All in the family?

The Green Party candidate has won the Gorton and Denton by-election, and by a considerable margin. This should come as no surprise. There is disappointment among Reform UK supporters, although the constituency was not even in the top 400 of Reform’s target seats for the next general election. The demographics to which the party appeals were not particularly numerous there, and those voters had relatively little at stake in this by-election. 

The morning after, there is a great deal of talk about “family voting”, which in this context implies collective voting organised along extended family kinship lines. Most commonly, this has happened using postal voting, allowing the paterfamilias in each household to fill out all of the ballots himself and send them off in one go. In this case, an urgent report by the Democracy Volunteers, an election monitoring group, filed in the immediate aftermath of the vote, described supervised voting of family members in person at the polling station. So, that is what is getting most of the attention, and it seems to convey more of a sense of potential intimidation than the postal variant of the phenomenon.  

Coordinated voting among extended family groups is a subject I have written about in the past, and which I think has gone understudied. However, in the aftermath of Gorton and Denton, I think there is a risk of overstating its importance, and I think this risks fixating on a particular symptom at the expense of the underlying issue. 

Family voting as a phenomenon is a result of representative electoral politics being imposed from the top down in a society with no home-grown tradition of it, and in which democracy had to fit in around pre-democratic systems of government. This happened very commonly as the British withdrew from former colonies, especially in South Asia. In much of the sub-continent, especially in the peripheral, Muslim majority areas that became Pakistan, central government had little power, and authority had to be delegated outward and downward. 

Extended family structures served as vehicles for governance and cohesion in the absence of civil administration, enhanced by a complete absence of strictures on intra-family marriage. Decision-making and dispute resolution was done on the basis of family authority, and reciprocal agreements between heads of families that were automatically honoured by more junior family members. Mass-franchise electoral democracy had to fit in around this system, and families voted collectively as part of pre-made agreements, in return for patronage once a candidate was in office. Parties, such as they existed, were the corporate manifestations of alliances of large extended family groups, with a khan-type figure at the top. 

When Pakistani communities established themselves in areas in Britain, extended family groups, known as biraderi, often came to play an even more important part in the lives of individuals than they had back home, as a sense of cohesion became critical to navigating life in an unfamiliar land. Local politicians quickly came to recognise that these family groups could be an extremely efficient means of shoring up support, as it was far easier to secure the votes of a few dozen individuals in one go by meeting a family elder, than it was to knock on door after door in return for the possibility of one or two votes at a time. The family structures, meanwhile, had “get-out-the-vote” mechanisms built in.  

Over the years, this gave Pakistani families real leverage over the local political organisation, which almost invariably meant Labour, with very little in the way of opposition. As the community began to attain plurality status in certain seats, and supermajority status in many council wards, they began to assume political control of local Labour Party structures which, in many cases, simply served as a front for far more organic, family-based authority structures. 

But the high-watermark of this type of politics is now in the past. Now that South Asian Muslim communities are far more established in Britain, individuals within the community have a greater degree of individual autonomy than they did a generation ago. The community remains very tight-knit and cohesive, certainly in comparison to English society, but the tightening of kinship structures that occurred immediately after immigration into Britain has been somewhat loosened. 

Politically, we can see this is in the fact that the Green Party issued communications directly to members of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in their own language. There certainly is evidence that the community collectively turned away from Labour and toward the Greens, but this reflects real shifts in politics rather than a stitch up. There has been something rather silly about the suggestion that fathers and brothers may have been intimidating their female family members into voting for Hannah Spencer, as if these women might have been secretly yearning to vote Tory. So, yes, there may have been collective family voting, but my suspicion is that the vast majority in the community would have voted for the Greens anyway. 

What too much of a focus on family-based voting risks missing is the underlying issue of ethnic in-group affinity, which is the phenomenon of people thinking about themselves first and foremost as a member of their ethnic group — which engenders a high degree of practical ethnic solidarity. English society, along with those of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, has extraordinarily low levels of ethnic in-group affinity, even by the standards of Western Europe. We do not tend to favour other people on the grounds that they are English when making routine decisions — at least, not to anything like the degree that the vast majority of humanity does. There is some degree of chicken-and-egg here, but this is related to the highly and uniquely individualist social structure that emerged in Early Modern England, which allowed for the development of our distinct institutions, the nuclear family, jury trials, the joint stock company et cetera. 

It is important that we don’t mistake the distinctly tight-knit nature of some South Asian diaspora groups for the extent of the issue

The electoral system is but one arena in which ethnic solidarity is corrosive to normative English assumptions about how things ought to work. Juries are another obvious example, but also decisions made around the allocation of planning, permits and housing in local government, and particularly in employment, are all going to be profoundly compromised by a mismatch in expectations of what is reasonable. This quickly becomes very zero-sum — in a mixed society with a variation in levels of intra-ethnic solidarity, the group with the highest degree of solidarity wins everything. 

This is crucial because this is the issue that really underlies the phenomenon of votes essentially becoming an exercise in ethnic head-counting. And it is important that we don’t mistake the distinctly tight-knit nature of some South Asian diaspora groups for the extent of the issue. This is a phenomenon that goes far beyond that particular group, with far more extensive implications than electoral politics. Family voting is a thing, but let us not miss the wood for the trees.