The ‘island of strangers’ elections

Labour’s catastrophic showing in last week’s local elections has predictably shifted the attention to Westminster, where UK prime minister Keir Starmer is – for now – clinging on to power. Yet it would be a mistake to brush over the elections that have pushed Starmer to the precipice, or to view them only through the narrow lens of Labour’s woes.

Last Thursday’s local elections were highly significant for another reason – they were dominated like no other ballot before them by Islamic sectarian grievances. It was, to borrow a phrase from Starmer himself, every bit the ‘island of strangers’ election.

According to analysis by the Henry Jackson Society, 572 ‘Muslim sectarian’ candidates were elected to 58 local councils across England. These are defined as candidates who ‘repeatedly and saliently’ emphasised ‘Muslim communal grievances’ and ‘transnational Muslim issues’ during their campaign. Two organisations, the Muslim Vote and Vote Palestine, were the driving force behind these campaigns. As revealed in a new report from Policy Exchange, the Muslim Vote viewed the local elections as an opening salvo in, as it sees it, a ‘five-election plan spanning 25 years’ to establish political Islam at the heart of British democracy.

The rise of Islamic sectarianism has been visible for a little while now. In the 2024 General Election, four Muslim independents were elected with the support of the Muslim Vote. In February, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Green Party – again with the blessing of the Muslim Vote – harnessed the constituency’s large Muslim voter base to claim a stunning victory over Labour. But last week’s local elections have brought into focus the true force and scale of this movement.

Birmingham was one of the epicentres of the sectarian earthquake. Here, 19 members of the Greens were elected, along with 13 Muslim independents who campaigned under the banner of the Independent Alliance. The success of the latter led to jubilant scenes on Birmingham’s streets, although not of the kind you might expect to see following a council election in England. Newly elected Harris Khaliq was garlanded with flowers and led on a horse by his fellow Muslims to the sound of drums through a residential street.

Elsewhere, another crowd of Muslim men gathered in a Birmingham park cheering, dancing and raising the successful candidates on one another’s shoulders. Akhmed Yakoob, a co-leader of the Independent Alliance, released a video of himself being driven down a main street in Birmingham, standing through the car’s sun roof alongside another of his party’s successful candidates, as if he was part of a papal procession.

In Greater Manchester, we saw similar scenes. Baggy Khan, a new Green Party councillor, posted a video of himself driving a bright orange, gas-guzzling Lamborghini Huracán Spyder – which is an odd look for a representative of the supposed party of the environment.

Down in London, things weren’t much better. In Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire party – an exclusively Bangladeshi Muslim organisation, endorsed by the Muslim Vote – won 33 of 55 seats, with Rahman returned to the mayoralty on a 16,000-strong majority. In neighbouring Newham, the ‘Newham Independents’ – like Aspire, a political movement more or less totally comprised of Bangladeshi Muslims, and also endorsed by the Muslim Vote – won 24 council seats. The Muslim Vote endorsed the Green Party in Hackney and Waltham Forest, achieving significant success in both.

These are clear victories for sectarian division. Both Aspire and the Newham Independents are almost exclusively male, Bangladeshi and Muslim. The Independent Alliance in Birmingham is the same, with the only difference being that its candidates are primarily of Pakistani origin. Both parties ran on – and succeeded with – what was effectively a pro-Gaza, ‘anti-Zionist’ platform.

These are not political parties or coalitions organised around shared interests that cut across cultural and ethnic divides. They are movements that cater explicitly to the interests of particular religious and ethnic identity groups.

One of the most striking symptoms of the rise of sectarian politics was the extent to which candidates and parties campaigned in languages other than English. Members of the Greens, the Muslim independent parties and even Labour were all recorded giving impassioned speeches in various languages. There was also a proliferation of leaflets and political advertising written in languages other than English.

Some of the candidates were not even British citizens. In Scotland, where Holyrood elections were held on the same day, Q Manivannan was elected on the Green Party ticket in Edinburgh and Lothians. Manivannan, a self-described ‘queer Tamil immigrant’, is a 30-year-old university student who has only lived in Scotland since 2021, the year he arrived from India. As if the situation could hardly become any more absurd, Manivannan can only work 20 hours a week under the terms of his student visa, which is due to expire in any event before the end of his five-year parliamentary term.

British politics may be dominated by the rise of Reform UK, and the demise of Labour. But there are other forces at play, too – and they threaten to break our nation up into parallel societies, separated by language, religion and ethnicity. We must be alive to the threat of sectarianism before it’s too late.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.