Labour has won a landslide and the largest swing in British history without even increasing its vote share in England, and winning perhaps only 35% nationally. Its only significant gains in proportional terms were in Scotland, largely at the expense of the SNP, who have suffered catastrophic losses, meaning they are only 1 seat ahead of Sinn Fein, now the largest party in Northern Ireland - who are in turn 3 seats ahead of Reform, the third largest party in Britain by vote.
But these Reform MPs are - as I write - outnumbered by the five pro-Gaza independents, who won seats in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and London in reaction to Keir Starmer’s position on Israel. Labour are down an average of 18 points in seats where the Muslim population is 20%, and in seats where that figure is above 25%, they are down 23 percentage points. While Labour lost a huge share of the Muslim vote, what is more worrying is the atmosphere in which this has taken place.
In Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips held on by 700 votes, and in a remarkably unpleasant – I might even say upsetting, although I’ve only had three hours’ sleep - count she lamented that ‘This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in,’ as she was booed.
‘I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence,’ she told her antagonists, and described how opponents had filmed a Labour activist in the streets and slashed her tyres, while another was screamed at by a man. She told how Jo Cox’s family had wanted to come and campaign but she couldn’t let them endure it. ‘Can you throw them out?’ she asked the authorities of her hecklers.
There were similar scenes in Birmingham Ladywood as Shabana Mahmood was heckled as she gave her speech, the returning officer pleading with the supporters of independent Ahkmed Yakoob to stop.
Yakoob was described by the Sunday Times’s Will Lloyd as ‘the one man in Britain who embodies the way our politics have changed’. He described ‘a 36-year-old defence solicitor who wears black Prada trainers, a glittering diamond watch, tinted gold-framed sunglasses and Gareth Southgate-like waistcoats. He has 195,000 followers on TikTok, a platform he understands more intuitively than 99 per cent of the politicians in this country. He speaks in clipped, brutal epigrams that sound like they are only ever a few’ and ‘The word “genocide” is never far from’ his mouth with ‘For Gaza’ printed on his leaflets.’
Labour hung on in Ladywood, a historic constituency in England’s second city where in 1924 Neville Chamberlain very narrowly beat a rising star of the Labour Party called Oswald Mosley.
Gaza independents also narrowly lost Birmingham Hodge Hill by just 1000 votes, and Ilford North, the constituency of Wes Streeting by just 528 votes.
While the media focus was largely engaged in catching out the musing of some of Reform’s less intellectually capable candidates, this other populist revolt has been carried out in an atmosphere of anger and intimidation perhaps not seen in English elections since the days of Rotten Boroughs.
There was police intervention in Oldham last month, Naz Shah MP was abused as a ‘dirty, dirty Zionist… paid by Friends of Israel’.
This is what Bethnal Green MP Rushanara Ali was dealing with. A group of Muslim Labour supporters of Kate Hollern MP clashed with partisans of independent candidate Adnan Hussain in Blackburn.
In Leicester South, Labour’s John Ashworth was beaten by a pro-Gaza independent, having endured scenes like this The Conservatives won one of the city’s two other seats, the heavily Hindu Leicester East – the only Tory gain in the election. A decade ago Leicester was spoken as the model multicultural city, the first majority-minority city in Britain. Two years ago, it saw street violence between Hindu and Muslim mobs; last year Ashworth said he was proud to represent it as he condemned Suella Braverman’s comments that multiculturalism had failed.
Former Tory MP and now peer Paul Goodman wrote: ‘Leicester East is a terrible warning of British politics dividing on communal lines - with the Conservatives becoming the party of India and Israel, and Labour that of Pakistan and Palestine. No good can come of it.’
The pro-Gaza candidates were supported by a lobby group called The Muslim Vote which ‘presents a list of 18 policy demands’ which include ‘provision of Sharia-compliant pensions, a system for Sharia-compliant student finance, and changes to Ofcom extremism rules.’ As Sam Bidwell put it: ‘This was never just about Gaza - Muslim voters are emerging as a distinct bloc.’
The 2024 election represents the return of genuine sectarian politics in England for the first time in a century, and we really have no idea where it is going.
English politics emerged out of sectarian rivalries, but in time these faded, and our liberal tradition was based on the premise of forcing religion to take a backseat. The British Labour Party, unlike similar movements on the continent, was successful in crossing religious divides between Catholics and Protestants. Now they have helped bring political sectarianism down on all of us, consistently encouraging unwise levels of unselective immigration, smearing anyone who opposed it, and playing the biraderi clan system to win elections. If they didn’t think that this sort of politics was the inevitable result of multicultural democracy, God help us.
My sympathy is also reduced by the fact that a number of Labour MPs used Palestinian flags in election material, that politicians like Angela Rayner appealed to community leaders in a way so contrary to the national interest, and by the fact that Labour are likely to respond with stricter laws against ‘Islamophobia’, further eroding our freedom to express our beliefs.
Anger has been aroused before, such as at the 2005 election, but the Muslim population of Britain has doubled since, and the number of seats where a sectional party might win has increased by a far greater proportion. There are 20 constituencies which are more than 30% Muslim, all of which went Labour in 2019, and according to the Henry Jackson Society, 40% of British Muslims would consider voting for an Islamic Party, a number which rises to 46% for younger voters.
It’s always been my belief that, while white liberals see minorities as essentially ciphers for their own morality tale, and take little interest in what they believe, as demography changes these same minorities will no longer be happy be to play these silent parts.
Opinion formers might consider going beyond lamenting the more obvious ugly elements of sectarian politics, and those areas where representatives upset liberal sensibilities, and look at the very system that encourages minority ethno-narcissism. Until that happens, we have a form of asymmetric multiculturalism that entails sectarianism is tolerated if it’s from a group broadly seen as being in the progressive alliance.
The Labour Party aren’t the only offenders; the Greens have in some ways followed the French Islamo-Gauchiste model of forming voting blocks of Muslim radicals and hard-leftists (with NIMBYs thrown in). Earlier this year we saw a Green Party councillor elected in Leeds announcing to supporters ‘We will raise the voice of Gaza, we will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!’ and describing his victory as a ‘win for the people of Gaza’. (But what about the bins?).
As for the Tories, over a dozen candidates have endorsed the ‘Hindu manifesto’. and the party has been consciously trying to suck up to Hindu nationalists. Leicester East suggests that the strategy has some limited success, and the Tory share has indeed held up better in areas with large Hindu populations.
Where this goes from here we don’t know; we have already seen MPs change Parliamentary procedure out of fear of the mob, and it remains to be seen what effect these pro-Gaza MPs will have on the feeling of unease in SW1. It’s worth remembering that the Muslim Vote talked of a ‘25 year war’ in a since-deleted tweet.
It is often joked of British politics, long a quite gentlemanly affair, that your opponents are on the other side of the House, and your enemies beside you, but these new sectarians will share the opposition benches with representatives who really are their enemy – Britain’s four new national populist MPs.
Indeed one further element to this new sectarianism in politics is the rise of Reform, who have rapidly risen in popularity as a result of Conservative immigration policies. Reform, too, appeal to identity interests, although it must be disguised, being for the one group whose sense of ethnic identity is taboo, who are not allowed to appeal for more ‘representation’ in politics and culture, nor agitate for immigration policies that would increase their share of the UK population.
Much was made about Clacton being a ‘left-behind’ town that suffers from deprivation, but aside from Paul Embery few have noted its nickname of Little Dagenham, and the fact that so many of its residents are East Enders who have fled that historic area’s complete transformation.
They have no way to articulate this feeling of loss because some forms of ethnic narcissism or even pride are hugely stigmatised. I’m not saying such a taboo is bad - identity politics is ugly - but this kind of asymmetrical multiculturalism is designed for societies where minorities are small, vulnerable and placid, and I’m not sure any of those things are true.
Certainly, sectarian politics will likely have a feedback loop helping Reform to grow even further, if they can avoid self-destruction, ego battles and message indiscipline (which I’m sceptical of). There is a strong relationship between Muslim share of the population and the national populist vote, which is triggered not just by the usual discomforts of diversity but the fear of political-religious militancy.
In multicultural democracies people tend to vote for the party that represents their group, which is one of many reasons why these low-quality takes about the Tories needing to move to the centre don’t really hold. This is not the Britain of 1983, in so many ways. This new kind of politics is sad, unnerving and actually rather boring, and certainly produces lower-quality debates, but it was also obvious a mile off. It’s going to be a difficult few years for the new Labour government.
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