Right wing populism has become the drumbeat and the political scenery of our times.

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Its signature moments, from Brexit to the two Trump presidencies, have been vast in scale.

Its meaning, as the West struggles to keep up, during an era of mass migration, is pretty well understood.

For Britain, with Reform UK the most popular party ahead of the next general election, as with many European countries, there is probably much further to go.

Now we have a left populism, represented mainly not by left-wing MPs from the labour party, nor by Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party, but by Zack Polanski’s Greens

Compared to the great scale and turmoil of the populist right, a by-election at Gorton and Denton in Manchester might seem a pifflingly small event to base anything much up upon.

Yes, the victory of the Greens’ Hannah Spencer was clear and convincing; but we are only talking about a few thousand votes here or there, in a single urban spot.

But I would argue that this victory presages something huge in British politics which will affect all the other parties.

“Populism” is generally a boo-word, signifying simplistic or unrealistic answers to complicated and deep problems. On the right, that might mean claiming migration is almost the only issue that matters and by closing borders completely, everything else – a better economy, law, and order, education – will also be sorted.

On the left, it means the belief that the only real problem is the billionaires; and that national governments can tax individuals and big companies successfully enough to pay the costs of open borders and social inequality.

But, if right wing anger has been generated by profound economic failure, much the same is true on the left.

Here, the real driving force is the disillusion and despair of millions of younger voters, who have no realistic prospect of decent housing; and now, with the arrival of a tsunami of job destruction caused by AI, can kiss goodbye to the prospect of good jobs.

If that seems apocalyptic, just hunt out what the leaders of AI are saying themselves. At LBC, I have interviewed the “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, who told me that the only way the big artificial intelligence companies could win back the vast amount of money they had borrowed was by destroying huge quantities of white collar jobs, and very quickly.

This week, Dex Hunter-Torricke, who’s worked in senior positions at Meta, DeepMind and Elon Musk’s Space X, and who now sits on the board of the Treasury, told LBC that the International Monetary Fund believed 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies were now under threat, and we were facing a massive tidal wave of disruption for which politicians were completely unprepared.

I agree: this is the biggest thing happening to our society now and I can’t think of a single leader, Labour, Tory, Reform or anyone else, who really grapple with a scale of the change that’s coming.

But ordinary folk, young people in particular, coming out of education and finding the entry-level jobs they’ve been banking on are no longer there – they understand.

How will we as a society cope with millions upon millions of people who have no economic stake in modern Britain at all, whose hopes have been blighted?

We should be hitting the panic button. I believe it is the economic betrayal of a younger generation – not simply Gaza, or dislike of Reform, or enthusiasm for multiculturalism – which is driving the rise of the Greens.

They have mutated from an environmentalist party into a party of left-wing insurgency; this makes it far harder for the current prime minister to survive and makes it likely that Labour will turn, in due course, to Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner as alternative sources of left-wing energy.

But it’s also bad news for Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats – for at times the Greens seem like Lib Dems on acid, more passionate and excited. Indeed, it’s a serious challenge to the whole Centre ground of politics, now looking in both directions, and seeing more energy and anger on either side.

So yes, this by-election has been a hugely significant moment which leads us, probably, to a hung parliament and coalition government at the next election as the party system continues to fragment.

Andrew Marr is an author, journalist and presenter for LBC.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

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