Until now, a simple driving force las lain behind the Green Party’s onward local election march: NIMBYism. The blue-haired hippies of the pronoun police have allied with the grey-haired adversaries of intergenerational fairness to turn chunks of Middle England lime. Many a solar farm has cheerfully blocked to keep onside the Outrageds of Suffolk, Hertfordshire, et al.
Yet this time, Britain’s least interesting major party has discovered a new cause to bandwagon on: Gaza. I imagine residents of Rafah currently have more on their minds than shutting English coal-fired power stations, scrapping Trident, and providing mandatory LGBTIQA+ education. But that hasn’t stopped the Greens from deriving electoral benefit from their sorry plight.
Many readers will have seen the video, but it still deserves watching. Mothin Ali, a new Green representative on Leeds City Council, throws his fist in the air, surrounded by ecstatic supporters, and cries: “We will raise the voice of Gaza, we will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!” He described his victory as a “win for the people of Gaza”. I didn’t know they could vote in West Yorkshire.
I don’t doubt Mr Ali’s environmental credentials. According to his official party profile, he twins a love of horticulture and enthusiasm for “community wellbeing” with his day job as an accountant. But he complements this Monty Don routine with a few strongly held views on the state of Israel. Incidentally, he used to be a Labour supporter, describing Jeremy Corbyn as a “great guy”.
Following Hamas’s butchery on October 7th, Ali took to social media to explain that “Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces” and that viewers should “support the right of indigenous people to fight back”. He was involved in stirring up hostility against Zacheria Deutsch, Leeds University’s Jewish chaplain, who was urged into hiding after receiving death threats.
None of this particularly endears me to the new face of environmentalism around the Pennines. In fairness to Ali, he wasn’t the only Green elected on Thursday with cask strength views on the Middle East. The Times reports two Greens elected in Bristol who led Labour to fear the Greens “were becoming a haven for antisemitism”. Concerns were also raised about a Peterborough candidate.
John Mann, the Government’s independent advisor on antisemitism, will likely be having a few frank conversations with the party’s leadership over the coming days. They should put down their organic peace crisps and withdraw the whip from anyone found to have been antisemitic. I am appalled that we have Europe’s fourth-highest rise in antisemitic incidents since October 7th.
Yet as hideous a statistic as that is, it is as depressingly unsurprising as the rise of sectarian voting that this set of local elections made plain. Labour’s vote fell precipitously in areas with large Muslim electorates. Akhmed Yakoob came third in the West Midlands; Oldham council fell to no overall control due to the election of seven new independents running on Palestine-infused platforms.
Following George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by-election, his Workers’ Party gained two councillors, including ousting Labour’s leader on Manchester City Council, even if the long wait for Monty Panesar to enter Downing Street continues. Bear in mind that the 20 constituencies in the UK with an electorate more than 30 per cent Muslim all voted Labour in 2019.
Local candidates protest that it was not only the Gaza situation that caused Labour defeats in these areas. However, the correlation between a substantial fall in the Labour vote share and a substantial Muslim minority is too obvious to ignore. This is a repeat of the post-Iraq alienation of Muslims from Labour. Back then, the Liberal Democrats were particular beneficiaries.
Confronted with potential defections, Labour has acted. Keir Starmer has not conceded to the demands of The Muslim Vote, a pressure group demanding to cut British military ties with Israel to help show Labour is “serious” about winning back Muslim voters. Instead, he has Tweeted against an offensive of Rafah, and demanded a ceasefire. Strangely, Netanyahu hasn’t noticed.
Cynical? Most definitely. But we should expect no more or no less from the growing sectarianism within our politics. Thursday’s elections made clear what had become apparent at both the Batley and Spen and Rochdale by-elections: that in our modern obsession with identitarian communalism, a new form of sectarian politics is emerging in Britain, driven by Muslim voters.
Having sympathy for Gazans and anger at Israel’s offensive is a legitimate (and common) political position, and should be separated from charges of antisemitism. Remember the tradition of Tory Arabism? But to watch a particular minority begin to vote along religious and ethnic group lines, over far away events over which British politicians have no control, is a worrying portent.
We have become used to celebrating Britain as a particularly successful multi-racial and multi-faith democracy. But you can only keep singing Kumbaya whilst ignoring the reality of badly integrated immigrant communities for so long. If Labour’s relationship with so-called “community leaders” breaks down, the divergence of these voters from the mainstream becomes clear.
What happens if British Muslims start voting for continental-style Islamic parties? 40 per would consider it, according to the Henry Jackson Society. It would be easier than the Greens trying to ride both the environmental and Palestinian horses at once. If Galloway is re-elected, he will be well-placed to capitalise. He seems a more likely tribune for Muslim voters than Siân Berry.
What would other minorities do? As Daniel Hannan highlights, Sadiq Khan lost voters to the Tories in areas of London with higher Hindu or Sikh populations. Is this what we must look forward to? We do have a long tradition of voting along religious lines. Is this just the Ulsterisation of the mainland? Will our politics divide along ethnic and religious group grievances?
The demographics point in one direction. Having Labour as the party of Palestine and Pakistan and the Tories as the party of Israel and India has been a future we have long looked towards with much dread. But if the ties that bind us are fraying – my generation is as keen on British patriotism as your average SNP hardliner – it will fill the void. The case for a Britain Lee Kuan Yew is strong.
In a perfect world, most voters, of any creed, race, or faith, would vote as individuals. We all want a GP appointment when needed, bins collected on time, and safe streets. This applies as much to young Muslims in Bradford as to NIMBY OAPs in Stowmarket. But when we elevate other identities above our Britishness, those bonds fray. Our democracy is strangled by identitarianism.
The Singaporean experience shows the tendency of countries with significant ethnic and religious minorities to descend into tribal grievances without a heavy-handed policy of managed neutrality. This subject makes us uncomfortable. But the consequences of mass immigration are unavoidable. Britain’s future looks very different from its past, whatever Horrible Histories suggests.
Mary Harrington posits that as “race-neutrality loses its numerical super-majority, that ideology will begin giving ground to ethnic or religious in-group preference”. The natural consequence is a growing ethnic consciousness amongst white voters too. You now hear “Enoch woz right” as much from right-wing recent graduates on Twitter as from skinheads and pub bores.
Being a middle-class liberal on all things multicultural (I’m a product of our public school system – perhaps the greatest integrative force yet devised) this trend does not leave me feeling overly hopeful. I’m quite proud of the sort of Britain that can make a Hindu Prime Minister without any particular fuss. If that tendency is on the way out, the country I grew up in has changed fundamentally.
I’ll tap my usual sign: things can only get worse. In the meantime, I wish Ali the best on Leeds City Council. Perhaps he will find managing bin collections more exciting than posturing about Gaza. But I assume, instead, his election serves as a postcard for a grim future of sectarian politics, inter-ethnic rivalries, and national discord. It isn’t easy being Green, as Leeds might soon discover.