The Gorton and Denton by-election has already got alarm bells ringing across Yorkshire for Labour - Andrew Vine

Sound familiar? It certainly does to the long-time Labour members and activists I know in a dozen or more constituencies in West and South Yorkshire.

The stories of their areas have broadly followed the same trajectory of Gorton and Denton and while, thankfully, none has the same appalling levels of deprivation, these Yorkshire seats are far from affluent.

The questions voters will ask themselves before deciding which party to support on Thursday are much the same as those asked in any number of Yorkshire communities for years.

What does the future hold? How is our area to be revived, smartened up and given a new sense of purpose? Where are the stable, well-paying jobs coming from? How are our young people to be given hope and the chance of a rewarding career?

Successive governments have failed to come up with convincing answers or investment that brings about real change for the better.

And if the polling ahead of the by-election is accurate, it points to the voters of Gorton and Denton having little faith in the current government to improve their lives.

Labour is predicted to lose to Reform UK or the Greens, and may find itself pushed into third place, which would be a dreadful result in a once-safe seat which it held with a majority of more than 13,000 a little over 18 months ago.

The overwhelming likelihood that Labour will be badly beaten on Thursday is why party members who I’ve chatted to are taking such a close – and frankly gloomy - interest in the result.

If Mancunians sick of post-industrial decline vote that way this week, there’s every chance Yorkshire folk who share their disillusionment will do likewise the next time they get the chance, in the hope upstart newcomers like Reform and the Greens might come up with the answers that Labour and the Conservatives have failed to deliver over decades of dominance.

If Labour does lose – and badly – ministers will undoubtedly be trotted out on the usual round of interviews to insist voter disenchantment with a serving government is only to be expected and that it does not predict the way the country will go at a general election.

That is never a convincing argument, and it certainly won’t soothe the nerves of Labour members in Yorkshire who will take Gorton and Denton as further proof that their party is in trouble.

A few of them have spoken to me of their frustration with the government as a whole and the Prime Minister in particular.

Underpinning that frustration is a sense of bewilderment at how things could have gone so wrong in so short a time. Last July, they were euphoric at the landslide election victory.

Most are old enough hands to have campaigned for the Tony Blair landslides in 1997 and 2001, and to them it was like those glory days had returned.

An impregnable majority, an agenda for change and the determination to deliver it seemed set to make this one of the great Labour administrations, even though they acknowledged Sir Keir was hardly the dynamic leader that the young Tony Blair had been.

Now, instead of their government forging ahead, they find themselves having arguments over a drink with friends about whether Sir Keir is the man for the job, and if Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting would be better as leader.

It is also on their minds that Gorton and Denton probably won’t be the only electoral kicking in store for them. In a couple of months’ time, the local and regional elections are forecast by pollsters to go badly for Labour, further increasing the speculation about Sir Keir’s future.

But the thing that hurts these decent, conscientious people the most is that their Yorkshire communities haven’t seen the new start that Labour promised in 2024.

There hasn’t been growth, or new jobs, and the prospect of either seems remote. Exactly as the Conservatives’ promise of economic levelling up turned out just to be hot air, so Labour’s pledge of change for the better so far has little substance to it.