THE Green win in Gorton and Denton, the party’s first at a by-election, is a victory not for the green of environmentalism so much as the green of political Islam. This spells doom for both established parties and reformers.
Hannah Spencer, the new MP, hardly mentioned environmentalism.
And don’t be fooled by her speech on Friday morning, when she attributed victory to the voters who ‘think everybody should get a nice life’ instead of ‘working to line the pockets of billionaires’. Yes, her campaign contained plenty of fluffy anti-capitalism, but that was not her dominant message.
Her office distributed more leaflets and video views in Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali than English. This linguistic bias inevitably appeals to ethnic block voting. Apart from the languages, the content was aimed more at pan-Muslim, pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli unity than any particular ethnicity.
Green Party leaflets are obsessed with the elite’s supposed Zionist betrayal of Gaza in particular and Muslims in general. Some feature images of non-Green British politicians alongside Narendra Modi of India and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
These leaflets were distributed by whites wearing keffiyehs, including their blonde candidate herself.
Don’t dismiss the Green strategy as old news.
True, George Galloway is another white candidate who used an insurgent party (Respect) to mobilise mostly Muslim activists and voters to win seats in Parliament after leaving the Labour Party in the 2000s.
True, too, that Tower Hamlets is administered by a corrupt and bigoted Bangladeshi-Islamist party (Aspire), which is led by a convicted electoral-fraudster from Bangladesh, includes a councillor who ran for office in Bangladesh simultaneously, tolerates Palestinian flags on public signposts and lampposts, and removes British flags.
But Gorton and Denton is not Tower Hamlets: it is not majority foreign-born.
Most of Gorton and Denton’s constituents are white British. According to the census, about twice as many constituents are white as ‘Asian’.
Gorton and Denton is the first by-election in which a nominally non-religious, non-ethnic party won by appealing to a religion and to ethnicities that do not predominate in that constituency.
As I have warned here and here, British politics is descending into religious and ethnic sectarianism.
Most immigrants in the recent decade come from unstable, autocratic states, with foreign tribal and religious loyalties, and without experience of full democracy.
Their (self-)segregation is a practical constraint on participation in British politics. Some immigrants and their children do not speak English as a first language (as seen in Gorton and Denton) and thus are overly exposed to ethno- and religious-centric messaging.
We have seen some ‘community leaders’ (usually clerics, invariably male), as in Tower Hamlets, collect ballots, tell constituents how to vote, or bribe them.
Another practice is for an enforcer to enter the voting booth with the voter. This is somewhat misleadingly called ‘family voting’ on the assumption that a husband or father or brother is the enforcer, but in fact the enforcer might not be so directly related.
As soon as Thursday night, John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers, a non-partisan election-monitoring group, warned of ‘family voting’ in most of the polling stations observed in Gorton and Denton.
Such practices are commoner than officially observed, because British authorities, in stereotypical two-tier fashion, crack down on reforming parties while turning a blind eye to privileged identities. Even in Tower Hamlets, official intervention was belated and partial (hence the fraudster is back in charge).
And in Gorton and Denton, Manchester’s Returning Officer denies knowledge of any ‘family voting’ until after the polls had closed, even though Ault says he escalated the issue before the polls closed!
Co-religiosity and co-ethnicity between perpetrator and official can corrupt official practices. Just look at the decades-long cover-up of grooming and rape gangs. The perpetrators are predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani heritage, in constituencies run by predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani heritage – constituencies such as those in and around Manchester.
While you still might be thinking that religious and ethnic block voting is old news, most Britons, I find, underestimate the involvement of non-Muslim white politicians, such as Galloway and Zack Polanski, leader of the Greens.
Traditionally, the strongest political identity in British politics has been party.
Even then, most voters swing between parties, and decide the election, based on issues and policies. The religion and ethnicity of candidates have not been of concern to most voters, or been advertised by most candidates.
After party, the next identity that candidates try to express is local roots, to appeal to constituency voters.
Now traditional parties, policies, and localism are no longer efficient.
This is alarming, because majority is frustrated by minorities unified not by policies but by identity – what I have termed before ‘the tyranny of the minorities’.
You might welcome the demise of the dominant parties of the last 100 years, but while splitters, reformers and insurgents (Reform, Restore, Reclaim, Advance, and others I lack space to mention) certainly defeated the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates (neither of whom got the 1,000 votes needed to get their deposit back) they could not defeat ethno-religious block voting.
Labour lost half of the votes it won in that constituency in 2024. It came third in one of its safest seats. Labour hasn’t come third in an English by-election since 1983.
Labour trailed Reform UK, despite making its campaign mostly about Reform UK (its main rival to form a national government) – and despite cheating!
Labour kicked off the campaign by claiming that Reform’s candidate, Matt Goodwin, is too academic (says the party that privileges educators and students), hates Islam, and hates Manchester. The latter accusation is backed by a clip of Goodwin saying, in 2023, that he was ‘unfortunate enough to be in Manchester a few days ago’ . . . except that he was referring to the Conservative Party conference!
Labour ended the campaign by distributing a claim that the latest polls show Labour is the party most likely to defeat Reform nationally, but it sourced no such polls. The leaflet claims that its author is Tactical Choice, which does not exist. This is a breach of election rules. Reform rightly intends to complain to the police.
Yet mainstream journalists have used Labour’s strategy as their explanation for the Greens’ victory. The BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason, reported that ‘they managed to convince enough people here that they were the most viable vehicle if you didn’t want Reform UK to become the representatives for this part of Greater Manchester.’ It’s hard not to explain such guff as a deliberate attempt to avoid the alarming ethno-religious-centrism of Green strategy.
Even though Labour lost to Reform, Reform underperformed, suggesting the right is not united enough to outweigh an ethno-religious bloc.
Reform won 28.7 per cent, not far ahead of Labour (25.4), and far behind the Greens (40.7).
Yes, Reform performed well relative to history, and is still a young party. Yes, Reform defeated the party that administers national government, but national government is routinely punished in local and by-elections.
Most revealingly, Reform did not win the share of votes that national polls had suggested since 2024.
We cannot put down the disappointing performances of the non-ethno-religious parties to an unusual turnout of minorities or suppression of the majority. The Greens pulled this off during one of the highest by-election turnouts in history: almost 48 per cent of voters went to the polls.
Gorton and Denton foreshadows a general election contest in 2029 between ethno-religious block voting and majoritarianism.
Reform and their like need to adjust to ethno-religious block voting if they are to form a national government.
