Pro-Palestine sectarians are poisoning democracy

On Thursday, England goes to the polls for the local elections. In theory, this is the most prosaic form of democracy we have. A chance to vote on the administration of bin collections, pothole fixing, planning applications and council taxes.

Councils are not meant to function as a stage for sectarian grievance or foreign-policy cosplay. Yet, across a growing number of English councils, that is what local politics is becoming. Over the past month, I have spent many hours analysing candidates whose political pitch revolves not around their ward, but around Gaza and the politics of the wider Muslim world.

Some of these ‘pro-Palestine’ candidates should be nowhere near public office. Amu Gib, who is standing as an independent in Islington, was allegedly part of the ton last year, in which Palestine Action activists are alleged to have caused £7million damage. Shahid Butt, standing as an independent candidate in Birmingham, was convicted in Yemen in 1999 over a plot to bomb the British consulate, an Anglican church and a hotel. An independent in Bradford, Sharat Hussain, has described Jews as ‘dirty paedo foreskin-eating pigs’.

It is hardly unreasonable to ask what this says about the calibre of people now being drawn into politics by their loathing of Israel. Local-election campaigns are becoming a vehicle for imported rage and council chambers are imagined not as a place to govern a borough, but as a place to perform allegiance to a foreign cause.

My recent report for the Henry Jackson Society sought to measure this phenomenon rather than merely gawp at it. It used ‘Muslim sectarian’ not as a label for Muslim candidates, but as an operational category for candidates whose public political appeal is repeatedly structured around Muslim communal grievance, Muslim representation or transnational Muslim causes.

On that definition, 66 out of 1,902 wards in the 2024 English local elections elected at least one Muslim sectarian candidate. The strongest predictors of a ward electing at least one Muslim sectarian candidate are higher voter turnout, a larger proportion of voters under 30, and a larger proportion of Muslims.

A one-point increase in voter turnout within a ward is associated with a 14 per cent increase in the chance of electing at least one Muslim sectarian candidate. A one-point increase in the under-30 share is associated with an 11 per cent higher chance, and a one-point jump in the ward’s Muslim proportion is associated with a seven per cent higher chance. These are not causal claims. They do not mean Muslim voters or young voters are inherently sectarian. They mean that where the numbers, demographics and mobilisation structures are in place, this sectarian politics can break through.

This is bad for everyone, especially Muslims. It reduces Muslim voters to a grievance constituency. It rewards candidates who inflame rather than govern.

Local democracy depends on shared civic life. A councillor is not elected to represent only those who share his religion, ethnicity, foreign-policy obsessions or communal grievances. He represents the whole ward: the people who voted for him, the people who voted against him and the people who did not vote at all. This basic civic ideal is being corroded by sectarian politics. We need to confront this threat before we lose this ideal entirely.

Emma Schubart is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.