Later this month, a by-election will take place in Britain that may seal the fate of the UK’s beleaguered prime minister, Keir Starmer. But it’s also sending a warning to all who believe that the fanatical leftists who now dominate progressive politics must be stopped if we’re still going to have a society worth living in.

It’s a warning not just for Britain but also for America’s Republicans, Vice President JD Vance and tech mogul Elon Musk, who are all expressing huge concern about the erosion of Britain’s historic identity and what this means for the West.

The by-election is for the parliamentary seat in Makerfield, a blue-collar town in the north of England. It’s been caused by the vaulting ambition of one man, Andy Burnham, a former minister in Tony Blair’s Labour government, whose recent popularity as mayor of Manchester has made him the go-to candidate to lever the terminally unpopular Starmer out of office.

Because he needs a seat in the House of Commons to do so, the sitting Labour MP obligingly moved out so that Burnham could contest it.

However, the assumption that he might romp home in a tribally Labour area is in doubt. The election is on a knife edge.

Burnham is resented as an unprincipled carpet-bagger. The main threat he faces, though, comes from a key change in British political life. Blue-collar former Labour voters no longer feel the party represents them. They view it now as a party of the intellectual elites, who have all but driven their nation off a cliff through promoting mass immigration and anti-western ideologies of race and gender.

The resulting march of Islamization, two-tier policing and the abandonment of justice, fairness and common-sense has made such voters desperate for politicians to stop all such wokism in its tracks.

As a result, there’s a large swell of support in Makerfield for Nigel Farage’s Reform party, which is now neck-and-neck with Labour. Ever since he launched the insurrection that led to Brexit, Farage has dominated the political landscape. More than any other politician, he’s continued to make the political weather over the neuralgic issues of mass immigration and the need to remove Islamist extremists from Britain.

Recently, however, Farage has lost his shine. Policy U-turns, plus the fact that a number of prominent politicians have defected from the despised Conservative party to Reform, have created the suspicion that Farage is really just like all the other politicians who have said one thing and done another.

Now this arch-disruptor is finding an even more disruptive politician snapping at his heels in Makerfield. Rupert Lowe was a Reform MP who spectacularly fell out with Farage and stormed off to form his own party, Restore.

Although there’s little difference between Restore and Reform, Lowe is rhetorically more extreme and uncompromising. As a result, Makerfield voters are increasingly concluding that Lowe, rather than Farage, is the real deal.

Rocket fuel has been put behind this view by Elon Musk. In January last year, Musk called on Farage to resign as Reform’s leader, claiming he “doesn’t have what it takes,” and praised Lowe for making “a lot of sense.”

Musk often reposts Lowe’s content on X, which gives Lowe’s posts a huge boost. As of mid April, Lowe was the most popular British politician on X with 12.9 million likes compared to 1.9 million for Farage.

As a result, Restore is gathering significant support. Although it’s currently polling at around 7% in Makerfield, that would split the anti-Labour vote so badly it would cause Burnham to be elected.

Musk’s intervention is therefore likely to produce the very outcome he’s working to avoid.

Moreover, there’s real concern over the kind of people Lowe has attracted. Restore supporters say Britain needs to return to its Anglo-Saxon and Christian roots — which means it must once again be white. So no place in that for black or brown-skinned Brits.

In addition, it has a problem with Jews. Prominent supporters have publicly labeled Jewish people “foreign” and called for their removal from Britain, expressed admiration for Hitler and absurdly
blamed all foreign wars — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya — on Israel and the Global Jewish Conspiracy.

They are therefore similar to the Jewish-conspiracy nutjobs on the American right led by Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. The danger they all pose is that they toxify and weaken the resistance to wokism by tarring everyone fighting to defend Western civilization with the same extremist brush.

As a result, they greatly increase the chances of the Democrats or Labour regaining or retaining power — against the wishes of the people — because the opposition is fatally split.

The axiom that the revolution eats its own, first coined when the 18th-century French revolutionaries started guillotining each other, is generally associated with the left. Now it’s arrived on the right.

By failing to dispatch these extremists and instead including them in their “big tent,” the defenders of the West risk handing victory to the very leftists they’re so desperate to defeat.

Melanie Phillips is the author of “Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege” (Wicked Son).