Labour’s By-Election Choice Just Created A Big Problem

Right, so Labour has picked its candidate for Gorton and Denton and then acted surprised when people started looking at the record that came with her, as if candidate selection is meant to be beyond question rather than a concrete political choice with consequences attached. Especially when, as a Manchester City Councillor, she very much has a track record.
Because this isn’t about rumours or smears or who somebody’s married to or isn’t, that’s the cheap stuff, that’s what gets thrown around when there’s nothing real to hit. This is about what Labour chose to stand behind in a seat it clearly thinks it’s entitled to. A candidate whose professional life sits inside private infrastructure delivery, stakeholder management, rail projects, consultancy culture, the exact machinery Labour keeps insisting it’s going to dismantle one day, just not today, and apparently not here either.
Nothing illegal. Nothing hidden. Nothing you can wave away as fake news either though. Just a very clear signal about what Labour now considers normal, acceptable, and safe. And once you see that, the by-election stops being about stopping Reform or mocking the Greens and starts being about something much more uncomfortable: whether Labour still even recognises the problem it claims to exist to solve.
Right, so Keir Starmer’s Labour has selected Angeliki Stogia as its candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, and that choice has already narrowed what Labour can plausibly posture as, because a candidate isn’t a press release, a candidate is a bundle of lived decisions, affiliations, votes, jobs, roles, networks, and instincts, we will look for them and pick through them and based on who you’ve chosen to impose – because that is the Starmer way – we’ll hold that to scrutiny.
Hannah Spencer is of course the Green candidate, and the first thing that has happened is not a sober comparison of records, it’s the usual gutter nonsense, online accounts trying to manufacture a “gotcha” about who she lives with, what her partner does, what that supposedly proves, like a person’s politics can be discredited by a job title at a big firm, and it’s so obviously a substitute for actual argument that it gives the game away straight off, because if you had anything real you would use it instead of making your case by insinuation and Facebook post, they literally made up a fake husband for her and that whole smear rhythm tells you the point is not truth but atmosphere, not scrutiny but intimidation, and it is designed to push ordinary people back out of politics by turning their private lives into a target range and apparently now making them up if needs be, because that’s the level some have already stooped to.
Angeliki Stogia’s register of interests lists her as a partner at a company called Arup and records a secondment linked to the Transpennine rail upgrade, and that matters because Arup isn’t a campaign group or a charity or some neutral technical body, it’s one of the big consultancies that operates within Britain’s privatised infrastructure system, the firms that sit between government money and private delivery and translate public need into projects investors can live with. In Angeliki Stogia’s case, well, here’s some of the blurb on her from Arup’s own website:
‘Angeliki leads the firm's Stakeholder Engagement and Communications service across the UKIMEA North region.
Based in Manchester, she specialises in developing and implementing engagement strategies that build advocacy, enhance reputation, manage risk and deliver better outcomes across energy, rail, water highways, cities, government and sustainability sectors.’
Now this isn’t about secrecy or wrongdoing, it’s all declared, all within the rules, but once you know what Arup actually does, and her role within it, the question stops being “did she break a rule” and becomes “why is Labour comfortable selecting someone whose professional world is built around managing outsourced rail and energy projects, at the same time as it tells voters it wants public control back.”
And you need to bear that rail and energy remit in mind going forwards here. The Transpennine Route Upgrade describes Angeliki Stogia as joining in spring 2025 as Head of Stakeholder Engagement, working with councils, MPs, partners and, crucially, the people putting the money on the table, because at that scale “stakeholder” doesn’t necessarily mean local residents with a clipboard, it also means funders, delivery bodies, contractors and the private capital structures that large rail projects now rely on and will continue to until its all fully and properly nationalised. That role sits right at the point where public money, private finance and political cover meet, where objections get softened into “feedback” and projects keep moving. Taken on its own, that’s a job. Taken alongside a role at Arup, a firm built around making privatised infrastructure workable, it becomes a pattern Labour is now asking voters to ignore.
Manchester City Council has also recorded Stogia in its planning and governance story for years, including reporting around planning decisions and the planning model that has turned Manchester city centre into a developer-led churn where heritage gets treated as an inconvenience and public objection becomes an admin problem to be handled rather than a democratic constraint to be obeyed. In 2021, a detailed account of the planning committee approving demolition at 42–50 Thomas Street describes Councillor Stogia’s language about “eyesores” and “viability” in the context of wiping out working-class history for a redevelopment model that keeps producing shiny towers and leaving poverty underneath, and you can dress that up as pragmatic all you like, but it is still a political posture that aligns neatly with the same worldview as private-infrastructure consultancy, where the world is a set of projects to be made investable, not a set of communities to be protected.
Now, if Labour wanted a candidate who embodied a clean break with that development culture, it could have picked one. It chose not to. It chose a candidate whose public footprint sits right on the fault line between public office and private infrastructure delivery, and then it expects voters to treat that as a detail, while it tries to run the campaign as if the only story is “stop Reform,” as if the seat is owed to Labour by default, and as if people should accept that the party that used to talk about ownership and public control now treats those words as vibes rather than commitments.
There is a difference between a councillor having a job and a councillor being inside the infrastructure pipeline that councils and government bodies routinely outsource to, because transport and energy are not like selling socks, they are foundational systems, they are where public money and private profit meet, and when you are both an elected decision-maker in a city region and also professionally positioned inside the apparatus that pitches, delivers, and manages large-scale rail work, you do not need a single corrupt act for the optics to look a bit iffy, because the conflict is cultural before it is criminal, it is about whose language you speak fluently, whose interests you treat as “reasonable,” whose anger you treat as “a stakeholder issue,” and whose demands you treat as something that can be waved away as unrealistic.
Stogia’s defenders will say the obvious thing, which is that registers exist, disclosures exist, rules exist, and she is within them. They would be right. Fine. But “within the rules” is not a moral defence when the argument is that the rules themselves have been bent to normalise exactly this class of revolving-door politics, where the public realm is run through consultancy logic and the boundary between democratic accountability and corporate delivery culture becomes a suggestion rather than a wall. If Labour’s pitch is that it will rebuild trust, then selecting a candidate who embodies the permission structure of the privatised settlement is not rebuilding trust, it is testing how much cynicism the party can get away with.
And then there’s the other piece of “allowed but ugly” that sits there like a warning light once you look it up: Angeliki Stogia is listed as an active director of National Car Parks Manchester Ltd at the time the company entered liquidation, with a creditors’ voluntary liquidation commencement date recorded as 7 July 2021. Again, this is not “scandal” in the tabloid sense, it does not automatically imply wrongdoing, and anyone who tries to turn it into an accusation of criminality without evidence would be an idiot. But as an optics problem for Labour, it is spectacularly on-brand in the worst way, because you don’t need to prove a single dodgy act to see what it symbolises in the public mind: the same municipal-politics universe where councils create arms-length companies, where services get spun into corporate shells, where governance becomes boards and directors and opaque structures, and where a politician can simultaneously sell a story of “Labour values” while sitting on a directorship in a company in liquidation.
That is what Labour has now attached to its own campaign by choice, and it is why the smear campaign against Hannah Spencer is so revealing in a backwards way, because the people pushing that stuff are trying to force the Greens into the same swamp of insinuation and class-snobbery, “oh you’re not really working class because someone near you has a professional job,” “She lives in Hale, that’s not poor,” while Labour has handed opponents a far cleaner line of attack that does not require gossip, does not require innuendo, and does not require anyone to pretend a partner’s employer is somehow a political crime.
So the frame becomes simple and vicious for Labour in a way it cannot easily escape. Labour is trying to run a by-election as a morality play about patriotism and extremism and “stopping Reform,” while its own selection decision makes it look like the party is still structurally comfortable with the outsourced, consultant-heavy, developer-sympathetic, privately financed model of running Britain, the same model Labour used to claim it existed to confront, but which Starmer and his idol Blair before him comfortably embrace. That does not mean Stogia is personally corrupt. None of this does. It means Labour’s instinctive comfort zone has become visible again, and once it is visible you can’t unsee it. Especially when it all gets pointed out.
Manchester’s development model has been argued over for years, and the core grievance is not that buildings exist, it is that the city has been run as a growth machine that rewards the people who can monetise land while treating ordinary residents as an obstacle to be managed. When planning committees override waves of objection, when heritage is dismissed, when “viability” becomes the magic word that makes affordability disappear, when the same corporate players keep turning up around big schemes, the democratic problem is not one vote on one day, it is the cumulative effect of a political culture where consultation becomes theatre and outcomes stay consistent. Stogia has been part of that world, publicly, as a councillor, and her professional role is in precisely the sector that thrives when that world remains the default.
That is the trap Labour has set for itself. If Labour attacks Hannah Spencer as “not really local” or tries to sneer at the Greens as naive, it invites the obvious reply: Labour picked a candidate who looks like the living proof that the party has made its peace with private capital in infrastructure, and then it wants to pretend the argument is only about which logo is more “serious.” If Labour tries to pivot into “competence,” it still has a problem, because “competence” in the privatised settlement often just means being competent at managing decline, smoothing dissent, and delivering projects that keep ownership and profit at arm’s length from the public. If Labour leans on “unity,” it still has a problem, because unity as a slogan is useless when the party’s practical decisions keep aligning with the same interests that have hollowed out trust in the first place.
And the funniest part, in a bleak way, is that Labour has watched the right do this for decades: keep the public realm permanently remodelled as a marketplace, keep delivery structures fragmented, keep accountability diffused, keep politics safe for consultancy and outsourcing, and then tell the public to vote for stability. Labour used to claim it would reverse that. Now it selects a candidate whose declared professional footprint sits inside that machine and expects everyone to treat it as irrelevant. That is not a comms mistake. That is the party showing you what it considers normal.
You can still argue, honestly, that personal lives should be off-limits unless they involve actual wrongdoing. You can also argue, honestly, that a councillor having a professional career is not itself a sin. None of that saves Labour from the central consequence of its own decision, which is that it has made it far easier to tell a coherent story about what Labour is now than it is to tell a coherent story about what the Greens are, because Labour’s candidate record speaks the language of private delivery culture, municipal corporate structures, and developer-era planning instincts without anyone having to invent anything at all.
So the story here is not “a scandal,” and it is not “a gotcha,” and it is not “a conspiracy.” The story is that Labour has chosen to carry a set of optics that fit perfectly into the post-Thatcher settlement it once claimed to oppose, at the exact moment it is trying to hold a seat under pressure from both Reform and the Greens, and it has done it while the opposition it wants to ridicule is being attacked with the kind of online smear tactics that only work when people are already desperate to avoid talking about the real record in front of them.
And again I reiterate, everything discussed here is drawn from public records, declared interests and published reporting, and the argument being made is a political one, and not a criminal one.
That said though, Keir Starmer’s Labour can now either defend that record and own what it implies about the party’s comfort with privatisation-by-another-name, or it can pretend it doesn’t exist and hope the electorate stays obedient. It can’t do both, and it can’t unpick the choice it has already made, because the candidate is now selected, the declared interests are already published for anyone to look up, the professional role is already public, the directorship is already listed, and the whole campaign now has to operate inside that constraint until polling day arrives and forces the verdict.
For more on Hannah Spencer herself, now overwhelmingly standing in stark contrast to her main opponents in this election, find out more about the plumber come trainee plasterer here – no directorships there.
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