It was the moment that defined the local elections, though you won’t have seen it on the BBC. Mothin Ali, newly elected to Leeds City Council for the Green party, punched his fist in the air and, to the delight of his supporters, yelled: ‘We will raise the voice of Gaza, we will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!’
Palestine, rather than council tax, children’s services or bin collections, got him elected. The most cursory glance at the results shows Labour’s vote collapsing in areas with large Muslim electorates, notably Bradford, Blackburn and Oldham.
In the West Midlands, Akhmed Yakoob, an independent standing mainly on a platform of solidarity with Gaza (plus more burial spaces for Muslims and more housing) won more than 69,000 votes, taking more than 20 per cent of the vote from Birmingham proper and nearly costing Labour the mayoralty.
If I were looking at the results from a narrowly partisan point of view, I might allow myself a grim smile. The rise of George Galloway and assorted Muslim radicals is not a problem for the Conservative Party.
Indeed, an extrapolation from Thursday’s vote shows Sir Keir Starmer falling short of an overall majority – a very different picture from recent opinion polls and constituency surveys, which predict Labour winning by more than 100 seats.
Moment Green Party councillor Mothin Ali shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ after being elected in Leeds
But what is happening goes way beyond party politics. We are seeing something that has for a long time been almost unknown in mainland Britain, namely sectarian voting.
Until now, we have been good at assimilating settlers. Greek and Turkish Cypriots have lived alongside one another in the same north London streets, leaving their quarrels at the door. Likewise Turks and Kurds, Serbs and Croats.
This unremarked and rather beautiful fact is most striking when we consider the story of most Britons of South Asian heritage.
The partition of India in 1947 was accompanied by indescribable violence. People were tortured, mutilated, raped, burned alive, blinded with chilli powder, boiled in cauldrons, hacked to pieces.
Bands of ‘goondas’ (ruffians) slaughtered patients in their hospital beds, children in their classrooms, worshippers in their mosques, temples and gurdwaras. Trains would arrive from across the new border with blood seeping from every aperture.
I read several eye-witness accounts of the atrocities some years ago, and can barely bring myself to think about, let alone write about, what happened.
But here is the extraordinary thing. Migrants to the UK came disproportionately from the provinces most affected by the violence – above all Punjab. The children of victims and perpetrators made a decision to live alongside one another as good neighbours. Muslim, Sikh or Hindu: no one wanted to dredge up the bad times.
What has changed? How is it that communities that were willing to put aside enmities that affected their own families are now agitated about fighting in a place thousands of miles from either their ancestral or their current homes?
There have been two malign developments. First, there has been what I can only call an Arabisation of Islam. Most first-generation Muslims in Britain were from the Sufi tradition that emphasises personal piety.
But from the late 1970s, a different and increasingly fundamental form of Islam gained ground. And today this is more popular among younger Muslims than their elders.
The bigger change is in how we think of ourselves as a nation. When the first settlers came from Punjab, Gujarat, Kashmir and Bengal, Britain’s prevailing ethic was individualism. All citizens were responsible for their own actions. People were not answerable for what their ancestors had done.
That ethic is much more unusual than is sometimes realised. India and Pakistan never properly got over the trauma of partition. They went on to fight repeated wars, and their border is the most militarised on Earth. In a way, that is more understandable.
But in Britain, our moral code, like our legal system, emphasised personal autonomy. Vendetta, carrying your quarrel against your enemy’s family, is the default setting of a tribal species like ours. Britain was unusual in making it unthinkable.
Until now. The claim of identity politics is that we are all defined by our group, whether on grounds of race, gender or sexual identity. Starting around 2015, a phenomenon that sociologists call the ‘Great Awokening’ gathered pace. Instead of being taught that they were equal citizens, students were told that they needed to be aware of where their group slotted into an imagined pyramid of oppression.
The danger of woke is not that it is nonsense, but that it is perilously seductive. We evolved in kin-groups, and are easily stirred up against supposed outsiders. It is Britain’s historic value of common citizenship that requires patient education, both of new arrivals and the young.
In a society where people are categorised, not on the basis of their behaviour, but by whether an ancestor owned or worked on a Caribbean plantation, is it any wonder that tribalism is making a comeback?
Independent candidate for Mayor of the West Midlands Akhmed Yakoob
The war in Gaza is the immediate focus point, but this could be just the beginning. Notice, for example, the only parts of London where Sadiq Khan lost votes compared to last time in 2021: Brent and Harrow (where many British Hindus live) and Ealing and Hillingdon (many Sikhs). Grateful as I am for Conservative votes, I’d much rather not have sectarianism of any kind.
For one thing, it does no favours to the communities concerned. If the main parties stop competing for your vote, you lose influence.
For another, it encourages complacency. In my 21 years in the European Parliament, the worst examples of corruption I saw were in parties representing a national minority, where voters felt they had to vote for ‘their’ team on religious or linguistic grounds. We see something similar in Northern Ireland.
But the biggest problem is that identity politics is not compatible with an open society. We can’t live together in a free democracy if two babies born on the same day come into the world with a set of pre-existing grievances.
What can be done? For one thing, the mainstream parties must work harder to engage with voters as individuals rather than pitching for bloc votes via community leaders.
There ought to be a long-term opportunity here for the Tories. British Muslims are more likely than the general population to be self-employed, to be owner-occupiers and to identify with the UK as a whole rather than with any of the constituent nations. Theirs is the only great religion founded by a businessman, and its precepts emphasise the sanctity of property.
In Muslim-majority countries, the more religious parties tend, accordingly, to be more market-oriented. But here, because of the Great Awokening, everything is seen through the prism of race and oppression.
Changing that perception is ultimately a job for teachers. British children should leave school identifying primarily as citizens of this country, and with a measure of pride in our achievements, from stamping out the slave trade to defeating Nazism.
Simply to state the problem is to realise how deep-rooted it is. But if we don’t tackle it, our democracy will break apart.
Lord Hannan is International Secretary of the Conservative Party and serves on the Board of Trade