And with that, what was once racist is now allowed to be said. What was yesterday a conspiracy theory is today a legitimate observation. In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which the Greens won handsomely with an ethnic sectarian campaign designed to maximise the Pakistani-heritage vote, the Labour establishment is abuzz with ominous talk of ‘family voting’ and the role of this practice, in which men decide the votes of all eligible electors in their household, in securing victory for Hannah Spencer. An outfit calling itself ‘Democracy Volunteers’ put out a report last night, something the group admits it ‘rarely’ does, claiming ‘extremely high’ levels of family voting, with the practice reported at 15 of 22 polling stations observed. Mainstream journalists are suddenly reporting conversations in which ‘South Asian’ women described their vote as a matter for their husband. Such talk is naturally displeasing to ideologues of multiculturalism, who regard it as ‘a dangerous slur on an entire community’.
We have seen again and again that sectarian campaigns directed at constituencies with sizeable Muslim populations can be highly effective
In truth, it’s a little more complicated than that. Labour hasn’t only just seen the light; it was sufficiently concerned about ‘family voting’ to support Lord Hayward’s Ballot Secrecy Act 2023 from the opposition benches. Since the Iraq war, Labour has gradually come to realise that its strategy of pandering to ethnic and religious sectarian interests was open to abuse, namely rival political parties copying the approach and using it against Labour. The emergence in 2024 of the Gaza independents, Muslim candidates who captured safe Labour seats on Palestine-centric platforms, confirmed Labour’s worst fears and this morning’s result drummed it in. But the party deserves no sympathy whatsoever. It is nursing a leopard-mauled face after decades of encouraging leopard face-eating while chiding anyone who objected as leopardphobic.
Gorton and Denton was no revelation. We have seen again and again that sectarian campaigns directed at constituencies with sizeable Muslim populations can be highly effective. Which is why talk of ‘family voting’ is an attempt to distract from Labour’s disastrous result. Take every vote derived from polling station coercion, add it to every postal vote filled out by a husband for his wife, father for his daughter or brother for his sister, multiply that number by three, then subtract the total from Spencer’s margin of victory and it would not change the result. Spencer did not win because of religious or cultural chauvinism. She won because her campaign electioneered in Urdu, because she (a non-Muslim) announced she was fasting on the first day of Ramadan, because her party is almost as obsessively rabid about Israel and ‘Zionists’ as the voters it courts. She won because there are enough electors in the constituency to making that brand of politics winning politics.
Yesterday, I wrote on Coffee House about the Green leader Zack Polanski trolling right-wingers over an Urdu-language election ad. I said it was of a piece with progressives promoting open borders, celebrating the rapid cultural transformation of the country, and deliberately rubbing voters’ noses in it. In doing so, I warned, ‘you are not creating the circumstances for cosmopolitanism, you are creating the circumstances for fascism’. Bit strong, no? No. The scale of transformation across the last generation or two has been so overwhelming that, in a growing number of constituencies, it will be possible for the Greens (or anyone else) to run the Gorton and Denton playbook over and over with the same result many if not most times. This is what Britain’s near future looks like and how we will do politics there.
There is no immediate or obvious way to fix this. The more excitable Reform supporters bang the drum for mass deportations, a policy that is unlikely to happen even on the most limited definition of removing illegal immigrants and legal migrants who commit crimes. The British state lacks the infrastructure, and more importantly the political and institutional will, to repatriate every illegal immigrant and criminal migrant. Not to mention that, after the next election, the British state could be at least partially in the hands of the Greens if they continue to cannibalise Labour. As for the reheated Powellism of remigration, the British public of today will not tolerate loved ones, friends and neighbours being torn away simply because a cohort of their co-religionists vote a certain way, or sympathise with Hamas, or threaten schoolteachers who show illustrations of Mohammed or schoolboys who scuff copies of the Qur’an. We should take pride in the continuity of British decency.
How long that continuity will pertain is another matter. The British public of today mercifully rejects fascism but that is no guarantee for tomorrow. If we are embarking on the fragmentation of our society and our civic culture into competing ethnic, national and religious camps – a peaceful Lebanonisation of Britain – the ground for resentment will be fertile and the circumstances ripe for the rise of white identity politics and it is difficult to imagine how that politics could be anything other than authoritarian.
How does Britain maintain its liberal democracy while adapting to demographic and cultural change but not adapting so much that it permits practices inimical to our traditions? I honestly don’t know. A friend often says of these dilemmas, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’. I wouldn’t either but there’s nowhere else to start from and we need to get started.
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