England is now a sectarian society. As of the General Election, on 4th July, some people are sent to parliament by specific religious and ethnic communities simply because they are members of those communities, not because of the policies they espouse. A system which has long existed in sectarian Northern Ireland has now come to the English mainland. The reason? Mass immigration into England over the last 25 or so years of South Asian Muslims, who are highly concentrated in certain areas.
The UK’s General Election has led to the utter humiliation of the ruling Conservative Party, which had been in power for 14 years and done nothing to reverse the process of mass immigration set off by Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the early 2000s. In fact, they’d accelerated it, with more than 745,000 legal immigrants arriving in 2022 alone, putting appalling pressure on housing and public services, putting aside what this does to national unity [Net migration to UK hit record 745,000 in 2022, revised figures show, By Patrick Butler and Peter Walker, The Guardian, November 23, 2023]. Led by Rishi Sunak, a second generation Indian immigrant, the party, which has existed since the seventeenth century, was plunged into its worst defeat ever, gaining just 121 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons which, as in the US, is elected by First Past the Post. Labour, under its rather dull leader, Sir Keir Starmer, attained the second largest majority in its history.
But far more interesting, and worrying, is the fact that a number of Labour MPs in previously strongly Labour areas lost their seats. Specifically, they lost them to independent Islamist candidates standing on Pro-Gaza platforms. In Leicester South, in the East Midlands, a senior Labour MP lost his seat to a South Asian Muslim, who was once a Labour supporter, who declared, upon victory, “This is for Gaza!” and held up a keffiyah; the head scarf which is strongly associated with the Palestinian cause. In Blackburn, in the northwest, the sitting Labour MP was defeated by an independent called Adnan Hussain, a lawyer who declared: “This is for Gaza. I cannot deny that I stand here as the result of a protest vote on the back of a genocide.” Iqbal Mohammed, an IT consultant and once a Labour supporter, took Dewsbury and Batley, also in the northwest, from Labour on a manifesto of fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ayoub Khan, a barrister and former Liberal Democrat councillor, took Birmingham Perry Bar from Labour as a Pro-Gaza independent [Who are the pro-Gaza independents who unseated Labour MPs? By Haroon Sidique, The Guardian, July 7, 2024]. In addition, a number of senior Labour MPs came close to losing their seats to Pro-Gaza candidates [Labour cannot afford to be complacent over pro-Gaza vote losses, By Josh Halliday, The Guardian, July 5, 2024].
Labour has long taken the Muslim vote for granted, but its failure to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza has led to a political uprising which the First Past the Post System is uniquely set up to deliver. In democratic terms, the 2024 general election is an absurdity. The Labour Party took 411 seats (64% of the seats), and a majority over all other parties of 178, on just 33.7% of the national vote. With 12.2% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats took 72 seats, while the populist conservative Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage who very much spearheaded Brexit, got just 5 seats on 14% of the vote. These were all seats that very strongly supported Brexit [Wikipedia]. (The Conservative Party: 23.7 percent vote share and 121 seats.)
The Reform vote share differed so wildly from the number of seats won because it was roughly even nationwide; they came second or third in numerous seats. Muslims, however, are concentrated into very specific areas; usually ex-industrial towns. In many of these towns, they have set up parallel societies: everybody is a South Asian Muslim (due to White Flight and people’s evolutionary desire to be with people like themselves), the community is centred around a number of (often fundamentalist) Mosques, people are highly religious, and there is a strong feeling of fighting against the dominant society [see Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, By Ed Husain, 2022]. It is conditions like this that allow Muslim independents to be elected, once they reject the Labour Party which they have done due to its stance on Gaza. In that regard, it is surely no coincidence that the seats that sent Reform Party members to parliament were overwhelmingly native British and substantially working class.
Of course, once this happens you have sectarianism and this is the end of democracy, or the beginning of the end, because people are not voting on policy, they are simply voting for a person who represents their ethnic group. Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen spelt this out in his book Ethnic Conflicts. Although it is possible for multi-ethnic societies to be democracies – India is an example – in general there is a negative association between ethnic diversity and the ability to sustain democracy. This is mediated by ethnic conflict. In fact, Vanhanen found that ethnic diversity explains 66% of the variance in ethnic conflict when you compare different countries. In other words, ethnic diversity is very likely to lead to ethnic conflict and this is, in turn, likely to lead to sectarianism, which will render democracy hollow.
India, though it is multi-ethnic, generally shares a religion – about 80% of Indians are Hindu – and the ethnic groups of which it is composed are all relatively similar. This is not the case in the UK, where the independents MPs are of a different race and a different religion than the native population. It follows that the UK cannot be compared to India and that it really is seeing – in the most stark fashion with the election of these MPs – what has a long been happening anyway; the break-up of the country into a parallel societies; into Muslim and non-Muslim areas.
This shouldn’t be surprising. As I have explored in detail in my book The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, the ethnic diversity, mass immigration and the splintering of large polities always occurs in the winter of civilization and it is likely happening in the US as well. How deliciously ironic that Labour candidates, who have dogmatically espouse mass immigration and condemned critics as “racist,” are now losing their seats in parliament due to the sectarianism that has developed due to mass immigration.