Yesterday’s result in the Gorton and Denton by-election confirms that when it comes to political leadership, we are truly without a paddle. Or to put it more politely, the electorate can see no direction home across the horizon, and are reduced to fighting bitterly among themselves.

Beyond the immediate result lurks a dark possible future for the country and its voters. Either bloc-voting according to sectarian identity could threaten the workings of traditional democracy in Britain – or accusations of it could poison normal courtesies between competing politicians.

Reform UK says it has reported alleged “cheating” in the by-election to the Electoral Commission. Both Conservative and Labour spokespeople were quick to highlight accusations from independent election watchdogs – Democracy Volunteers – that they had witnessed unprecedented levels of “family voting” in polling stations. Democracy Volunteers, who have a respected record in a number of countries, did not specify who they had seen engaging in the illegal practice of group voting.

Gorton and Denton has a high level voters, 27 per cent, from Asian and Muslim backgrounds. The Green campaign certainly wooed them. Hannah Spencer rallied with Palestinian flags. The party produced campaign material in Urdu and used an image of Sir Keir Starmer greeting Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu prime minister and a bogeyman to Pakistan.

Democracy thrives when people from similar backgrounds vote differently. There have already been a handful of single-issue Muslim candidates elected to parliament. Few would welcome Northern Irish-style religious sectarianism and counter-accusation getting a grip on politics in Britain.

Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s defeated candidate, is furious at being beaten by what he calls “a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives that came together to dominate the constituency” and pointed to the alleged “family voting”. His divisive response is typical of our new political culture, where division on ethnic and religious lines is used to supercharge political attacks.

The Conservatives joined in too. Kemi Badenoch, the party’s leader, bluntly accused the Greens of a “nasty, sectarian campaign”.

“If you stir up grievance politics between groups based or religion or race,” she wrote on social media, “as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great”.

What a shame, then, that she opened that very statement with sectarian allegations of her own: that “Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes”.

All of this lands with greater force as voters are more widely spread – and with each vote so much harder for parties secure. Future by-elections and future general elections are likely to be just as viciously fought as this one, as all parties feel increasingly unrestrained.    

Last night both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats lost their deposits, with 1.9 per cent and 1.8 per cent vote shares respectively. It was the Conservatives’ worst ever by-election performance.

Both the traditional parties are now caught in a pincer, squeezed on both their flanks. The Tories are losing support to Reform UK on one side, and the Liberal Democrats on the other. Labour are shedding to Reform in the so-called Red Wall on the right but haemorrhaging more gravely still to the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Welsh and Scottish Nationalists to their left.

In Gorton and Denton it was the two populist parties, the Greens and Reform UK, who forced Labour into third place, in a constituency that had been in the top 10 per cent of Labour’s safest seats. Back at the 2024 general election, Andrew Gwynne, the disgraced former Labour MP vacating the seat, won more than half the votes cast.

Recriminations within Labour will now continue all the way until the Welsh, Scottish and English local elections in May. Conventional wisdom is consolidating that Starmer only has a stay of execution until those expected next set of dire results.

There are recriminations in Reform UK as well. A month ago Reform were seen as the favourites to reap the benefit of disillusionment in Gorton and Denton – especially following Sarah Pochin’s victory in nearby Runcorn and Helsby.

Nigel Farage has long stated that he wants Reform UK to replace the discredited Conservatives. Now Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens, talks little of environmental matters, and openly declares his ambition of replacing the Labour Party.

In her victory speech just before 5am on Friday morning, Hannah Spencer, the new MP and the Greens’ first ever Westminster by-election victor, played the left-wing class card.

“What does working hard get you?” she asked despairingly, before saying “billionaires” would pay so “everybody should get a nice life”. The universal aspiration for “a nice life” is not, however, how the Green Party won this byelection.

The Gorton and Denton byelection will surely go down in the political annals as one of the great watershed moments. But it may well be remembered not so much for the Green victory but as the defining moment when rancorously disappointed communities divided against each other, united only in rejecting what they have got and the governments that took them there.

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