Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.<\/p>\n
Given the ongoing implosion of this Labour Government, it\u2019s easy to miss one of the most concerning long-term trends illuminated in last week\u2019s local election results. But we mustn\u2019t let psychodrama around the Prime Minister\u2019s future obscure the dangerous rise of political sectarianism.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe Zionists control everything\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But it is by far the largest single wave of successful sectarian candidates in modern British political history, and that should concern us all.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t entirely new in Britain, but when it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s encouraging to see more people taking this problem seriously \u2013 though we must be careful to be precise when we talk about what sectarianism is. We can, after all, only address problems if we understand them properly.<\/p>\n
Sectarianism isn\u2019t a phenomenon confined to one particular group \u2013 though at the most recent local elections, most of the sectarian candidates that were elected were Muslim. Across history and around the world, many different groups have organised themselves along sectarian lines, even if that hasn\u2019t been the norm in Britain.<\/p>\n
Sectarianism isn\u2019t the same thing as \u2018family voting\u2019, even if political sectarianism often relies on close-knit family networks to take root and influence people\u2019s behaviour. \u2018Family voting\u2019 can be one symptom of sectarianism, though campaigns and candidates can engage in sectarian politics without using family or clan networks.<\/p>\n
Sectarian politicians often emphasise, and overemphasise, certain issues in a way designed to appeal to a particular religious, cultural, or ethnic group. For example, many of the sectarian candidates elected at the most recent round of local elections spent lots of their time on the conflict in Gaza, in a way designed to appeal to Muslim voters. Clearly, if the war in Gaza is taking precedence over bin collections and potholes in a local council election, that\u2019s likely to indicate political sectarianism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, it\u2019s the deliberate targeting of particular groups through that emphasis on certain issues that\u2019s sectarian, not merely the act of caring about those issues in principle. It isn\u2019t sectarian to have a particular view on the conflict in Gaza, but talking disproportionately about the issue, in a way designed to appeal to one group, is sectarian.<\/p>\n
Sectarianism is also not the same as religious extremism. Religious extremists will almost always behave in a sectarian fashion, but not all sectarian behaviour is rooted in religious extremism. Islamists, for example, will always be sectarian \u2013 they believe that Islam ought to be the basis for a country\u2019s political system.<\/p>\n
But sectarianism doesn\u2019t have to be religious. Lutfur Rahman, for example, was convicted for electoral fraud and sectarian campaigning in 2015. His sectarian campaigning was directed at Bangladeshis, but not because most Bangladeshis are Muslim. The basis of that sectarian campaigning was his direct political appeals to people from a particular ethnic group, rather than a religious one.<\/p>\n
Both sectarianism and religious extremism are a problem, and a threat to our way of life \u2013 but we must understand them as related but separate problems.<\/p>\n
And sectarianism as a phenomenon doesn\u2019t come from nowhere. As Kemi rightly said in her speech on integration earlier this year, \u201csectarianism is a symptom of separatism. It is the politics that follows when people are taught to think as blocs\u201d. Successive governments have made decisions on immigration and around assimilation which have created conditions in which some groups haven\u2019t adopted the norms, behaviours, and customs of mainstream British society.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sectarianism is the political manifestation of that and, if we want to address it, we must address these underlying causes \u2013 including through a much more limited and much more selective migration system, which makes sure that everybody who comes here assimilates into our norms, cultures, and customs. We will not solve this problem by failing to understand it, or by ignoring the root causes.<\/p>\n
And we certainly won\u2019t be able to solve the problem of sectarianism if we can\u2019t even acknowledge it. In her role as Shadow Equalities Minister, Claire Coutinho has exposed the Government\u2019s total unwillingness to confront this problem head-on, recently tackling Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson about her repeated refusal to condemn explicitly sectarian campaign groups, like \u2018The Muslim Vote\u2019.<\/p>\n
At our best, the Conservatives have always been the party willing to tackle problems honestly, from a position of proper understanding, regardless of how difficult it is to talk about them. When we\u2019ve failed, it\u2019s because we\u2019ve failed to live up to that ideal. Just as we\u2019ve succeeded in facing down some of the country\u2019s greatest problems before, I know that we can do so again on sectarianism, and the deeper issues that produce it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent. Given the ongoing implosion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,16281,6615,16282,3996,16283,16284],"class_list":{"0":"post-35127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-gaza-independents","10":"tag-integration","11":"tag-islamists","12":"tag-local-elections-2026","13":"tag-religious-extremism","14":"tag-sectarianism"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116565788838617675","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}