Anyone could have predicted

There was a time when people who earned their living from political commentary tried to convey the sense that they had seen it all coming well in advance — that whatever was playing out in the unfolding election results, or the latest bit of rigmarole, were the entirely foreseeable consequences of trends that they had been talking about all along. This required maintaining a degree of composure, be it in print or on screen, even if events were turning against their own preferred or expected course. After all, what value was the analysis of somebody who keeps getting publicly blindsided? Any old chump could turn on the evening news and say “well, I didn’t see that coming”. 

That’s all changed now — the rise of 24 hour news channels pushed broadcasters into trying to maintain a sense of urgency, to keep people tuned in during the many hours in which there was little new to report. Those who appeared on our screens learned to cultivate a natural tone of hyperbolic disbelief. In the age of social media, a fashion for exuberant displays of personal authenticity made donnish unflappability seem corny. Outrage, bewilderment and fear were more raw reactions to breaking news, and were considered somehow more genuine. As a result, our news media has adopted a far less learned and more histrionic tone. 

Overall, this is but a single addition to the long list of annoying trends that define modern political life. However, it has opened the door to a strange kind of inverse insouciance, as commentators feign surprise and outrage at things they knew perfectly well were going on, but which are nevertheless inconvenient to acknowledge. If there is no longer any cost to credibility in not being aware of an emerging trend, then there might be a benefit in pretending that something foreseeable was in fact a surprise.  This is most obviously the case when people are confronted with the negative consequences of policies their own side favoured — especially those consequences their opponents warned them about. 

Last Thursday, as voters were heading to the polls in the local elections, The News Agents podcast published a recording of a recent meeting between one of their co-presenters Lewis Goodall, and Akhmed Yakoob, a political figure who leads the “Independent Candidate Alliance”. Centred in Birmingham, the Independent Candidate Alliance is a slate of formally unaffiliated candidates, the overwhelming majority of whom are from Mirpuri Pakistani families. Yakoob — a lawyer by background — had previously appeared on The News Agents, seemingly on friendly terms. However, on this occasion, the interview descended into acrimony, and Yakoob stormed off, leaving Goodall to pay for his own coffee, and having him barred from the cafe in which they were sat. 

The resulting footage made for great viewing by anybody’s standards, let alone those of The News Agents. Unsurprisingly, it attracted a great deal of attention and much commentary. Many people have asked the question of why it is that the most mainstream of mainstream broadcasters such as Goodall, and his colleagues Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel, have chosen to enter the realm of podcasting; it seems to defy the entire point and premise of the genre. The answer is, quite obviously, that it allows them to present their usual stuff in pretty much their usual style, without any regard for the onerous restrictions of British current affairs broadcasting. These restrictions include, among other things, very strict limitations on putting out contentious political content on polling day itself. 

It was genuinely a very good interview. Goodall confronted the most controversial subjects head on, and didn’t back away when he was given an inadequate answer. Goodall pressed Yakoob on his attitudes toward “LGBT” people, and questioned the assumptions underlying Yakoob’s categorisation of Green Party leader Zack Polanski as a “degenerate”. He also put pressure on Yakoob’s reasons for not himself running in the 2026 local elections, which Yakoob claimed was out of a strategic need to nurture a younger generation of candidates, but which Goodall suggested was due to his legal troubles. 

Yakoob currently faces charges of money laundering and is awaiting trial, but stressed that he was not officially barred from running. It was Goodall’s repeated questioning over this latter point, raising the prospect that he might go to prison, that caused Yakoob to lose his temper, and to compare himself with the late South African president Nelson Mandela. Goodall gave Yakoob the opportunity to reconsider the comparison, which he did not take up.

Yakoob’s answers were so flagrant, and his lack of restraint so clearly inexcusable, that many liberals felt justified in expressing their shock and alarm in terms that would usually be reserved for politicians of the Right. The Deputy Editor of the Jewish News Daniel Sugarman accused Yakoob of deploying “dogwhistles”, perhaps raising the question of how blunt he would actually need to be in order for his comments to be accepted at face value. Nick Lowles, CEO of the self-appointed morality police of British politics “Hope Not Hate”, said that it was “frightening” to think how powerful Yakoob might be about to become as a power broker in Birmingham (the Independents went on to win a credible but not earth-shattering thirteen seats on the city council). 

Right-wing critics suggested that Goodall was forced in the interview to confront realities about attitudes among British Pakistanis that he didn’t want to accept, and that were too robust for his delicate liberal sensibilities. I think these suggestions can be disregarded — Lewis Goodall knew exactly what he wanted to get out of the interview, and he pressed all the right buttons to get it. He was aware that South Asian political culture has a strong tendency toward machismo, which Yakoob plays up to by adopting elements of African-American “gangsta” aesthetics, and that he would react badly to persistent questioning in an undeferential tone on subjects he didn’t want to talk about. 

Goodall was also aware that, far from being a career-ending disaster, a prison sentence is considered a right of passage for many South Asian politicians, and can be a great enhancement to their personal credibility. Furthermore, Goodall knew perfectly well that Yakoob does not operate within a political milieu that selects for political sophistication, or which places much value on answering questions in a way that does not shock or horrify gentle English sensibilities. Figures such as Yakoob, as well as an earlier generation of Labour-aligned but Pakistani-focussed local politicians, only avoided causing this type of offence in the past because journalists like Goodall knew quite well not to ask them those kinds of questions.

Exposing how starkly different the political culture of the Pakistanis who were settling in our towns and cities was from the British mainstream was not something that left-leaning journalists were willing to consider doing until very recently. The fact that the community was “getting involved” in local democracy and party politics was held up as evidence of their integration into British society, and of their compatibility with democracy.  The community was assumed to be a natural ally of the forces of progress in British politics, and one of the few growing bulwarks against the Right. That they had some decidedly old-fashioned sounding ideas about social and sexual issues could be ignored or wished away as they were shoring Labour up in areas where the party’s natural voter-base was being dissolved by the forces of economic change. 

More recently, Labour and others on the Left have retreated behind the defences of a political dichotomy that contrasts a mythical “unity” against “those who seek to divide us”. The latter in this context being code for pointing out ways in which the politics of the Pakistani diaspora diverge sharply from liberal assumptions. The fact that an outfit with the politics of The News Agents now apparently has licence to indulge in a bit of division is a simple consequence of the fact that the Pakistani “independents” are becoming a hindrance rather than a support for established centre-left parties. For those who long insisted that diversity came only with benefits and no drawbacks, the projection of shock and anguish at Yakoob is a useful means of maintaining deniability, whilst cutting him loose. 

This is a pattern that is becoming increasingly acute, having grown steadily more obvious over the last few years. The outbreak of aggressively and explicitly antisemitic language and symbolism in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks was met with a tragicomic wringing of hands about where all this ghastliness had all suddenly emerged from. The most recent outrage — the stabbing of two identifiably Jewish men in Golders Green by a Somali-born British citizen with an extensive record of violent crime — triggered a similarly fatuous response questioning what it would take for the British public to “stand with” the country’s Jews. No suggestion is ever given about what this unspecified gesture of solidarity might look like. 

Those who spent years dismissing all the warnings that it was coming are permitted to hide behind incredible protestations of outrage and disbelief

It is considered vulgar to point out that the majority of this kind of commentary is coming from voices who have long been the most insistent that immigration is an unalloyed social good, but it is true, and is a point worth making. While this point is made by antisemites on the Right, they are mistaken for the same reason that those who insist that the point itself is inherently antisemitic are also mistaken. This hypocrisy and insouciance has come from the ranks of the metropolitan commentariat, among whom Jews are comparatively overrepresented, as they are in law or medicine. But the overwhelming majority of this commentariat are not Jewish, and the overwhelming majority of Jews are not members of the metropolitan commentariat. Very generally speaking, British Jews have similar opinions  to their gentile peers in whichever socio-economic and geographic category they inhabit.

In a culture in which being wrong about things still carried some costs, the colossal mistakes of the multiculturalist project could be reckoned with in terms of the damage it has caused. As it happened, Mr Yakoob’s “independents” did not sweep to predominance in Birmingham last week — but to at least some extent, this was because working class white voters coalesced around a single option in each ward to keep them out (mainly Reform UK). As predicted, the dawning of the age of mutli-racial electoral politics in some English towns and cities is engendering ethnic patterns of voting, even among the white voters for whom it was presumed inapplicable. The emergence of a distinct, autonomous Pakistani political machine in such places is introducing a tawdry and rather threatening new political culture that is decidedly not to liberal tastes. Yet rather than be confronted by this, those who spent years dismissing all the warnings that it was coming are permitted to hide behind incredible protestations of outrage and disbelief.