I’ve heard the calls a few times now, “if only we’d fought Gorton and Denton”, or “the local party got screwed over by HQ”, but as someone who was there coordinating the local party’s activity in the by-election, some things are a bit overstated.

Not fighting Gorton & Denton was a symptom of the problem that culminated with disappointing results in urban areas (including in my own ward in Manchester) last week, but it wasn’t the cause. The Greens aren’t doing well nationally because of the momentum of the Gorton & Denton win, they won Gorton & Denton because of the momentum they already had, which the win just accelerated.

So let’s set the record straight. The local party was in agreement with HQ – we didn’t want to burn ourselves out fighting a by-election there was no realistic chance of winning. And despite what you may have read in Liberator, there was no fully funded offer to do an election communication to the whole constituency (which would have cost at least an order of magnitude more than the suggested £300!), but instead only a more targeted one which we did do (and despite Liberator claiming HQ ran the election communication, it was actually me who did the work whilst recovering from surgery). There were a few points of friction with HQ (it was true that there was some initial pushback against even the targeted mailing, and I did find some of HQ’s comments on my artworking a bit pedantic), but we successfully made the case for approval from the agent and got on with it. Jackie was a fantastic candidate and I’m proud to have her as a colleague in the local party, and she did the job brilliantly, but she went into it knowing it was not an election we would be fighting to win.

Then when Labour’s NEC blocked Burnham, I was not at all surprised when the leader of Manchester’s Greens mentioned to me in conversation after full council that they were going to throw everything at it now. That was the turning point that convinced them that they could do it, and in the same position I would have felt the same – but we weren’t starting from the same position.

But the dominos that meant Gorton & Denton was a no hoper for us started falling a long time before the Greens chose to fight it, and us choosing not to. Membership is stagnant and even among core activists, enthusiasm is low. But despite a strong council base in Gorton a couple of decades ago, following the coalition era collapse we have now no infrastructure in place to have launched a campaign from. And when it comes to campaigning, nationally we seem to rely heavily on squeeze and tactical voting meaning we can only fight a campaign if we can position ourselves as a contender in a two horse race, which Gorton & Denton was never going to be.

All of these decisions added up that meant by the time Gwynne resigned, we’d essentially ruled ourselves out (which at best may be just an unintentional consequence of our strategy), and that’s not even to speak of the national media framing around the election which wouldn’t have considered us.