What’s the state of this Starmer-led nation? Speak to angry voters in Gorton and Denton and it all becomes clear | Owen Jones

I had so many conversations with people fed up with all the chaos, deceit and U-turns. Politics must respond to this disenchantment, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

You can feel Labour’s electoral coalition fraying in the cold, rain-soaked streets of south-east Manchester. With nine days to go now until the historic byelection in Gorton and Denton, one thing unites these otherwise diverse communities: a visceral contempt for the prime minister.

Mention Keir Starmer’s name and people laugh: not with affection but disbelief, as though it’s faintly absurd to treat him as a serious topic of conversation. “He just doesn’t stick to his word,” says a middle-aged woman walking her dog, stressing that her real feelings would be impolite to print.

And it is hard to argue with her, not least as Starmer’s government reels again after yet another head-spinning, chaotic U-turn – this time forced upon him by Nigel Farage and Reform. A plan to delay local elections abandoned in humiliating fashion, not because the PM realised it was the wrong thing to do, but because Farage raised a legal challenge and Starmer knew he would lose it.

“He says he’s going to do something and then doesn’t,” the dog walker says. Her view is widely shared: according to YouGov, six in 10 Britons believe Starmer is untrustworthy, with just two in 10 believing the opposite.

These are the fruits of a political project crafted by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s recently departed chief of staff. It was smart politics, he clearly believed, to mislead the Labour membership into voting for him six years ago by offering leftwing policy pledges and then abandoning them. But the founding sin became the defining trait: voters routinely perceive this government to be innately deceitful and duplicitous.

Walk the streets of Gorton and Denton now and the resulting draining of trust is easily discernible. Labour took half the vote here in 2024. Now its coalition is splintering in two directions at once: towards Zack Polanski’s Greens on the populist left, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the Trumpian nationalist right.

Commentators like to divide the constituency neatly in two: younger, more diverse Gorton; older, whiter, more working-class Denton. There are certainly an astonishing number of Green party posters and garden stakes in Gorton, while union jacks are more visible in Denton.

People don’t always fit into neat boxes, though. An older woman in Denton voices her grievances about “illegal migrants” taking jobs and then tells me she’s voting for the Green candidate, local plumber Hannah Spencer. A white man in his 70s uses his thick Mancunian accent to denounce Rachel Reeves for what he sees as a vendetta against pensioners – and says he too will back the leftwing insurgents.

Spencer is bullish about Denton. Reform tend to “assume that white working-class communities all think and act in one and the same way,” she says, “and that we don’t care about each other. I think they’ve really, really underestimated how much people actually do care about having a place for everyone to live.”

Yet while the constituency is saturated with anger and disillusionment, that anger expresses itself in very different ways. For those drifting to Reform’s candidate, Matt Goodwin, immigration is almost always the first grievance voiced. A middle-aged woman is voting for Reform because “Britain seems full with immigrants at the moment, and there’s not enough houses”. Her three sons, she complains, cannot even get on the council-house waiting list.

Here is how rightwing populism feeds on the wreckage of a broken economic model. People are left feeling trapped in a zero-sum game: if only there were fewer foreigners, there would be more homes, more jobs, more security for them. But tens of thousands are trapped on council-house waiting lists because the stock has been flogged off and not replaced. She notes, entirely reasonably, that flats are going up “everywhere you look in Manchester”, but assumes they are for refugees – when the real problem is that expensive flats are being built that local people cannot afford.

Whether the Greens can defeat the rightwing populist answer to popular grievances depends on a mostly youthful army of activists. The party claims it knocked on 11,000 doors on Saturday alone – roughly a quarter of households here. But its rise has been sudden; it has little historic infrastructure in the seat and is building from nearly scratch. “The main thing is that nobody is voting Labour,” says longtime resident and activist Ally Fogg. “It’s become almost impossible to find a Labour voter anywhere.”

It is certainly a struggle to find Labour voters here. I do find one party loyalist, who argues the media hold Starmer to a harsher standard than they did his Conservative predecessors. Even he, however, is wavering: he will decide on polling day which candidate is best placed to stop Reform.

Labour remains bullish about its prospects, although this byelection upends normal expectations management. Normally, you do down your chances to motivate your voters, but if you’re competing with another progressive party, a different calculation applies. If its vote has not collapsed, then it will be down to a new “shy Labour voter” – that is, like Tory supporters before them, a reluctance to admit your voting intentions because of the stigma attached.

What is undeniable is that even the party’s remaining grassroots struggles to articulate a coherent purpose. A cheerful canvasser from Bradford tells me “equality” is a core Labour value. When I ask which policies embody that, she falters.

Party briefings insist support is holding among local Muslim voters, despite fury over British complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza. Leftwing activist Farrukh Haroon dismisses that claim out of hand. “Their vote has tanked,” he says. Labour treated Muslim communities as “voting fodder” and “colonial subjects” – but, he argues, “that has been broken.”

What should really frighten anyone invested in the future of democracy is the level of angry disengagement on display here. Some of those I spoke to made clear they had given up on voting: that they now had a solidified contempt towards any politicians. These are citizens that the Greens’ brand of populism has yet to convince.

After so many years of living standards and public services in crisis, the hope that sustained so many people has shrivelled. There is frustration, some apathy, but most obviously despair – and if that despair hardens, it could carry this country into far darker territory. Once trust has been eroded, as is evident here, no one can be sure what happens next.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist