Nigel Farage and defeated Reform candidate blame sectarianism as mask slips

In this analysis for the Manchester Evening News, Damon Wilkinson argues that Reform’s desperation became apparent in the wake of their defeat in Gorton and Denton

Damon Wilkinson Reporter

21:49, 27 Feb 2026

Sectarianism. Here in the UK, it’s a word we’re more used to hearing in connection with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

But in the early hours of Friday, as the result of the bitterly-contested Gorton and Denton by-election was announced, it was a term Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin used time and time again.

“I think what you’ve seen is the emergence of a dangerous sectarianism in British politics,” the GB News presenter told the press as he lamented an apparent shift of the Muslim vote to the Greens that saw Hannah Spencer claim the seat in a watershed victory.

He added: “I think the progressives were told how to vote and I think what you saw was a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives that came together to dominate a constituency.”

Asked if his ‘divisive language’ was putting people off Reform, Mr Goodwin – a former academic who was once a leading expert on the far right – used the word again.

“You seem to be implying that we should be playing the game of sectarianism to win seats,” he replied. “We reject that. We are a party that’s about national community and national unity.”

Less than an hour later he was at it once more. “We are losing our country,” he wrote on X. “A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. “We have only one general election left to save Britain.”

Soon Mr Goodwin was joined by party leader Nigel Farage. “This election was a victory for sectarian voting and cheating,” he posted on X, alluding to comments made by independent election observers who claimed to have witnessed ‘extremely high’ cases of illegal ‘family voting’ at polling stations across the seat on Thursday.

The Greens were quick to respond, describing Farage’s claims as ‘an attempt to undermine the democratic result’ that was ‘straight out of the Trump playbook’.

Professor Rob Ford – who once co-authored an award-winning book on right-wing politics alongside Mr Goodwin while the pair worked at the University of Manchester – also joined in the condemnation.

“A win this big and decisive in a seat this socially mixed is not, and cannot, be down to ‘Muslim sectarianism’,” he wrote on X. “Deeply concerning that a defeated candidate would seek to undermine the legitimacy of an election result rather than accept a simple truth: Gorton & Denton rejected him.”

Reform had come into the campaign trying to convince people their agenda was not about division and animosity. What he wanted, Mr Goodwin said in a post on his Substack page, was to ‘live in a country… where people who work hard, play by the rules and contribute are put first – where they belong’.

But once the result was announced the mask slipped. ‘Islamists’, ‘woke progressives’, ‘dangerous Muslim sectarianism’ – that’s not the language of a party concerned with ‘national unity’, as Mr Goodwin claimed.

Instead, we got a glimpse of what Reform really thought about the people whose votes they had been trying to win.