There is a revolution taking place in British politics. What happened early this morning in an unglamorous corner of Greater Manchester is proof that something seismic is occurring.
Some will argue that by-election protest votes against sitting governments are a feature of our political landscape and nothing significant should be read into the verdict of the electorate in Gorton and Denton. They are wrong.
Sure, all governments experience mid-term unpopularity, and voter anger is often expressed through the mechanism of by-elections.
But in years past, a by-election defeat for the governing party in one of its own seats invariably meant a victory for the official opposition or the Liberal Democrats.
In Gorton and Denton, that outcome was never on the cards. What we saw instead was Labour battling to hold on to the constituency in the face of a major advance by two insurgent parties – Reform and the Greens – who can presently boast no more than a smattering of parliamentary seats between them.
And one of these parties ended up securing a momentous victory, while the other grabbed second place.
These same two populist parties are also making waves in the national opinion polls, while support for the old establishment parties is flatlining.
Many voters on both Left and Right, their patience exhausted, are seeking a radical alternative to the stale and technocratic liberal-centrism that has served our nation so poorly. And now they are voting for it.
But as the political kaleidoscope turns frantically, nobody can be sure where the pieces might settle. What we can be certain of, however, is that the situation will become more febrile before it stabilises (assuming it does ever stabilise).
What we witnessed in Gorton and Denton was a snapshot of the polarisation rearing its head across much of the rest of the country.
In particular, the victorious party, the Greens, resorted to what can only be described as naked electoral sectarianism, releasing a video in Urdu which purposely appealed to the narrow communal and tribal interests of the sizeable Pakistani Muslim population in the constituency.
If anyone was looking for evidence that the state-sponsored multiculturalism drip-fed to the British people over many years has not been the force for unity and integration that its cheerleaders claimed it would be, they needed only watch that short video.
The campaign and outcome in Gorton and Denton prove that Britain is increasingly dividing along ethnic, religious and cultural lines.
As tensions mount over issues such as mass immigration, demographic transformation, economic stagnation, profound social change, the ideological capture of our institutions – and now, in Muslim communities, the Gaza conflict – people are retreating to their tribes, to the familiar, to their comfort zones. The Lebanonisation of our country may already be underway.
This grubby Green win explodes the myth we've been sold about state-sponsored multiculturalism - Paul Embery
|Getty Images
The result of the by-election is important, of course. But what matters more are the underlying trends that are revealed by the vote share for the parties.
And those trends provide further evidence, if it were needed, that a major political realignment is taking place in Britain. That we are now into multi-party politics in this country seems undeniable. Gorton and Denton was but one skirmish in a much wider war – and one that is being fought increasingly on new terrain.
For its part, the Labour Party had a dire evening and is plainly in the mire. Gorton and Denton was its 38th safest seat – won last time out with a majority of over 13,000.
Less than two years after the party secured a national landslide, it shouldn’t even have been a contest. Losing the seat was bad enough. Being knocked into third place is calamitous.
Some in Labour have previously argued that the party should not chase after traditional working-class voters who were switching to Reform and instead focus its efforts on attracting greater numbers of young, liberal, cosmopolitan, graduate, Remain-voting and ethnic minority voters.
But now it appears that the party is haemorrhaging the votes of these latter groups to the Greens, potentially leaving it without any sort of base at all. What a mess – and one entirely of the party’s own making.
Overall, Gorton and Denton has demonstrated the extent of the fracture in our politics and wider society. That fracture isn’t going to heal any time soon.
The very concepts of national and cultural unity – things we all once understood and which bound our communities together – seem utterly elusive in these turbulent, discordant times.
The establishment parties, having led us into this morass, seem woefully ill-equipped to get us out of it. They may find soon enough that they will never be granted another chance.
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