by Katie Lam, Conservative Home
Given the ongoing implosion of this Labour Government, it’s easy to miss one of the most concerning long-term trends illuminated in last week’s local election results. But we mustn’t let psychodrama around the Prime Minister’s future obscure the dangerous rise of political sectarianism.
Across the country, hundreds of candidates campaigned on the basis of group-based appeals to particular religious, cultural, or ethnic groups. According to the Henry Jackson Society, nearly six hundred of those candidates were elected, so roughly 1 in every 10 seats that were contested last week.
Those successful candidates include Lutfur Rahman, the Mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, who released a leaflet over the course of the campaign entirely in Bengali, and a slate of candidates in Birmingham who were coordinated by Akhmed Yakoob, the TikTok lawyer who was filmed over the course of the campaign telling Muslim voters that “the Zionists control everything”.
This is far from the first time that political sectarianism has succeeded in Britain. We saw the same trend, on a smaller scale, at the last two rounds of local elections, and at the Gorton & Denton by-election earlier this year.
But it is by far the largest single wave of successful sectarian candidates in modern British political history, and that should concern us all.
Sectarianism is, at the most fundamental level, political behaviour in which people are encouraged to think of themselves, and to act politically, as members of a religious, cultural, or ethnic group, rather than as individuals. Sectarianism isn’t entirely new in Britain, but when it’s played a role in our politics historically, it has tended to be localised, and rare. For most of our democratic history, our political system has been shaped around the assumption that people will vote according to their individual interests and beliefs and that, taken together, these individual inputs can point us towards a shared national interest.
Sectarianism undermines that basic assumption. Instead, it encourages people to think of themselves as a member of a particular group first and foremost, and to put the interests of that group ahead of both their personal interest and any sense of the national interest. In fact, it often encourages them to be hostile to the idea of a national interest at all. It fragments our society into a series of narrow group-based interests, and provokes conflict between those groups.