Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.
A new far-right movement has been born in Britain and we don’t even know it. It’s homophobic, it’s racist, it’s misogynistic, it rails against “elites”, it supports political violence, and it wants to jail its political opponents.
That movement isn’t Reform, though many of their candidates do match that description; the movement isn’t even what’s left of UKIP, or any of its six-dozen anti-EU splinter parties. Indeed, the movement has no views on the European Union, or most policy that actually affects Britain.
It does however have a lot to say on one issue in particular: the four MPs elected on this movement’s platform, and the other half dozen within striking distance of winning, have campaigned near-exclusively on a platform whose chief complaint is a war 3,000 miles away about which the British government can do nothing to resolve.
It is easy for Labour to dismiss the election of the ‘Gaza Independents’ as a protest vote, not least because in part it was, and to believe that when the war ends so too will the protest. But to dismiss it as such is to misunderstand how we got here.
In truth, my own description of this movement as new needs revision, for whilst 2024 is the first time it has broken through, it has come all too close before.
2021’s Batley and Spen by-election, sandwiched between Boris Johnson’s ‘vaccine bounce’ and ‘partygate’ and long before the Israel-Iran War had entered its current phase, was fought on much the same ground.
George Galloway’s campaign then, against Jo Cox’s sister in Jo’s former seat, was built on fusing religious conservatism with third-worldist positions on foreign affairs. The key questions at that by-election: Kashmir, Palestine, LGBT inclusive education, and whether it was appropriate to send death threats to an Religious Studies teacher who showed one of Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammed caricatures in a class on freedom of speech.
In Batley and Spen, in Rochdale, and now in a dozen more seats, we have been treated to a taste of this kind of ethno-religious, communitarian politics that had once been the preserve of Northern Ireland – a politics that is corrosive to a democracy and its values.
Go to any school in England and you will see a simple poster: a hand with five fingers labelled democracy, tolerance, respect, liberty, the rule of law. The mobilisation of voters based on ethnicity, race, and religion runs counter to each of these values, and the particular set of tactics engaged to do that this time around – slashing activists tires, threatening MPs – have normalised a base level of political violence that I think most of us thought we had overcome.
If we accept that we have an issue (and we ought to if the descriptions from Jess Phillips and others on the ground are at all accurate), what is there to do about it? How do we prevent Ulsterisation? That is, how do we stop the kind of segregated voting you see in Fermanagh and South Tyrone arriving in Birmingham?
There are election specific measures that could be implemented, not least removing the imperial hangover of non-citizen voting.
Other possible measures include ensuring the Boundary Commission draws cross-community seats that make a sectarian-effect harder, or banning campaign micro-targeting based on protected characteristics, as Facebook has chosen to do, would both help.
The former would mean acknowledging that a seat where a third vote Reform bordering a seat where a third voted for an independent Islamist is symptomatic of an issue, and the latter acknowledging that Galloway style micro-targeting – giving leaflets on grooming gangs to white households and leaflets on Gaza to non-white houses – is corrosive coalition building too.
To be clear it isn’t just Galloway and the Gaza Independents using this kind of targeting – both main parties have sought to pit Hindu and Muslim communities against each other, with Labour trying to link the Conservatives to India’s BJP and campaigning on Kashmir, and the Conservatives distributing gross leaflets telling Hindu households that Sadiq Khan would tax their jewellery.
It’s an easy politics, and responsible parties must resist it. But above all we need to do much more than address the electoral symptoms of segregation. We need to address segregation itself, and that means creating shared spaces again.
With a quarter of English primary schools ethnically segregated, and 40 per cent of secondary schools, education needs to be at the forefront of this effort. Policies like bussing, which in the past massively improved people’s life chances, need to be adapted to the 21st Century. Scotland’s default school assignment could be extended to England too, and the dangerous manifesto pledge to allow faith schools to admit 100 per cent of their intake on faith-based admissions criteria must be ditched.
Copying part of France’s separatism law, which amongst other provisions heavily restricts parents opting out of mainstream education through homeschooling, would be another good place to start.
The housing policy lever needs to be pulled as well, particularly where the government can have most influence – social housing.
Setting estate-specific minimums and maximums based on large-area data, so that no estate risks ghettoïsation, and increasing penalties for developers to ‘buy-out’ of building new social housing ought both to be considered.
Recent successes in Denmark with its vulnerable residential areas policy – that combines data on crime, employment, education, and historic migration status to target resources for urban regeneration and create assimilatory programs like government-sponsored language classes – should be looked at too.
And as was proposed for Northern Ireland by Ulster University, a specific department to deal with sectarianism ought to be established, and it ought to have a broad remit to build more genuinely shared institutions and spaces across the UK. A new department would need to be tough, effective, and fair, willing to make it clear that neither the English language or British values are optional and equipped with the resources needed to provide new economic opportunities inside of segregated urban areas.
If we don’t, the sectarianism we have seen at this election will only continue to grow and with it the kind of insidious politics that undermines tolerant liberal democracies. I still want to live in Barack Obama’s post-racial democracy; yet it has become clear that to get there, we will need to do a lot of work.