While the rise of The Muslim Vote is the most disturbing expression of the sectarianism that is disfiguring the face of our politics, it is not the only example.
Britain’s Indian community has proven firmly Tory, carrying popular Conservative MP Bob Blackman to victory in Harrow East after he appealed directly to Hindu voters and endorsed Indian leader Narendra Modi. Leicester East, with its almost 40 per cent Hindu population, switched from red to blue in a countercultural victory for Tory candidate Shivani Raja, who romped home 4,426 votes ahead of her closest rival.
All of this lies downstream from the record immigration that various governments have brought upon us in recent decades. Consider, for example, Britain’s Jews, the country’s oldest and best-integrated minority. Even after the collective trauma of the Corbyn years, the community did not vote as a bloc but as individuals informed by their own consciences, as is the way with everybody else.
Two weeks before the election, a Survation poll for the Jewish Chronicle placed the Tories nine points ahead among Jews, suggesting residual distrust of Labour. The following week, a larger study conducted by Jewish Policy Research found Labour in front by 16 points.
Jewish voters went on to deliver a Labour victory in almost every seat in which they had a significant presence, aside from outliers like Hertsmere, which was held by the popular Oliver Dowden with a large majority.
The problem, therefore, is not immigration itself. It is not ethnic or religious minorities. It is scale. It is the saturation of society’s capacity to absorb newcomers into the dominant culture. The Enlightenment gave us the separation of church and state and the freedom to pursue our lives as private individuals.
It also lifted any ethnic component of cultural belonging. This made our society predisposed to welcoming people from abroad; but this can only be a success when the scale allows newcomers to adapt to our foundational culture of freedom, tolerance and neighbourliness, law-abidingness and open contracts. When this is overwhelmed, all freedoms are lost.
As Sir Roger Scruton put it: “We, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be. We don’t require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life or to participate in the same festivals.
“But we have a shared civil culture, a shared language and a shared public sphere… We can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside or against it.”
The rise of political sectarianism, as exemplified most damningly by The Muslim Vote this week, is a red flag showing where we have been going wrong. For a subset of British citizens to set aside all domestic concerns in favour of a foreign war 3,000 miles distant, and to organise behind it along ethnic lines, is a profound indictment of our fraying social cohesion.
To make matters worse, with Labour back in power, immigration is unlikely to come down. The problems we face may be downstream from the immigration explosion of previous decades, but we are very much upstream from where the country will find itself in five years’ time.
We must face facts. Due to the woeful mismanagement of immigration that began with Tony Blair and was eagerly continued by the Conservatives – if that is what they were – the future of our towns and cities can only lie in segregation, parallel institutions and internecine friction.
Meanwhile, the future of our elections will be increasingly dominated by hostile sectarianism.
Data analysis by Eir Nolsoe and Ben Butcher
