Stop saying sectarianism

It is not so often that I agree with a member of the Green Party that it can go unremarked. On X, a member named Ally Fogg posted — in a response to Robert Colvile’s latest Times column (We’re entering a sectarian age):

I wish someone could tell me what sectarian means nowadays because it’s clearly not the same word I grew up with. As far as I can work out, it means nothing more than people I don’t like voting for people I don’t like.

Clearly, from the context of following tweets, Fogg believed that Colvile was arguing that the term “sectarian” only applied to Muslim voting for either Green or Muslim Independent candidates. Much of the left also believes this is true. Had he read the column, he would have realised Colvile is making a wider point about the fracturing of politics, including Restore’ domination of Great Yarmouth First, the “now monolithically Conservative” Jewish part of North London, Reform’s pledge to put migrant centres in Green seats and Nick Timothy’s concern over Islamic prayers in public spaces.

But Fogg has a point. Concern about Muslim sectarianism began on the online right, where despite Elon’s best efforts, much of the most perceptive diagnosis of British problems continues to happen. The trouble with much of this analysis is, once an original idea or under considered issue is processed through the algorithm and the much-vaunted “posting-to-policy pipeline”, it is continually compressed or bastardised until the original idea becomes little more than a slogan or word (see: Eternal September).

Whilst “sectarianism” began as a particular concept, it has fallen the way of much of the work of the online right: by being separate but sadly close to race-based grifters, many terms originating there — high trust or third worldism, for instance — may have started out with a particular definition, but have quickly become used as shorthand for white or non-white by people who are not willing to address the public with those explicit labels, or are too stupid to realise what they imply.

The term sectarian is heading this way — although, ironically, Colvile’s piece is not guilty of this, by including non-Muslim voting trends. In fact, sectarianism is not the correct term for the widespread trend he describes, as it usually refers to divisions within a broader shared religion, ideology or movement. The term is simply too narrow and fails to capture the wider trends driving the process, which go far beyond mere voting trends.

Rather, I make a plea that a better term would be Neo-communalism, which I have attempted to define both in these most august pages and in CapX. Communalism, originating in South Asian political contexts, describes a strong identification with one’s own religious or ethnic community as a separate and competing political bloc. As I defined it, it is “the slow and inexorable intensification of ethnic identification and political factionalism”.

Colvile makes the point that this is the result of immigration: “that in the process of importing the world, we’ve also imported its tensions — and its prejudices.” Ethnic and religious antagonisms that once existed oceans away have been transplanted wholesale into Britain’s civic space.

In the past, the danger of religious or ethnic identities hardening into rival political camps could often be contained within the overarching framework of empire — what Lee Kuan Yew described as the “universal concepts” imposed by imperial administration upon “heterogeneous ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious groups.” Singapore, upon independence, replaced those universal concepts with a stern and assertive national identity. The Indian subcontinent, by contrast, resolved many of its communal tensions through the brutal geographic separation of Partition.

Britain has done neither. Communities carrying deep historical grievances and imported ethnic hostilities now coexist in the same civic space, but without either physical separation or a strong assimilatory national identity to mediate between them. Indeed, Britishness itself has often been consciously hollowed out or denigrated in the belief that a thinner, more procedural identity would make mass immigration easier to manage.

The other point is that this is a universal process. Beyond voting, many of our institutions — the police, councils, even the law — are being bent in some way to the aim of managing Britain as a loose collection of communities whose competing sensitivities must be carefully balanced, or even segregated, rather than genuinely integrated. It also goes far beyond Britain’s Muslim population: Colvile names Restore, but it’s easy to argue that Reform are a neo-communal party for the white British, who are now voting along ethnic self-interest — that is, their concern around the implications of mass migration.

Much of this, of course, has been engineered by the left, whether by design or accident through their institutionalisation of DEI, which was always a system of ethnic preference, and through the concept of multiculturalism alongside mass migration. 

Last year, during the summer of riots, the right was seized by David Betz’s over-hyped declaration of an impending civil war. That was a similarly unsubtle idea that went for alarmism over accuracy: a better idea was Aris Rousinnos’ Ulsterisation (which played less on outright conflict and more on the long-term development and implications of ethnic consciousness) or my own South Africanisation (which placed more emphasis on the economic and segregationist consequences of increasing ethnic conflict).

Competing ethnic factions are now carving out their own political spaces and, as I warned last year, “Britain is heading towards a future where politics will no longer be about the common good, but about which group can best mobilise its base, and where loyalty to your ethnic group outweighs loyalty to the nation.” That is not Britain given over to sectarianism. That is another country entirely.