Sects on the Brain
A post-Gorton narrative which is dramatic, seductive, and wrong
There is, apparently, a spectre hanging over British democracy. Ever since the result in Gorton and Denton, the media, especially on the right, has been awash with ideas of sectarianism and ethnic bloc voting. The preferred take suggests the Greens triumphed because of an en masse movement of local Muslims, largely driven by concern over Gaza, exacerbated by dodgy electoral practices. This, the take goes, damaged Labour, bested Reform, and catapulted Hannah Spencer into parliament.
The most alarmist versions extrapolate from this. G&D is taken as evidence of a wider trend, of ethnic bloc voting dominated by concerns about overseas interests. It is set to spin our elections into nothing more than census-taking and the sort of sectarian division seen in Northern Ireland or Lebanon. Thereafter, a vicious cycle of escalation spins us into ethnic violence and civil war.
It is exciting, but analytically lazy. It misunderstands the concepts of ethnic voting and the realities of what is happening among the electorate. G&D was not an ethnic revolt, but the result of a Labour Party that has alienated swathes of its normal voters. There was a complex electoral realignment, driven by a host of issues. The right (and many in Labour) are ignoring this, rooted too firmly in their own priors and prejudices.
The sectarian narrative leans too far into simplistic associations about minority voters. It disregards the complexities of how competing interests drive voting behaviour. Equally, it misreads the impact of Gaza, which matters to progressive voters far beyond Muslims. The approach, especially from Reform, also focuses far too much on barely evidenced and poorly analysed allegations of electoral malpractice. The result is a narrative of fear, which doesn’t really grapple with the facts or the proper definitions of ethnic voting.
The first thing to understand is that ethnic bloc voting is different from the simple reality of ethnic minorities voting. It is a well-explored academic topic, with proper definitions and analyses. The concept fundamentally relies on ethnic identity being the primary driver of voting behaviour, cutting across other interests. Once this is established, it becomes self-reinforcing. For some group, the party becomes the party of that group, promoting their interests exclusively. Other groups find their own party, and elections become a matter of census-taking, seeing who has the larger bloc in a given constituency. Where one dominates, the competition becomes about who is the best (and usually most bellicose) representative of the group.
In practice, everyone in the UK should understand this instinctively through Northern Ireland (unless you are the former NI Secretary). In NI, save for a few moderates in the middle, there are two communities. The nationalists vote for nationalist parties, the unionists for unionist ones. You don’t switch from Sinn Féin to the DUP because the latter has a better tax policy. Instead, community parties compete to offer the best representation for their side. This is the battle the UUP largely lost to the DUP, largely because the more belligerent tends to win out. Overall, identity matters more than class or other politics.
This isn’t what happened in G&D. To start with, the maths simply doesn’t work. The Greens didn’t win by creating a Muslim bloc. They won by appealing to voters across the constituency, bringing together white and Asian voters. Equally, the latter was still split, with a third of Asian voters turning out for other parties. This is quite traditional politics, combining interest groups on a mix of class and culture. Analysis of broader voting patterns points to this. Demographic factors determine whether you fall into the left or right bloc, but your affluence decides which party you pick. In short, the Greens won as much by building a class coalition as an ethnic one.
The politics also point to this. The sectarian analysis often assumes that Labour’s problems with Muslim communities are rooted in their response to Gaza and reads this as an ethnic position. This is a misreading, and a result of how out of touch the Westminster right is with mainstream opinion on this. The plurality position among the British public is greater sympathy with Palestine than Israel, with neutrality and not knowing more popular than sympathy for Israel. Concern over Gaza is far from a Muslims-only ethnic issue but is instead widespread – especially among working-age and female voters. In somewhere like G&D, you’d expect the better-off white liberal voters to be highly animated by it.
Equally, Muslims have a much more multi-centric approach to politics than simply being outraged by wars in the Middle East. Polling from before the last general election sees around a fifth cite it as their most pressing issue. That is a lot, but it is not dominant. Most Muslim voters were driven by similar things as everyone else, and especially everyone else in their economic and social brackets. The NHS, the cost of living, and the economy were the most widely reported concerns. There is little sign these are identity-driven voters. They are like everyone else, with a range of interests that often overlap with others’.
The image of the Muslim bloc is also burnished with the idea of electoral malpractice. For years, UKIP and its successors have talked of illicit vote harvesting and unnecessary pressure. This is not entirely baseless. In places like Bradford and Tower Hamlets, corrupt practices have been discovered and demonstrated. Yet a huge amount of innuendo lingers over whether these are the tip of the iceberg, or evidence that this stuff is picked up and prosecuted.
Following Gorton and Denton, the main accusation has been around so-called “family voting” in polling booths. For those unfamiliar with electoral law, this measure is largely designed to address domestic coercion. Everyone’s vote should be private and cast alone so that no one can know or verify how they voted. The prohibition intends that even the most oppressed partner or family member can vote how they want, without an abuser knowing. It is a good rule and should be enforced properly.
In Gorton and Denton, an alarm was raised by Democracy Volunteers on the night of the vote. Yet their report is vague. The sample size is small and fails to distinguish between technical breaches (people in a polling booth together) and operative ones (voters being coerced). It is unclear whether it is sloppy practice or corrupt ones. Neither should be waved away, but the latter is far more serious. Since this first report, there has been little further evidence, and so far, no actual challenge to the result.
There has just been speculation and innuendo. Much of this has been predicated on an inherent distrust of ethnic voters and assumptions about Muslim family dynamics. This is a pattern with a long history. Since the UKIP years, Farage and his successors have cried fraud after every defeat in constituencies with a significant ethnic minority presence. They do so loudly, in the media, and then quietly drop it when no actual evidence materialises. No election court challenge has ever followed. It is not a serious concern about democratic integrity. It is a political manoeuvre, designed to delegitimise votes that didn’t go the right way. After all, the assessment lacks the fundamentals that matter – evidence that this happened on a wide enough scale to swing a result, and that anyone was directing or organising it at a level that mattered.
Much like the sectarian analysis, this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The idea of an ethnic bloc driven by overseas politics putting thumbs on the scales of democracy is provocative. It is Trumpian in its casting of aspersions on minorities and the electoral process – and in its deviation from the actualité. The narrative suits Reform because it stokes cultural anxiety, suits Labour because it externalises blame, and suits lazy pundits because it’s a simpler story than properly examining how ethnic groups are and are not voting.
The real story of Gorton and Denton remains one of a governing party losing its electoral coalition. That includes a party that has relied on minority groups for support, losing them. But to treat this as ethnic bloc politics is a misreading of that phenomenon. The Green Party’s win came from a mix of white, Asian, and other ethnicities, driven by class and culture. It is politics, not sectarianism. It fails the simple test of whether identity is the primary driver or an ancillary force.
Assuming so is actively dangerous for anyone who wants to understand what is happening. If Labour convinces itself that Muslim voters left because of ethnic conspiracy rather than the NHS, the cost of living, and a foreign policy that alienated progressives of every background, it will never make the diagnosis that might actually save it. On the right, the risk is getting sucked into their own alarmist narratives, which are increasingly divorced from reality. A politics untethered from reality tends to make costly misjudgements, talking to itself, rather than ordinary voters.
The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them.
