UK by-elections generally don’t make that much difference, but the victory of the Green party yesterday in Gorton & Denton might be the biggest thing to happen in British politics since… pretty much as far back as I can remember.

I want to explain why – mainly to myself because I’m still processing it.

Below is a video from the Anywhere But Westminster series made by John Harris at The Guardian.

In this series he goes to UK constituencies and just talks to people. In terms of UK politics I think this is the best journalism we have, because it quickly becomes clear where the voting intention is.

Watching him visit and talk to the constituents in Gorton & Denton, it seems so clear to me that the Reform party were going to win.

So many people, when asked what they cared about, focused only on the Reform talking points. Reform seemed to be running a very effective media strategy that was dictating the conversation.

Reform’s chosen candidate, Matt Goodwin, didn’t seem like the kind of candidate who would resonate with that area, but I suspected that didn’t matter. Years and years of the Reform narrative via mainstream media would have done all the heavy lifting here.

This also seemed to be the general trend of British, and indeed global, politics: when it came to an actual election, the candidate furthest to the right kept winning.

So I was confident that, despite the optimism around the Greens, it would be a Reform victory – and a comfortable one at that.

The Green party won. The Reform party lost. I haven’t been this happy to be wrong since Barack Obama won in 2008.

I don’t, however, think this is an indication that the Green party will win the next general election. I don’t even think it’s a sign that Reform will lose it.

The reason why I think this by-election is so important is that it feels like the a smoking gun in terms of understanding what has been happening in British (and global politics) over recent years.

For so long, we’ve been talking about the rise of the Far Right. Mysteriously, at every election, the energy and momentum is behind Far Right candidates.

What I think this by-election (and, incidentally, the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York) shows is that we are not witnessing the rise of the Far Right so much as the collapse of the Centre.

No one is voting for the Centre Left and Centre Right parties.

If you look at the way both the Labour party and the Conservative party fought this by-election, I think it’s not hard to see why. They are just not doing the work.

They are complacent, they take their strengths for granted and don’t have a good understanding of their weaknesses. They are cynical and they follow outdated electoral strategies.

Up to now, the only candidates who have been able to take advantage of this are Far Right candidates, because they have the backing of billionaires. However, with each progressive candidate victory, it’s becoming clear that they can win too.

This isn’t necessarily great news for progressive though.

Most countries have media ecosystems that are owned by billionaires, and that obviously gives the Far Right a huge advantage.

The reason why I feel a lot more optimistic today is because the Green party won even though that video above really seemed to suggest the mood in Gorton & Denton was sympathetic to Reform.

So how did they win?

Something interesting about the result, if you look at the numbers, is that there was a clear split between the parties that really made an effort and the ones that didn’t.

Many people, myself included, thought Labour would get spectacularly bad numbers. They didn’t. They weren’t that far behind Reform. So I take it that this time they decided to make the effort and go out and talk to people door-to-door.

That’s what I think won this election: good old-fashioned face-to-face canvassing. Perhaps that video was unrepresentative, but the Anywhere But Westminster video series has generally been an excellent barometer of previous elections, and I can’t think what else could have turned the mood in the favour of the Greens..

I think this election shows that progressive candidates with a clear positive message who put in the work of talking to their constituents face-to-face can outperform candidates with the backing of billionaire media. And they can do it comfortably.

That doesn’t mean this will keep happening. I imagine Reform and other billionaire-backed parties will go home, regroup and come back with some new dirty tactics.

However, this suggests that the old-fashioned approach of talking to constituents face-to-face is more effective than the toxic media bubble.

And, at the very least, that gives all of us anti-fascists a fighting chance.