“WE do things differently in Manchester”, said the Greens’ Hannah Spencer as she won the Gorton and Denton by-election, amid claims of cheating.
should serve as a warning sign for the wider West.
The Gorton by-election is a snapshot of something darker than the PM’s fate… it’s a sign of ‘Balkanisation’ hanging over parts of the UK
Labour were obliterated in a seat they won with 50 per cent of the vote in 2024Credit: PA
The deep rifts in many of Britain’s urban communities are no longer a quiet concern, they are a crisis.
The sea of and flags that greeted the voters arriving at polling stations felt less like campaigning and more like territorial signalling.
As did the reported family-voting — a term for illegal acts such as dads and husbands entering polling booths to ensure wives and daughters back their chosen candidates.
This so alarmed monitoring experts Democracy Volunteers that they published an emergency statement as polls closed.
The academic-led group stated: “In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68 per cent of polling stations, affecting 12 per cent of those voters observed. We have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our ten-year history of observing elections in the UK.”
I suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg, with postal-vote pressures a whole lot harder to monitor.
But it worked.
The most sectarian campaign of recent years yielded results for the new hard-left insurgents, obliterating Labour in a seat they won with 50 per cent of the vote in 2024.
, race-baiting images of Indian PM and Israeli premier meeting Labour politicians.
It wasn’t subtle.
Green candidate Hannah Spencer, pictured with leader Zack PolanskiCredit: Getty
The Greens handed out a taste of the dirty tactics that have been deploying in order to keep the Muslim vote on board for years.
It’s like they studied Labour’s own bitterly divisive campaign in the 2021 and reproduced it on steroids.
was shamelessly put on the ballot in heavily , while preached fantasy solutions to the in white working-class Denton.
Separate messages for separate communities, ruthlessly exploited.
“We have to be intolerant of intolerance,” said former Tory Chancellor , now a , in the wake of the results.
“Something dangerous is happening in our country.”
The Iraqi immigrant who taught himself to speak English by reading The Sun, and rose to the second highest office in the land, has a point.
But such is the hatred of Government, hardline socially conservative Islamic leaders are now in bed with a party that wants to legalise all drugs and surgically mangle teens convinced they are of the wrong sex.
I wonder what the mosque elders make of proposed abolition of female-only spaces.
And that’s before we get to surrendering our bombs, disbanding the Army, opening our borders and taxing the country into bankruptcy.
leader has emerged as an unlikely insurgent, his Jewish background conveniently overlooked by his new friends because of his virulent hatred of .
Last March, I wrote in these pages: “The Left is just getting warmed up and Sir Keir needs to watch his flank. The ultra-lefty Greens are steadily climbing from the six per cent they scored in 2024, closer to nine.
Nigel Farage with Reform UK candidate Matt GoodwinCredit: Alamy
“Meanwhile the pro-Gaza independents have formed a formal alliance with exiled Jeremy Corbyn.
“Given Labour seized power last year on just 33 per cent of the vote, bleeding out anything near 15 per cent of the vote to the Left would be curtains.”
And so it came to pass in — but with a massive 26 per cent swing from Labour to the Greens.
Insurgent parties got 69.4 per cent of the vote combined, with the two old parties sharing the rump of just 27.3 per cent.
A truly historic breakthrough and a potential death knell for the old order.
But it is a snapshot of something much darker than the simple future of Labour or , or the fate of yet another PM.
Welcome to Britain’s slow balkanisation — a term that comes from the Balkans, a region of Europe fractured along ethnic and religious lines into smaller, mutually suspicious states.
Balkanisation does not just mean diversity. It means communities living side by side but not together. Separate institutions. Separate politics. Separate identities. Parallel lives.
That is the question hanging over many parts of Britain and Europe.
White working-class voters, who were promised globalisation would make them better off, say they are poorer than they were 20 years ago.
They look at stagnant wages, crumbling estates, hospital waiting lists — then are told they should be ashamed of their “privilege”.
They do not recognise the country changing around them.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour candidate Angeliki Stogia came third in the by-electionCredit: Getty
In 2001, England and Wales had around 1.5million . By 2021, that figure had risen to roughly 3.8million.
In parts of , a majority of residents identify as Muslim, and in roughly one in three.
In some areas of , in , in , there are wards where white Britons are now a small minority.
That is not diversity dispersed evenly. That is clustering. Enclaves. Ghettos.
Walk through some inner-city districts and English is rarely heard in streets and shops. The same is true from Manchester to Marseille, and Michigan to Minnesota.
As campaigning journalist Winston Marshall told our show last week, from Gorton: “There was a stretch of houses, and I knocked on every one, and it was a Muslim family in each one, and it was the mothers who opened the door One of them said, ‘Sorry, I don’t speak English’. The other three each said, in not very good English, ‘Sorry, my husband tells me who to vote for’.”
For decades, our leaders have blithely told us that time would soften religious identity, that each generation would become a little more culturally aligned with the wider society. But the opposite is happening.
And if white working-class voters feel abandoned? That is when politics becomes tribal, and flags go up on both sides.
Eze Chidiebere Paul
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