In amongst all of the excitement around Lord Alli’s largesse, the Westminster bubble seems to have largely ignored an altogether more important symbol of our country’s political health. In last week’s vote on the imposition of VAT on private schools, four members of the Corbyn-led Independent Alliance voted to retain the current exemption, to the surprise of some.

Formed in the wake of July’s general election, the Independent Alliance is a Parliamentary grouping composed of five MPs returned at the last election — former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, alongside Leicester’s Shockat Adam, Blackburn’s Adnan Hussain, Birmingham’s Ayoub Khan, and Dewsbury’s Iqbal Mohamed. In its founding statement, the Alliance condemned the legacy of austerity, called for an end to the sale of arms to Israel, and committed to abolition of the two-child benefit cap. So far, so standard.

So why, despite the left-wing predilections of this new group, did four out of five Independent Alliance MPs vote to retain VAT exemptions for private schools? After all, isn’t this the Tory position?

The explanation for this apparently strange set of circumstances is fairly simple — four of the Independent Alliance’s five MPs are not socialists at all. They are, put simply, sectarians, motivated by an entirely different set of political priors to Corbyn and his ilk. 

Despite the insistence of some Conservatives, Jeremy Corbyn is not a sectarian, and he is certainly not an Islamist. Corbyn is a true believer in socialist ideas, an early 20th century Marxist who ploughs a lonely furrow in a Parliament full of bureaucratic Blairites. His political life has been dedicated to ideas like wealth redistribution, class consciousness, and economic justice. His eccentric views on foreign policy and the Middle East are rooted in old left-wing ideas about colonialism and self-determination. 

But his compatriots in the Independent Alliance are motivated by different principles entirely. Their primary motivation is the promotion of the causes of a particular community. The general election campaign made this fact abundantly clear — these were campaigns fought by, for, and about Muslim voters. For these men, politics is a zero-sum competition for limited resources, in which the goal is to represent the interests of one’s own group. The sorry situation in Gaza was the catalyst for this group’s success at the last election, but it is by no means the only issue that animates our new sectarian MPs. 

This alliance of convenience between socialists and sectarians is not about shared principles, but temporarily aligned interests. The left’s principled support for income redistribution aligns with sectarian interests — it allows wealth to be redistributed from the out-group to the in-group. Likewise, left-wing instincts on foreign policy align closely with the views of many Muslims in Britain. For the traditional British left, Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza is an issue of injustice and power imbalance — for our new sectarian MPs, it is an issue of in-group fidelity. 

However, where these interests deviate, sectarians are not shy about sacrificing their comrades on the bonfire of political expediency. Last week’s private school vote was just the latest incarnation of this phenomenon — given that many Muslim faith schools benefit from the VAT exemption on private education, voting to preserve the exemption makes absolute sense. 

This is not the loony left up to their old tricks. This is a new problem altogether

Similarly, the Labour Party has faced difficulties in recent years in reconciling its Muslim supporters to the left’s advocacy for LGBT rights. Labour MPs in heavily Muslim seats, including veteran Eurosceptic Roger Godsiff, gave their support to anti-LGBT protests outside Birmingham’s Anderton Park Primary School back in 2019. Where sectarian and socialist principles diverge, sectarians will choose the interests and sensibilities of their own community every time.

And yet conservatives, firmly stuck fighting the battles of the 1970s, have a frustrating tendency to conflate the two. This is not the loony left up to their old tricks. This is a new problem altogether.

If we are serious about addressing the challenge of sectarian politics, we must first understand it. Rather than trying to relitigate 20th century battles about economic principles, conservatives must recognise that sectarian politics is a distinctly 21st century challenge, the result of decades of failure on immigration and integration. Conflating the two is not only inaccurate as a matter of fact — it gives intellectual cover to sectarians, allowing them to hide behind broad-based criticisms of “the left” as a whole. 

Without decisive action, sectarian politics is here to stay as a feature of British political life. Already, our politics is descending into a zero-sum competition for limited resources, characterised by self-sorting, nepotism, and the growth of parallel institutional structures. Unfortunately, these realities are the norm in much of the world, wreaking havoc in places like Lebanon, Bosnia, and even Northern Ireland. It could happen here too — and in parts of the country, this process has already begun, with sectarians such as Tower Hamlets’ Lutfur Rahman already emerging in local politics. 

In order to tackle this novel threat head-on, we must stop allowing sectarians to wear the clothes of the political left. It is possible — though not necessarily advisable — to argue with a socialist on philosophical grounds. It is not possible to make the same arguments to a sectarian. If you do not belong to their in-group, you do not matter.

The faster the right can learn this, the better. As Sun Tzu once said — to succeed, you must first know thy enemy.