don’t want that here.
But Labour’s answer to Reform has been to imitate them, to ape their narrative and paint themselves as a sort of Reform Lite. And the more they do that, the more the Reform narrative on immigrants, on marginalised groups of people, becomes embedded.
And we haven’t even started on the fact that the Prime Minister appointed Mandelson to Washington in the full knowledge that he had maintained his friendship with a convicted rich paedophile even after Epstein’s release from prison.
Progressive parties have a responsibility to challenge the nonsense that Reform comes out with and set out ideas to build a society where everyone can have enough to live a comfortable life. I’d say this very gently to Ed Davey as well. Our response to Keir Starmer’s island of strangers speech was not what I would expect of a liberal party that champions human rights. We should be talking about the benefits of people from other countries coming here and saving our lives in the NHS and helping us build a stronger economy and paying their taxes. If we don’t do that, then we are not going to solve the problem.
Labour do not deserve anyone’s vote in Gorton or anywhere else at the moment. I am sickened to my core at the way they have disappointed when they had so much chance to do good and heal the divisons in this country. If they want tactical votes, they need to not sicken the voters with that power. Reform is bad, but their enablers are arguably worse.
If I lived in Gorton, I would not be inclined to vote tactically anyway because I could not see Jackie Pearcey’s name on a ballot paper and not put a cross next to it. I first met her in the dinner queue at the Torquay conference in 1993. She was the one who taught me that you really can strike up a conversation with a stranger at Conference and they’ll be lovely to you. We’ve been friends ever since, helped by the Cix community of Lib Dems in the 90s and early 2000s.Jackie is as good an antidote to Reform as you are ever likely to get. She does not suffer illiberal fools gladly. She will annihilate their arguments given half a chance. She was an incredibly effective Councillor who gets things done and I think she is brilliant. I feel like our current parliamentary party could benefit from the breath of fresh air she would be.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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Concerns over therapy ferrets used to kill rats at UK's largest children's prison
National politicians should keep their noses out of the decision-making processes of local councillors
Nigel Jones
Matt (Bristol)
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36 Comments
I don’t agree.
Voting is always a choice between imperfect options, since the only person whose views I agree with 100% is Mohammed Amin.
If I lived in Gorton & Denton, I would not vote Liberal Democrat, because I don’t believe we can win there this time. I would vote for whichever party I thought was most likely to stop Reform winning, and would look for polling data before deciding.
If we want supporters of other parties to vote tactically for us when that makes sense, it is utter hypocrisy to say that Liberal Democrat supporters should always vote Lib Dem.
This comes down to the question of just what Reform is, is it just a nastier version of The Tories or is it in the same category as The British Movement or The National Front ? If we are seeing The first Mass Fascist Party in Britain since the 1930s then things are a lot more serious & ordinary Politics take second place.
The important question in G & D is do Reform win or lose.
@Mohammed
I wrote a piece on this recently for LDV, which sums up my opinion on the matter – simply put, Farage operates by telling people parties like the Lib Dems, Labour and Tories are “the establishment” and that we are not to be trusted.
To then have Vince Cable go to a national newspaper and tell Lib Dem voters to support Labour, from an image standpoint, allows Farage to say “see, I told you they’re all in it together, it’s an establishment plot to stop Reform”.
I support tactical voting, as I believe democracy must be protected from bad faith actors. But it is one thing to allow voters to make their own minds up, and another to have a party grandee dictate to them what to do. THAT is where the issue lies.
We have to distinguish between by-elections and general elections. In a general election, voting tactically may bring about a change of government and for the 2019 general election we, the English and Welsh Greens, and Plaid Cymru had a “Unite to Remain” agreement in which the three parties stood a single candidate in each constituency. This agreement covered 60 constituencies across England and Wales.
All that will happen as as a result of the Gorton and Denton by-election is that the Labour majority will either stay the same or reduce by one. The latter outcome may produce turbulence within the Labour Party but this will probably be nothing compared to what will happen if the Scottish and Welsh Parliamentary elections and English local elections in places like London on May 7th follow their expected course.
While I too have known Vince for decades and hold him in high regard, this intrusion of his does nothing to help the Party. At the same time the Party is pushing “full slate” where we are committed to maximising the number of council candidates we are standing even in areas where we are weak, because we know that it is the number of candidates standing that dictates the attention of the media, not how many extra seats we win, which will only be known afterwards.
If mainstream or left-leaning people dismiss concerns that some voters think are real, those voters will drift toward populist/right-wing parties.
In 2017 Lib Dems were on the brink of winning the Gorton by-election with Jackie Pearcey (then as now the candidate) when the by-election was cancelled by Theresa May’s calling of the general election.
Anyone who uses the 2024 election as a guide to this, as Vince seems to do, is not paying attention: the political world has been upended, old loyalties are gone and people are angry. The party which best channels that anger will win. This has the makings of being a being a four-way marginal (five-way if you count the Tories).
Lib Dems have two very strong campaigning seats next door and, if that strength were mobilised, and we ran a strong campaign we would be in a good position to win.
The question is will the party put the effort into a by-election in a working-class Northern seat?
Vote for Jackie ! I’ve been a Liberal all my life as far back as I can remember. My work politically has always been to change the corrupt 2 party system putting the Labour Party and the Tories out of business. We should be merciless in this pursuit.
Mohammed, Paul, Jack, Laurence – Agree all four posts! I would add:
There is a terrible myth that Hitler was unique. The facts – Stalin, Mussolini, Putin, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda, etcetera – show otherwise. Nobody ever believes it will happen in their own homeland, until it happens. Most German Jews didn’t think it was necessary to flee Hitler.
The Nazis took 10 years to work up to their Final Solution. First they flirted with mass expulsion. That’s where Trump, Farage, and most disgracefully Badenoch have already got to.
Of course, maybe that’s as far as they will go. Or maybe it isn’t. When Trump boasts of his Gaza Riviera, with no clear idea of what to do with two million Palestinians – I’d say he’s working up to an answer.
We need to keep Trump out of Britain, and his acolyte Farage out of power!
If we had an AV/STV system we would all be multiparty voters of different strengths. Ive voted tactically before as a deal with a corbynista in a Lib-Con marginal. Sometimes it is necessary and justifiable. Not with this Labour party though, and not will all the other parties in their least liberal manifestations.
If you want to reflect truly “progressive” values and you’re registered to vote in the Gorton & Denton by-election, there is only one place to put your ‘X’ mark and it’s against the Green Party candidate.
Labour (under Starmer’s leadership at least) appears to have abandoned its “progressive” values and we shouldn’t expect anything to change in that regard until he (Starmer) no longer at the helm.
This by-election represents a microcosm of the (potential) future direction of UK politics – if the Greens can face down the threat of ReformUK, secure victory and humiliate the current Labour leadership it will send a massive message of hope to the entire UK electorate, ie. that the so called minor parties; LibDems, SNP, Greens and Plaid Cymru can triumph across a swathe of formerly unwinnable seats whenever the next UK General Election [GE] comes around.
That outcome would mean that a “Progressive Majority” GE result with “Progressive Leaning” parties holding a clear majority but no single party among them boasting control of the Commons chamber – with that sympathetic to genuine Constitutional reform complexion, the real change ordinary UK voters are yearning for is no longer a dream and becomes a credible opportunity!
First off, it’s Denton and Gorton and Levenshulme and Burnage and a chunk of Longsight. I live in it. Denton is in Tameside, the rest in Manchester. It’s the scraps left over when the other constituencies were created. Labour have thrown it away. If Andy Burnham had been standing, they would have had a landslide. Mandelson hasn’t helped. What a time for that to be revealed. Despite what the very nice Green Party said, they are not the only ones to keep Reform out. Yes, we have been canvassed to death here. I think tactical (keep Reform out) voting here has to be Lib Dem.
I don’t agree with tactical voting in a by-election because for one thing unlike a General Election there won’t be people reciprocating what you are doing elsewhere. There’s also the fact that this government are currently so unpopular Labour could actually finish 3rd. Imagine the feeling of having cast a wasted tactical vote.
I feel sorry for the lovely candidate. But it is essencial to stop Reform. But Labour have been dreadful on many levels. The Manchester Evening News (my Dad’s bible) is putting Greens as favourites. I would rather vote for them. They have some wacky policies but in many ways are more similar to us. One more Green MP isn’t going to destroy NATO
I fear too many of the people here are starting from a sound position of needing to stop Reform good position but then rushing to a very weak conclusion.
One example is Peter Davidson, who starts with
“This by-election represents a microcosm of the (potential) future direction of UK politics – if the Greens can face down the threat of ReformUK, secure victory and humiliate the current Labour leadership it will send a massive message of hope to the entire UK electorate”,
but then concludes i.e. that the so called minor parties; LibDems, SNP, Greens and Plaid Cymru can triumph across a swathe of formerly unwinnable seats whenever the next UK General Election [GE] comes around.
No, it won’t. The public will conclude that the Greens can beat Reform, Labour and the Cons – not the Lib Dems.
Just as our four by-election wins in the last parliament was the basis for our recovery and triumph in 2024. 2026 could do that for the Greens and it would be largely at our expense.
Everyone who can get there needs to get behind Jackie, including the national party.
It would be different I think if Burnham was standing because then that would be a vote for change rather than an endorsement of this government’s track record. Also, stopping Reform getting 1 more MP isn’t the same thing as stopping them from forming a government, the fact is less is at stake in a by-election.
Jack Meredith 7th Feb ’26 – 1:27pm…To then have Vince Cable go to a national newspaper and tell Lib Dem voters to support Labour, from an image standpoint, allows Farage to say “see, I told you they’re all in it together, it’s an establishment plot to stop Reform”…
Do you really believe that Farage needs Vince’s help to claim that ‘”t’s an establishment plot to stop Reform”…He has been claiming it since day one…BTW.. He is urging Tory voters to vote Reform.
Every Reform victory is trumpeted in the ‘Mail’, ‘Express’, etc… If MY vote could stop that headline I’d vote for ‘Binface’ if it would help..
While I have a tremendous admiration for almost everything that Vince does, I think that calling for anti-Reform voters to coalesce around Labour in this by-election is misguided and foolhardy. His aim is admirable, but he’s backing the wrong horse (and a horse which over the past month has turned decidedly lame). The Manchester Evening News has tipped the Greens to win, and the betting agencies are also making the Greens odds-on favourites to take the seat. Vince’s intervention is a threat to this, and might allow Reform UK to slip through if the centre-left vote is split between Labour and the Greens. Sadly LibDems, and the Conservatives and SDP candidates, are frankly not in contention at all. The new Gorton & Denton seat is decidedly different in its make-up from its predecessors. Denton is a typical mostly white part of Tameside, while Gorton is now heavily Asian and Muslim.
Re David Evans “2026 could do that for the Greens and it would be largely at our expense “.
No it wouldn’t, David. Please look at the actual results across all the 631 GB constituencies (not counting the Speaker’s seat), at how polling actually resulted for LibDem and Green candidates in 2024. The two sets of results are largely complementary. Apart from their two gains in Herefordshire and Suffolk, almost all the seats where the Greens are now in sight of success are urban communities, largely in the inner cities, notably in the East London seats. Their greatest imminent success (based on current polling levels) are in Bristol, where they have strong chances of taking all five seats at the next opportunity. Greens are not a threat to LibDems in any of the 72 seats we hold, or in most of those which should be LibDem targets in the next General Election.
Vince was wrong to speak out like that, in something very controversial. Whilst he is not the leader of the Lib Dems he is held (rightly in other respects) in high esteem by many in and out of the party.
If something awful happened and it was a Lib Dem seat in a by election, (and I emphasise BY election) would a labour grandee be encouraging Labour voters to vote Lib Dem to keep Reform out?
We have an excellent candidate in the by-election. if I lived in Gorton and Denton, I wold vote LD.
If the polls were predicting a tight Reform – Lib Dem contest, you can be absolutely sure that Labour would NOT be urging its voters to cast their votes for the Lib Dem candidate, so it is foolish of the Lib Dems to gift Labour votes.
We saw that in the post-Brexit GEs in the constituencies where Labour had no chance of winning but they could – and repeatedly did – help the Conservatives take the seats by splitting the opposition vote.
I agree with Mohanned and Rif. We have to deal with the world as it is not how we would like it to be. This contest is turning out like an English version of Caerphilly. Once again the right wing press are champing at the bit for a victory for Farage’s poundshop fascists, once again I suspect the elecorate may have different ideas.
It is always difficult to predict who is the best party to beat Reform in a by-election, but in this case I suspect it is the Green Party not Labour who have the best chance of doing so.
@Sally Leitch-Devlin
“If Andy Burnham had been standing, they would have had a landslide.”
And Greater Manchester would be looking for a new Mayor.
From https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/26/labour-andy-burnham-veto-manchester-byelection
“There were plausible practical reasons for blocking the Greater Manchester mayor from running in the newly vacant Gorton and Denton seat: not least that the byelection to replace him would be the biggest and most expensive in modern British history.”
I never drank the Vince Kool-Aid – and his record on political strategy is considerably less impressive than his journalistic punditry.
But taking a strategic view the best outcome for the LIb Dems would be a Labour victory. In first past the post politics the less momentum anyone outside the ‘big two’ have the better.
And clearly the Lib Dems aren’t giving any sort of emphasis to this by-election. Lib Dem voice didn’t even have a post about Jackie (a fine and admirable liberal) being adopted as candidate but have in that time run two articles about Edinburgh South’s Burns Night supper!
There may be a bigger agenda here for the party. I recently asked our local party why there is no activity in preparation for a likely Parliamentary by-election here. It will be Reform v ANO, and I wondered why we could not be the ANO. I was told this is being “dealt with at regional level” ie shut up. If this means what I think it means then this is consistent with Vince Cable’s line on Denton and Gorton.
Vincent is wrong. We have a superb candidate. if I lived in Gorton and Denton, I wold vote LD.
What is sad is that it was not long ago that the party would have thrown everything into winning this seat. We have a long history of winning this sort of seat from Labour-Liverpool Edgehill and Brent East by way of example. Now we appear to be non existent in many parts of the country.
Does anyone imagine that Labour would ever,ever, reciprocate by urging people to vote Lib Dem where Labour can’t win?
If any Labour member did so they would be instantly expelled. Labour are not a pluralist party, they will not countenance anything that might further weaken the decaying two party system, and so often in by-elections they have made it plain that they would rather the Tories win than another completing party on the centre left.
Labour’s leadership is clinging on to the first past the post in a desperate bid to retain the duopoly on which they have depended for 100 years. People will vote in secret as they chose, but if we put up a candidate we must support them, otherwise there is no point in standing.
@ Richard Church, “Labour’s leadership is clinging on to the first past the post in a desperate bid to retain the duopoly on which they have depended for 100 years”.
Interestingly enough, when there was an opportunity to introduce various forms of PR in the ‘Representation of the People Act, 1918’, Asquith & Lloyd George and most of their followers decided to oppose it.
“Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose”
I couldn’t vote for a party whose leader is suggesting taking us out of NATO.
@ Richard Church,
” but if we put up a candidate we must support them, otherwise there is no point in standing.”
This sounds like a reasonable argument. Why waste £500 on a deposit when there’s little hope of getting it back?
The fact remains that both Labour and the Lib Dems do exactly this in many elections. It’s particularly tricky to negotiate a deal openly. Not putting in any real effort to support a candidate is the way it’s done.
@David Raw “Interestingly enough, when there was an opportunity to introduce various forms of PR in the ‘Representation of the People Act, 1918’, Asquith & Lloyd George and most of their followers decided to oppose it. ”
Indeed, and look how that turned out. Perhaps one might hope at least some modern politicians will have learned that lesson.
“What is sad is that it was not long ago that the party would have thrown everything into winning this seat.”
The reason this is not happening is that it would be a waste of time. The reason for that is that the Lib Dems just don’t have enough to offer, outside of comfortably-off territory, right now.
The classic Lib Dem byelection triumph technique is quite simple. Take an unpopular Tory Government which has cut taxes and spending too hard, as usual. Stand a sharp, personable, human-looking candidate. Promise to exert gentle leftward pressure. Try to pick one newsworthy current issue on which to attack the Tories and squeeze the Labour vote. Bob’s your uncle!
But the problem now is that this was, essentially, Keir Starmer’s pitch at the last election. And it has failed. And whilst Starmer’s errors have contributed, the main reasons for failure have been more deep-seated. You can’t buy transformational change for pence.
So politics now is a contest between the under-deliverers (Sunak, Starmer) and the over-promisers (Reform, Greens). The Lib Dems fall somewhere in-between – not a bad thing in itself, but not well articulated to the public. Plaid and the SNP have presented the in-between position – to promise a credible amount of change – rather better.
The over-promisers are currently winning, because the under-deliverers have caused despair. Let’s hope the Greens shade out Reform!
I’ve thought about this, and decided that in this situation I am fine to vote for anyone reasonable to beat a party that wants to tax women for not having children. In Denton and Gorton I would skip into the voting booth and vote green, as do many green voters AND MEMBERS have for us in other places.
We desperately need an offer that goes beyond being good community activists. That matters, but it needs to be publicly, proudly and clearly attached to a philosophy that people can hang their hat on. I want a sentence on what liberalism is and why it matters on every leaflet, in accessible language but not watered down. Then people who abandoned us will vote for us, rather than just giving us collateral victories by voting against someone else.
“not long ago … the party would have thrown everything into winning this seat” and indeed we did seem to be seriously fighting the planned 2017 Gorton by-election until its cancellation due to Theresa May’s ill-fated election call.
“………………….to beat a party that wants to tax women for not having children.”
This is not an argument in favour of Reform but many countries have a tax allowance for children. We had them at one time here too. In fact, anyone who is self employed or running a small business can still easily make use of otherwise unused family personal allowances.
A re-introduction of child tax allowances would mean that those who have no children end up paying more tax, on the same income, than those who do. Our system of child benefits works pretty much the same way if we think of child benefit as a negative tax.
Whoever at Reform has allowed a suggestion of a re-introduction of child tax allowances to be spun as a tax on the childless is clearly without the necessary political nous to be in the job.