All future elections in Britain will be decided by sectarian voting. All politics is now identity politics. Either pick a side or lose by default. Zack Polanski's Green Party decisively won last week's Gorton & Denton by-election in Manchester, beating Matt Goodwin and Reform UK by 4,402 votes, and... putting Labour in third place. Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, and Nigel Farage are all blaming sectarian and family voting because the Greens effectively mobilised the Muslim enclave in Gorton as an ethnic block vote. But Reform engaged in sectarianism too: unsuccessfully courting Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh voters, at the expense of the unrepresented white working class in Denton. No party spoke specifically to the British people, and so the majority stayed at home and didn't vote. You can't complain about sectarianism when you pander to minorities, only less successfully. You can’t represent the British people if you can’t define a British person. You can’t say "This is the last election," if you also insist that demographics aren't destiny. And you can't dismiss critics as "Very Online" if you make your living on Substack. All elections in Britain will be decided by sectarian voting. All politics is identity politics. Either pick a side or lose by default.show more

Connor Tomlinson

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