Political​ scientists and psephologists are quick to warn us not to read by-election results as proxies for national outcomes. By-elections are so often an occasion to give the incumbent party a bloody nose. Yet it did feel as if the by-election in Gorton and Denton on 26 February was telling us something, less in the probabilistic way the number-crunchers warn against, and more in an atmospheric or paradigmatic way, providing a glimpse of what our democracy is going to look like for the foreseeable future.

Opinion polling shows that, over the past year, England has been shifting steadily towards a five-party system (six in Scotland and Wales). The local elections in May 2025 made clear the threat posed by Reform to the two main parties, which translated into a national polling lead it has not given up since. The election in September of Zack Polanski as leader of the Green Party, on a bold left-populist platform, was a further disruption to the Labour-Conservative-Liberal Democrat cartel. Since then, Reform has mostly polled at between 25 and 30 per cent, with the four other parties hovering between 15 and 20 per cent. Feeding this into a first past the post voting system is a recipe for chaos, grievance and deceit.

The Gorton and Denton by-election suggests that tactical voting is becoming the default logic of political campaigns and voter behaviour. Virtually every party campaigned on the basis that it was the only one which could prevent another party from winning: in Reform’s case to stop Labour, in Labour and the Greens’ case to stop Reform. Even Kemi Badenoch, never shy of the absurd, followed up her party’s deposit-losing result of 706 votes by claiming ‘there was only one sensible candidate,’ and that was the Conservative one.

If this is the way democracy is going to be conducted from now on, then local polling will be critical if voters are to make even vaguely rational choices. But in contrast to national polling, local polling can be hard to conduct with any great degree of scientific confidence, since the panels of respondents are much smaller and therefore less securely representative of the population being studied. The bigger problem, however, is that campaigners of all parties have an incentive to twist, cherry-pick and even fabricate polls, as a way of persuading tactical voters to back them. In the days before the by-election, the Greens accused Labour of producing leaflets containing data from a fake tactical-voting website, instructing anti-Reform voters to vote Labour. Polling experts find themselves dragged into the war of words, their research repackaged as campaign material. In one focus group conducted by More in Common before polling day, people in Gorton and Denton expressed deep confusion as to what was going on and how they should best respond – a reflection at least in part of the sheer intensity of campaigning to which they had been subjected.

YouGov has recently conducted surveys on tactical voting, which confirm how influential it is likely to be. Most people say that if their favoured party appears to be out of the running, they will happily cast their vote for their second or third choice. This seems to be especially true of Labour voters. The evidence shows that tactical voting is most co-ordinated and determined when its aim is to block Reform: indeed, in a two-horse race against Labour, the Conservatives, the Greens or the Liberal Democrats, Reform would lose in each case through tactical voting (part of the confusion in Gorton and Denton was that it looked like a three-horse race). But that still depends on voters having clear information they can trust: they need to be sure what the best non-Reform alternative is.

The landscape could well change again before the next general election, for example, if Reform and the Conservatives announce a pact. But we can expect that election to be mired in confusion, dodgy polling claims and accusations, with profound uncertainty regarding the outcome and what to make of it. (Reform’s allegations of ‘family voting’ in Gorton and Denton are no doubt a preview of the tactics it intends to deploy.) More substantively, Britain has now joined countries such as Germany and France in arriving at a democratic settlement in which elections frequently become referendums on ethnonationalism. What is heartening about the YouGov tactical voting research is that, despite the misinformation and alienation that have led so many citizens to regard democracy in general with despair or contempt, a majority of people have a clear understanding of what Nigel Farage stands for, and an equally clear belief that it must be stopped.

Even so, this is not a healthy place for a representative democracy to end up. The need to stop Farage will occasionally work in Labour’s interest (though not as often as Keir Starmer’s advisers have assumed), but will hardly represent an affirmation of Labour or its politics. British democracy has become characterised by a mood of defiance, in which the primary motivation of parties and voters is to stop, to resist, to topple. Ejecting morally disgraced elites is becoming a national specialism (certainly when compared to the United States) and it is now taken as read that Starmer himself will, sooner rather than later, be the sixth prime minister to lose the job since Gordon Brown went in 2010, with only one of those six going because of a general election defeat. Serial decapitation has become the British democratic style.

It is also unclear how executive influence over Parliament is expected to work in this situation. The fact that Labour, one year after a general election which delivered the second largest parliamentary majority since 1945, was unable to get its welfare reforms through Parliament, demonstrates that the mood of defiance stretches to the back benches of the House of Commons. Imagine a coalition government, involving some combination of Labour, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party (effectively an anti-Farage ‘people’s front’), attempting to take a fiscally difficult decision and gaining assent for it. Now imagine that the fiscally difficult decision involves the question that will hang heavily over European politics for some time to come: defence spending. For left-populists and anti-fascists, an attitude of ‘No pasarán’ is cause for hope and celebration. For progressives seeking effective long-term government, that mood is certainly preferable to the nationalist alternative, but drastically insufficient as a plan.

It has become a cliché of contemporary British politics that the country is crying out for bold solutions to its problems, resulting in a mutinous spirit among voters, MPs and opposition parties alike. It is intriguing, sometimes thrilling, to watch the Westminster cartel being upended. A poll for Sky News conducted after the by-election has Reform and Greens as the two largest parties, on 23 per cent and 21 per cent respectively. The Greens are the overwhelming preference among 18 to 24-year-olds, while government legislation to extend the franchise to 16-year-olds is currently moving through Parliament, testing to destruction the old maxim about turkeys voting for Christmas.

While this democratic spring gets under way, Britain remains hemmed in by harsh macroeconomic and geopolitical realities, which no party is being entirely honest about. A democracy with a long-standing tradition of four or five-party politics might have developed the ethos and the culture with which to mediate it and even translate it into effective government. But Britain has been reared on first past the post, which nearly always punishes smaller parties, and still treats politics as a boxing match featuring a delegate of His Majesty’s Government in one corner and His Majesty’s Opposition in the other. Any chance of a sustainable and effective anti-Reform coalition government requires that this style of politics be abandoned as soon as possible, in which case it would be a great help if the voting system didn’t incentivise boasting and truth-twisting. The best time to have introduced proportional representation would have been forty years ago, when the traditional bases of Conservatives and Labour were visibly fragmenting. The next best time would be now.