It’s local election week in Britain (stifles yawn) and a chance to observe the exciting next generation of political idealists. Among those standing for office in Burnley, Lancashire, 18-year-old Maheen Kamran is an aspiring medical student who was ‘motivated to enter politics by the war in Gaza, where she believes a “genocide” is taking place.’ Kamran told PoliticsHome that she wanted to ‘improve school standards, public cleanliness and encourage public spaces to end “free mixing” between men and women.’
Sensible policies for a happier Islamic Britain.
‘Muslim women aren’t really comfortable with being involved with Muslim men,’ the youngster told the website: ‘I’m sure we can have segregated areas, segregated gyms, where Muslim women don’t have to sacrifice their health.’
The Labour Party, already suffering from internal divisions over slightly different sex segregation-related issues, faces a far bigger crisis within its coalition. Last July saw the election of sectarian candidates in England for the first time since the 1920s, with five ‘Gaza independents’ taking seats from Labour. This week will give some indication of whether it’s a permanent problem, with dozens of independents likely to win in the locals.
The crisis was sparked by the October 7 massacre, but the conditions were there for some time. It was in Burnley, a former mill town long dominated by Labour, where 10 councillors resigned from the party over the issue of Palestine in November 2023, one of the first signs that the Gaza war was going to cause big problems for Labour.
And so it did, with a general election that featured the grimmest scenes of intimidation seen in England in generations – scenes more in tune with 18thcentury electioneering, minus the excuse of drunkenness. Labour MPs like Jess Phillips in Birmingham and Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester were subject to jostling and jeering, and Ashworth lost his seat to independent Shockat Adam, who at the election count proclaimed ‘This is for the people of Gaza,’ while holding up a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf. The Muslim Vote pressure group boasted of having an ‘unprecedented’ influence on the election.
Indeed, and as polls currently stand, many Labour MPs are likely to lose their seats at the next election, squeezed out by independents who may yet evolve from a faction into some kind of cohesive party.
Islamogauchiste politics is not new in Britain, and leftist groups appealing to Islamic issues have won before. But this development is much more overt, popular and cohesive, with the Palestinian flag coming to symbolise a new sectarian political identity.
Whether it is permanent or not we cannot know, but pollster Lord Hayward told PoliticsHome that ‘I don’t see Labour being able to resolve this issue with the Muslim community in places where there are large Muslim populations.’ An unnamed Labour source was also quoted saying that there had been an ‘unravelling of the social fabric’ across the country in seats divided along lines of class and religion. ‘But what unites those communities is a general disillusionment with politics and government, and disappointment at the decline of public services.’
This is obviously bad news for Labour, who are already losing important demographics elsewhere, a process sped up by Brexit, the result of which was to sort voters based on their views on immigration and diversity. Before this realignment, Conservative voters had been colder towards multiculturalism, but afterwards the gap grew far larger (although the Tories since lost many of those to Reform). This made Labour even more dependent on minorities, the largest group being Britain’s Muslim population – but what they must have regarded as a demographic advantage there is also eroding.
There are currently 20 constituencies in which Muslims comprise more than 30 per cent of voters, and all of them elected Labour MPs back in 2019. There were just ten such seats back in 2011, a sign of how quickly the Islamic population of Britain is growing; it rose by 42.9 per cent between 2011 and 2021, reaching almost 3.9 million, and will pass the 6 million mark sometime in the early to mid 2030s. By the 2029 election, therefore, that list of constituencies will have increased considerably, and may prove crucial in a close-fought election projected to result in a chaotic hung parliament split between various parties.
Many years ago, former Labour speechwriter Andrew Neather elicited some degree of outrage with his comments that the Blair government encouraged mass immigration to ‘rub the right’s noses in diversity’, which he later walked back on. Certainly, it wasn’t a conspiracy – there were all sorts of reasons for why British and European elites felt the need to turbocharge immigration – but I very much doubt if voting patterns were not a consideration.
Progressive politicians tend to think in terms of the coalition of the ascendent – because left-leaning electoral groups are growing in number, so it’s good politics to champion them and raise their prestige, while increasing the hostile rhetoric against those outside of the coalition. This certainly influences the Left’s approach to immigration policy.
Labour long enjoyed strong support among voters of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Caribbean descent – in some groups it was close to 80 per cent; if the immigrants arriving after 1997 had come from ethnic groups which voted Conservative, it seems unlikely that Labour would have welcomed them.
Labour is popular with minorities in part because it is less tainted by racism, but the party also developed a relationship with the baradari system, clans which are especially effective at delivering votes. In many cases the link between a clan and a party is purely transactional – baradari have been known to switch en masse from Labour to Liberal Democrat or back again, based purely on local power interests. There is also clearly an issue with clan-related corruption, and I suspect that the degree of ethnic nepotism in English local government – especially in relation to housing allocation – is larger than anyone understands.
Labour’s thinking was cynical, but also naïve, and linked to a huge psychological weakness common among western liberals – their deep parochialism, and inability to understand or even care what the rest of humanity believes. These are the sort of people who genuinely think that the United States is notably racist by global standards, rather than the opposite. They take no interest in other cultures or the prejudices common within; they view all religions as Anglican in nature, cultural traditions that have been defanged and don’t bring with them hard-edged certainties. The effortless midwit confidence of the British ruling class in particular has been disastrous in nation-deconstruction – and as a result we now have quite overt sectarian politics in England for the first time in a century.
In part because the Labour party rewarded this support by relaxing immigration rules – the abolition of the primary purpose rule was enacted in response to constituents’ demands – the number of seats in which explicitly Islamic candidates could be elected is rising at a steady rate: 30 per cent is already enough to win a constituency when the field is so crowded and the opposition are divided. While obviously not all Muslims will vote for sectarian candidates in these constituencies, the Pakistani clan system ensures a high turnout, and has proved itself very adept at working a democratic system designed for an individualistic culture.
Yet despite the warnings, Labour won’t even identify the problem, let alone stand up to it, exhibiting an odd mixture of cowardice and cynicism. Jess Philips endured some quite startling unpleasantness at the election count, but just blamed it on ‘men’, while Ashworth condemned Suella Braverman for daring to suggest that multiculturalism had failed. This is despite the fact that at one point he had to hide in a vicarage – a fitting symbolism – to escape from screaming pro-Palestinian mobs.
Labour’s thinking was cynical, but also naïve
After his defeat, Ashworth said that ‘in my seat, there was a huge, huge, huge strength of feeling about the issue of Gaza, which I understand.’ Except that – I don’t think he does understand. None of them do.
As Louise Perry once explained, wokeness is actually two things – progressivism in whites, and ethno-narcissism among minorities, the two groups enjoying a symbiotic relationship and a common enemy. This is true of the Palestinian cause, too.
Just as a Union Jack in the 1960s had a different context in the King’s Road in Chelsea and the Shankill Road in Belfast, so does the Palestinian flag, seen both in the middle-class liberal streets of southern England and in heavily Islamic urban neighbourhoods, where it denotes group pride, identity and territorialism. In Birmingham, Bradford and elsewhere, shop owners admit to flying it for fear of reprisals, a sign of power ebbing away from the state and towards local communities. The Palestinian flag has a symbolism in Britain almost entirely divorced from the setting of the dispute. It represents ethno-narcissism – a form of ethno-narcissism which the Labour party has shamelessly enabled.
Ethno-narcissism, and its less pathological variant, ethnic pride, is the norm almost everywhere in the world. Europeans are very unusual in consciously rejecting it and viewing it as a sin, a product – more than anything – from the shock of 1914-45, which effectively vaccinated them against this human emotion. It makes it difficult for them to appreciate how normal such overt group identity is, added to which is a complacent sense that it will evaporate among the descendants of immigrants upon contact with British air.
In a video shared yesterday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar was shown at a gathering in 2022 celebrating the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence, where he stood in front of a Pakistani flag, declaring that: ‘we will only truly get real power not if we just have more Pakistanis sitting in council chambers and parliaments but actually having more Pakistanis and South Asians sitting in the corridors of power making the decisions… change is coming and the days when our South Asian communities are viewed as a vote bank, or curry bank, are well and truly gone. The days when South Asian communities get to lead political parties and get to lead countries is now upon us… we get to decide not just at which school our children go to but what they are taught at those school is upon us.’
Of course, as the media were quick to remind us, only a racist would care. Perhaps only a racist would also point out that this is not even about equity – that South Asians are overrepresented in Scottish politics – it is just what ethnic politics has always been about. Yet Sarwar was astute to observe in 2022 that the days of the vote bank are gone.
Not every or even most immigrants are drawn to such politics. Among the descendants of recent newcomers, there are many integrated, liberal secularised urbanites, but they are too small in number to be significant in a democracy, and have little to offer party machines. As a result, they are largely ignored by a Labour party which has become dependent on the votes delivered by conservative, inward-looking clans, in exchange for concessions aimed at strengthening their power. And the stronger they get, the more these concessions grow.
Christopher Caldwell once observed of affirmative action that ‘one moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which [it] can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong’.
It’s one of the most astute descriptions of the problems faced by liberal democracies, which have approached the challenges of multiculturalism with those two ever-contradictory goals, liberté and égalité, in mind. They hope to empower vulnerable minorities, on the one hand, while at the same time implementing liberal immigration policies that make those same minorities numerically stronger – and the aims of those communities, mere ciphers to the western liberal mind, are ignored until the balance of power shifts.
An example of this reality became clear in Hamtramck, Michigan, a couple of years ago, when it became the first US city to elect a Muslim-majority city council.
As the Guardian reported in 2023: ‘They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.’
Yet, despite that wonderful symbolism, ‘many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.’
The article quoted former mayor Karen Majewski, who described ‘a sense of betrayal… We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.’ In which case, one can only reply: ‘more fool you’.
The Guardian lamented that ‘after several years of diversity on the council, some see irony in an all-male, Muslim elected government that does not reflect the city’s makeup.’ It quoted Gracie Cadieux, ‘a queer Hamtramck resident who is part of the Anti-Transphobic Action group’, who complained that the actions of the city’s new rulers were ‘an erasure of the queer community and an attempt to shove queer people back in the closet’.
What did y’all think multiculturalism meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
The root of this problem is that progressive politics has developed an unhealthy friend/enemy distinction, related to the contrasting approach to the outgroup and the far-group.
Ibn Khaldun noted that when a society grows decadent, its leaders turn against relatives and come to depend on the support of outsiders. Parents disinherit their children. States turn to mercenaries rather than citizen-soldiers. Sponsoring out-groups to defeat local rivals is a pattern found throughout history – the results are usually dismal, and never as intended.
The Labour Party has come to rely on the votes of sectional groups who have no real interest in liberal or progressive politics, merely using them as useful allies against a Right which is less welcoming but psychologically closer. And the Labour party is still riding the tiger. An anonymous Labour MP told PoliticsHome that ‘People in the party are putting their focus on Reform, which I get, but also at the expense of this threat,’ of Islamists, adding, ‘these are real extremists.’
Khalid Mahmood, the first ever Muslim MP in Britain, warns that the Labour party is accommodating ‘Islamist’ interests: ‘While some Islamist organisations continue to pressure the government under the guise of combating Islamophobia, their demands are rarely about genuine inclusion. They are political and often incompatible with liberal democratic values.’
Indeed, and the most immoral aspect of this vote-chasing is that the people most likely to suffer are liberal, secular Muslims or those who have left the faith – exactly the people whom a western centre-left party should be championing. Along the way Labour cynically sold out liberalism for clan votes, sacrificing every principle they should have cared about, doing business with misogynists, gay-hating bigots, anti-Semites and a whole array of extremists who happened to make convenient bedfellows, all to win power and spite the near group.
Now their allies have turned against them, and you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh, except that a weakened Labour has only one direction to turn to now it faces a catastrophe of its own making: they must wage war on Islamophobia.
This article first appeared on Ed West’s Substack.
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