The British Lion is yet to Roar
Beneath the sectarian victory in Gorton & Denton, is the country quietly waking up?
Towering Columns
For The Times, Paul Goodman says the illegal practice of “family voting” may have determined the result in Gorton & Denton - and is a sign of things to come.
The practice sees voters joined by other people in the polling booth – often a husband joining his wife – in order to influence their vote: it’s a criminal offence. The practice isn’t confined to voters whose origins lie in Pakistan or Bangladesh. But it is scarcely unknown among them, if Democracy Volunteers are to be believed: in 2022, they claimed that some Bangladeshi-origin voters in Tower Hamlets, “generally men”, were inflicting the practice on others, “invariably women”.
An unseemly row has broken out between Manchester council and Democracy Volunteers about whether election officials were or weren’t notified – and whether they reacted if they were. And although the victorious Greens, with their aggressive courting of South Asian-origin support, are an inevitable target of conjecture, it isn’t yet clear which political party is most at fault: Labour fought the by-election energetically, and is no stranger to the darker arts of urban campaigning.
All the same, it is possible to believe, on the basis of the seat’s composition, the course of the election as a whole and yesterday’s turnout, that family voting swung the contest for the Greens – and deprived Reform of a sensational by-election victory. For if family voting warped voting at polling stations, where observers were present, imagine the scale of it in private homes, where there were none. But whichever party and campaigners are most to blame, this vicious, sectarian by–election – with its leaflets in Urdu, focus on events thousands of miles away, appeals to Muslim solidarity, anti-Indian propaganda, obsession with Zionism and not-so-latent anti-Semitism – is the shape of contests to come. The Gaza independents seized four seats from Labour at the last general election amidst accusations of electoral malpractice all round. Sir Keir Starmer’s Government set up a Defending Democracy Taskforce in the aftermath. Little has been heard of it since. There is a hole where a government anti-extremism strategy should be.
Also for The Times, Matthew Syed visited Gorton & Denton, discovering a case study of decline, distrust and Balkanisation.
Over in Longsight to the northwest of the constituency I glimpsed the other defining story of modern Britain: the consequences of mass immigration. The first four women I approached at the market didn’t speak a word of English; I got no further than a look of fear in their eyes, the only part of their faces I could discern beneath their burqas, before they were shepherded off by bearded men. I saw only half a dozen white faces among hundreds of shoppers on a cold Wednesday afternoon.
This isn’t multiculturalism; it is balkanisation. Like dozens of enclaves in northern towns and, indeed, parts of London, this area is dominated by Muslims; in this case, mainly of Pakistani ethnicity (the same as my late father). According to the 2021 census, more than six in ten residents identify as Muslim, the highest in the Manchester area. Progressives might say: “So what? Don’t you like brown people?” Er, I am a brown person. My point, though, is simple: how can it be good for immigrants, let alone the rest of the community, when there is a sharp divide between communities as if severed with a scalpel? How can it be conducive to their flourishing, to our flourishing, to the ethos of solidarity which is, after all, the rationale of that abstraction we call the nation state?
The irony is that many of the people I spoke to in Longsight concurred that this degree of separation is damaging. Rizwan, who works in a shoe stall in the market, said: “It would be better if more white people lived around here but they moved away and I doubt they are coming back.” I asked Saad, 23, who was shopping for an indoor rug, what he made of the fact so few of the older women here seem able to speak English. “It obviously isn’t good but that is the culture here,” he said. “The men do the talking.” But is this healthy? “Things are changing with the younger generation but it takes take time.” The highlight of my time here was meeting a 14-year-old who spotted me struggling to communicate with shoppers in the market and offered — with a twinkle in his eye — to translate. He was full of what you might call bantz. “Are you famous, bro?” “How much do you earn, bro?” Like quite a few of the Muslim kids here, he spoke with a curious synthesis of gangsta rap and Urdu lilt. “Why you keep talking like a rapper, dude?” I asked, causing him to dissolve into laughter.
In Compact, Benjamin R. Young unpacks Jason Burke’s analysis of how the revolutionary Left embraced militant Islam.
However, a simmering brew of religious fervor was beginning to boil in the Middle East. Sayyid Qutb, a radical Egyptian preacher and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, published a short book, Milestones, in 1964. Calling for Muslims to violently resist apostate regimes and the institutions of “World Jewry,” Qutb’s teachings became the intellectual cornerstone of the modern Islamist movement. Tapping into the anti-colonial rhetoric that resonated with left-wing radicals and Palestinian activists, Qutb’s conspiratorial theories jumpstarted a violent religious movement that would have long-lasting implications for the modern world.
Frustrated with Israel’s growing power in the region and the “apostasy” of US-aligned Arab governments, Middle Eastern radicals in the mid- to late 1970s abandoned the imported European ideology of Marxism in favor of homegrown Islamic teachings, such as Qutb’s works. Instead of reading the works of Mao and Che, they read Milestones and studied the Koran. Most of them became adherents of the most puritanical interpretations of Sunnism and Shiism. Although still full of revolutionary zeal, these extremists dropped communism for Islamism.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran demonstrated the revolutionary potential of Islam and its remarkable ability to transform a society overnight. Although a prominent religious figure by the mid-1970s, Khomeini spoke in terms familiar to many leftists: revolution, class, and the plight of the poor. The broad appeal of this blend of left-wing populist messaging with anti-Semitism and fundamentalist Shiism turned Khomeini into a national leader in waiting. Exiled by the Shah, Khomeini triumphantly returned to Tehran in 1979 and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For The Times, Juliet Samuel says UK universities are training five Chinese scientists for every British one - and empowering a strategic enemy.
It ought to be shocking that these venerated seats of science are contributing more to the next generation of researchers in a far-off country with a hostile regime than to the brilliance and enlightenment of their own countrymen. But aside from the warped norms of modern science, in which many scholars consider themselves above petty concerns like loyalty and national security, there is an obvious reason for this. At undergrad level, Stem courses cost more to deliver than universities are allowed to charge British students. Foreign students, by contrast, can pay their way. So, while the pipeline of Brits into advanced study is strangled, there is a vast surplus of foreign students ready to take their place.
The problem is that hosting thousands of Chinese engineers is very much not the same as getting in bulk batches of Canadians or Germans. The Chinese state has an official policy of “military-civil fusion” whereby all civil technology is put at the disposal of defence and security needs as well as technological espionage and economic coercion. Even if a vetting scheme could deal with this risk (which it can’t, because it’s a systemic problem arising from mutually incompatible and hostile political norms), Britain doesn’t have one remotely capable of doing so.
When UKCT tried to get details of how the Foreign Office checks overseas students, it was told the government would not supply China-specific data to avoid hurting “international relations”. Overall, the figures show about 1-3 per cent of applications are refused, but there appear to be yawning gaps. For example, the Foreign Office doesn’t ask Chinese students if they are members of the Communist Party. It doesn’t even seem to require them to record their names in Chinese characters and collects them only in Latinised “pinyin” form. This makes vetting using any Chinese-language resources impossible. I know because during an investigation of a dodgy, pro-Beijing figure some years ago, I came across a person of interest with a pinyin name that turned out to have 24 possible Chinese spellings, and the tantalising trail of breadcrumbs ended there.
In The Spectator, Gavin Rice says Trump may beat the Supreme Court on tariffs, and that “MAGA”-nomics is here to stay.
While the tariff programme is totemic, both in its audacity and its violation of economic shibboleths, in the context of the Trump Administration’s wider economic agenda it is far from the whole story. The MAGA movement’s drive to reshore supply chains and manufacturing jobs is partly about rebuilding national capacity in a fragmenting and more dangerous world, partly about reversing China’s global trade dominance and partly about restoring well-paid jobs to depressed regions. But it is also about a shift of Republican economic priorities towards production in the real economy, and away from the dominance of Wall Street.
Trump’s economic project, crafted primarily by J.D. Vance, Stephen Miran, Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, is about a major internal pivot in America’s centre of economic gravity as much as a reset with the global trading order. The overriding thesis is that for too long the American economy has incentivised talent to flock to financial services, rewarded speculation, extraction and rent-seeking, and returns to real estate investment over the growth of productive, long-termist companies.
American workers, the argument goes, have lost out not only from Chinese mercantilist aggression, stripping jobs out of the South and Rust Belt, but also from a set of economic conditions that places them at the bottom of the pecking order. While returns to capital have soared over the last thirty years, returns to labour have been small by comparison – America’s overall higher wages notwithstanding. In the US – unlike in Europe, where productivity itself is the problem – productivity growth of around 60 per cent since 1980 has not been reflected in pay growth, which has been more like 15 per cent. Output and compensation have been diverging sharply.
On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien says Prosper UK has exactly the wrong diagnosis of how Conservatives need to change.
The Austerity Programme was a catastrophic mistake which accelerated a downward spiral that was already taking place. The books did need to be balanced but they certainly did not need to the dramatically balanced in a low-interest rate environment and the manner they were done was totally flawed. The Conservative Party had come to see the public spending of New Labour as pure waste, just a sop to voters. They could not accept that expanding public services and welfare was propping up a failed economic model that had deindustrialised and hollowed out communities. Replacing old industries with nothing. This was a model that the Conservatives had kicked off when they were last in government. Spending cuts, without a new economic model, worsened deep seated social and economic problems and was directly correlated to Brexit voting. The Coalition was New Labour but without any populist public spending, it would survive and fall purely on the strength of its governing philosophy. It fell.
The Conservative Party could not seriously countenance a new economic model because its Panglossian philosophy was the market was always right - this is what backing business meant. If the economy was the way it was, it was because that is what was right. There is no alternative. If businesses wanted corporation tax slashed, they should have it. If they wanted red tape cut, they should have it. If they wanted devolution, they should have it. The immigration system should be as liberal as possible to help them, providing it did not prevent re-election. The only areas they resisted were on planning and environmental regulation. The former where the ‘establishment’ consensus, including business, was to be seen to be green and the latter because voters did not want to be disturbed by new housing. It was necessary to reduce house building to appease the coalition that sustained the ‘back business’ mantra. The Conservative Party’s view was that the British economy was the best of all possible worlds. It was wrong.
On public services, we were not getting good value for money from spending, but that’s because public services were focused on picking up the pieces for a broken society (as Cameron himself identified). Yet we did not seek to fix that social model because it would have required a different economic structure which would have mean admitting business and the market was wrong. So public services are in a doom loop of ever growing demand but with little being done to tackle the fundamental causes of poor levels of education, anti-social behaviour, family breakdown etc. I do not honestly think that anyone can genuinely say that Britain was stronger and more unified in 2016. Events have shown the hollowness of the project. The Cameroonian’s two missions - electability and economic rejuvenation - both failed.
Wonky Thinking
On his Substack, Neil O’Brien examines the statistical trends of internal migration, in-group preference and demographic shift within the UK.
In this post I have been looking mainly at the level of the local authority. But if we zoomed in further, we would see sorting at the neighbourhood level too - for age, ethnicity and education, compounding these trends.
I think these trends towards sorting matter for three reasons.
Disconnection within families.
A report from Onward found that between 2001 and 2020 the proportion of older parents (those aged 55 and over) living within 15 minutes of an adult child fell by 16%, (45% to 38%). The trend for people to sort into older places and for the age gaps to grow is one factor driving this.
As that report notes: “The effects of this variation on the quality of people’s relationships are considerable. Those living close to their family are much more likely to see them regularly: older parents are six times more likely to see their adult child daily if they live within half an hour of each other than if they live further away”.
The family WhatsApp group can’t substitute for proximity. This in turn has huge implications for the care of older people in our (ageing) society, and the use of paid-for social care.
Churn and lower trust
The UK model is lots of higher education and lots moving away from home for three years. That has obvious costs in terms of the large debts which so many young people now run up. But it also creates churn, with wider effects.
Churn and transience have political consequences. There is clear evidence that neighbourhood trust is higher the longer people have been in a neighbourhood. That same Onward report notes that:
an adult living in the same neighbourhood for over 30 years is… 15 percentage points more likely to believe that many of their neighbours can be trusted (50%) compared to someone who has been resident in the area for less than five years (35%).
I am of course not anti-mobility. Moving to opportunity is part of a healthy society. But in the UK we see surprisingly little sign of overall movement towards places where wages are higher, and that three quarters of of the local authorities that gain students, lose people overall. A lot of cities are churning but not attracting people in the long term.
Political balkanisation
This is maybe the biggest effect, and so I end where I started this piece.
Trends in the online world are certainly balkanising us. Once upon a time we might have read different newspapers, but at least we watched the same TV. About 37% of people in the UK watched the 1977 Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show. Today people have sorted themselves onto different platforms based on their views (Bluesky vs X.com) and even where they are on the same platforms, algo-driven spirals emerge where people are fed more of the same things they watch. If we watch TV at all, it’s on demand, and we get our news in many languages. Social media allows very immersive communities to emerge which can radicalise people in different directions and for different causes. People end up living in different information universes where the other tribe can do no right, while “we” can do no wrong.
There’s nothing so new about that - new forms of media allow people to form themselves into groups and drive change in new ways. Guttenberg invented moveable type, and boom, you had the Reformation and the Peasant War. As the man said, there are many such cases4. But the extent is greater than ever.
So if the same sorting happens in the real world too, then you start to compound these problems - you are less likely to be meeting people from outside your filter bubble offline. You have communities of rural oldies and young urban grads not mingling or meeting up. People start to say things like: “I don’t know anyone who voted for X”
And there is precedent for this - Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort looked at how Americans were moving in such a way as to sort people into like minded communities. This had already had political consequences when he wrote in 2009 that:
“People with college degrees were relatively evenly spread across the nation’s cities in 1970. Thirty years later, college graduates had congregated in particular cities… In 1976, only about a quarter of America’s voters lived in a county a presidential candidate won by a landslide margin. By 2004, it was nearly half.”
Bill Clinton (no less) urged people to read the book and take steps to counter polarisation, but alas, the US only seems to have slid into hyper polarisation since.
Could the UK go the same way? Could that happen here?
Well, you be the judge.
Policy Exchange published “Putting Business Back in the Driving Seat”, by Zachary Marsh, Iain Mansfield, Lara Brown and Ben Ramanauskas, with a foreword by Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith. The report calls for major reform of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies so businesses can return to meritocracy.
Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is a conceptual framework which seeks to promote the fair treatment of all members of a workplace:
‘Equality’ refers to an employers assumed responsibility to treat all members of the workforce equally – regardless of their identity.
‘Diversity’ refers to the expectation that a company will deliver a diverse workforce – usually in terms of identities like gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability.
‘Inclusion’ operates on an assumption that some aspects of a workplace may exclude certain groups and that employers ought to take measures to make everyone comfortable. EDI is known by many terms – DEI in the US and quite often simply as ‘Diversity and Inclusion’. Increasingly the ‘Equality’ is replaced by ‘Equity’ – a word representing a belief that people with different characteristics should be treated differently in order to achieve equal outcomes.
EDI in the modern workplace emerged from anti-discrimination laws, introduced in response to the systematic and widespread discrimination which dominated the workplace until the late 20th century. In Britain, early examples include the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Race Relations Act 1976, and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 sought to end an era of discrimination in the workplace which saw minority groups discriminated against on the basis of their gender, religion, ethnicity or disabilities. Further, often well-meaning examples of what would now be referred to as EDI were frequently introduced by managers who wanted to create an inclusive and open workplace.
The evolution towards the modern conception of EDI occurred gradually, and alongside a broader changing perception of the role of the company.
In 2004 the World Bank produced the paper ‘Who Cares Wins’ which introduced the term ‘Environment, Social, Governance’ (ESG) into public conceptions of the modern company. Companies were no longer expected to simply maximise shareholder value. Instead, they were judged on their ability to maintain good working conditions, tackle discrimination, and promote environmental and social causes. Companies were expected to align their portfolios with guiding principles like human rights, working conditions, the environment, and anti-corruption – with major investors taking this into account when making investment decisions. As Policy Exchange has set out in Corporate Cancel Culture: How ESG came to rule our investments, ESG has grown into an extensive industry, with the global market for ESG data alone estimated at £1.5 billion.
Alongside this, many employers have gradually moved from policies designed to tackle discrimination, to policies seeking to further ‘Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion’ in the workplace. In doing so, modern EDI practices draws upon a range of intellectual and political traditions from both Britain and the United States, including the ‘affirmative action’ policies that arose from the Civil Rights movement, theories of ‘disparate impact’, in which a differing impact on two groups of people may be considered evidence of unfair treatment or discrimination, and approaches drawn from critical theory, which argue that differences in outcome between groups are the result of the unfair use of power and privilege. While laws and permitted practices vary between countries – in the UK, for example, ‘affirmative action’ is legally prohibited, with only the less discriminatory ‘positive action’ permitted – increasingly, instead of simply seeking to eliminate racial, sexual or other forms of discrimination, modern EDI policies will seek to actively promote diversity, and to overcome these perceived structural inequalities in society. Corporate studies and business literature have supported the drive towards EDI. In 2015 McKinsey & Company published ‘Why diversity matters’, a piece of research they conducted into the relative success of diverse companies.4 In the paper they claimed that:
‘Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians (exhibit).’
McKinsey published four more pieces of research presenting the case that companies with more diversity of gender and ethnicity performed better: Delivering through Diversity (2018), Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters (2020), and Diversity Matters Even More: The Case for Holistic Impact (2023). Despite this, in March 2024 Jeremiah Green and John R. M. Hand revisited McKinsey’s claims and concluded that they could not be replicated.
John Miller and Lucy Parker, in their book the Activist Leader: A New Mindset for Doing Business, argued that
To be a successful business leader in today’s world you are expected to deliver societal value alongside financial value. Not one at the expense of the other.
And doing that takes a new mindset: the ability to think like an activist about the role your business plays in the world.
Further social developments, including the growth of genderism and trans ideology, the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace, and, in 2020, the death of George Floyd and the following surge of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, have all led to further developments in EDI policies and practices.
Support for EDI has become ubiquitous in the workplace. Business leaders, trade associations and major investors have championed EDI. Blackrock CEO Larry Fink’s influential annual letter to investors regularly asserted the importance of EDI and ESG – both an important signal of the acceptance of EDI in the corporate mainstream and itself a driver of further change. Training and monitoring of EDI has also become a major business. Many organisations exist to sell EDI to companies, either through training modules, toolkits on inclusivity, or the promise of auditing a company and rooting out any ‘systematic’ racism or sexism.
But what are the drivers on companies to adopt EDI policies? As this report will set out, the pressure on companies to promote EDI is both internal and external. Both central Government and regulators have imposed direct regulatory requirements related to diversity, whilst voluntary schemes and regular ‘reviews’ have promoted EDI. Many businesses have set up their own schemes to try and meet ever broadening targets. Internal pressure plays a similar role. Staff networks, activist employees, and human resources departments have contributed to the expansion of EDI.
This paper develops a taxonomy of how and why this imposes costs on business – and quantifies these costs where it is possible to do so. It then charts the causes of EDI overreach in the workplace and the external and internal pressures which have driven the adoption of such policies – and sets out how Government, regulators and business can take a more proportionate approach to treating employees fairly.
Podcasts of the Week
On the Spectator’s Quite Right!, former Downing Street Head of Policy Munira Mirza says the fear of racism and the politicisation of Islam are distorting our politics.
On the Works in Progress podcast, Sam Bowman, Peter Garicano and Aria Schrecker discuss the causes of European economic stagnation.
Quick Links
Independent election observers Democracy Volunteers found evidence of so-called “family voting” in 68% of polling stations, in violation of the Secret Ballot Act, in Gorton & Denton.
Labour sources complained their activists were intimidated by pro-Gaza protestors.
A Dutch man claiming to support Palestine Action has been arrested for desecrating the Churchill memorial in Parliament Square with anti-Semitic slogans.
A quarter of rough sleepers are not British, a report found.
BP is embarking on a new bout of shale drilling, in contrast to competitors.
The UK has per capita energy use that is almost half the developed world average.
Banning smartphones in schools led to a decrease in diagnoses of psychological disorders, a study found.
The Ministry of Defence has asked for an additional £2.5 billion to cover the cost of asylum for Afghans affected by the department’s data leak.