I hate to say I told you so — but I told you so.

As a drizzly dawn breaks, Britain is waking up to a Labour victory of historic proportions. In the coming days, countless column inches will be expended on analysing the big headlines. Expect to read plenty about Starmer’s uneasy electoral coalition, endemic Tory failure, and the rise of Reform. For amateur psephologists, this election provides plenty of analytical fodder. 

Yet for those thinking about the next fifty years of our politics rather than just the next five, the biggest story of this election is the wholesale emergence of sectarian campaigning and ethnic voting. Many commentators were stunned to see large Labour majorities overturned by pro-Gaza independents capitalising on Muslim frustrations with the British political establishment — but not me. At the outset of the campaign, I predicted that this could be the year that “political sectarianism [reared] its ugly head on the national stage”.

Fast-forward to Thursday night, and the political mainstream was stunned to see a slate of independent Muslim candidates elected in safe Labour seats. In Blackburn and in Dewsbury & Batley, large Labour majorities were overturned by campaigns specifically targeting Muslim voters. Ditto in Leicester South, where Labour frontbencher Jon Ashworth was defeated by Shockat Adam, whose campaign focused more on Palestine than on potholes. As I write, Birmingham Perry Barr has just turned up a similar result. Elsewhere, comparable campaigns shaved tens of thousands of votes off comfortable Labour majorities, most notably in Wes Streeting’s Ilford North, where Leane Mohamed reduced Streeting’s majority to just 528 votes.

Over the past six weeks, these campaigns largely avoided the attention of the mainstream media. In part, this is because the British press moved on from Gaza far more quickly than most British Muslims, leading them to underestimate the salience of foreign policy to this slice of the electorate. However, it’s also the result of the fact that these candidates do not rely on traditional campaigning methods, instead winning support through complex intracommunal networks which often prove difficult to poll accurately. 

The emergence of these sectarian independents is only made more interesting by the fact that Britain’s most infamous identitarian campaigner, George Galloway, lost his seat in Rochdale to Labour’s Paul Waugh. For Starmer and co, unseating the Workers’ Party leader is an enormous symbolic victory, an electoral slaying of the left-wing dragon — but they may live to regret doing so, as Galloway’s defeat decouples Muslim voters from the respectable “old left” politics that he has long espoused. At his most successful, Galloway was able to balance a traditional Labour pitch with explicitly sectarian appeals to Muslims, an awkward triangulation that served to temper the worst excesses of the latter. 

Thanks to their growing numbers, Muslim voters no longer need the Labour Party — but they also don’t need to rely on Galloway’s ability to advocate for their interests. This new breed of sectarian MP is homegrown, and draws their strength directly from close ties to their local Muslim community. Expect to see plenty of focus on Gaza from these new parliamentarians — but also expect to see them openly advocate for Muslim voters on issues such as counter-extremism, media regulation, and sharia-compliant finance. 

Of course, it isn’t just Muslim voters that are discovering how to influence the political process. This campaign has also seen the emergence of “The Hindu Manifesto”, a set of demands from the opaque “Hindus For Democracy” group that has been endorsed by a number of Conservative candidates. Despite the Manifesto’s calls for relaxed visa rules and crackdowns on anti-Hindu “microaggressions”, many Tories are happy to lend their endorsement in hopes of coveting Hindu voters, who form a formidable electoral force in their own right. Cultural stereotypes about hard-working, family-oriented Hindus help to give Conservatives an intellectual justification for what amounts to little more than cynical political opportunism. If Labour is to be the party of Pakistan and Palestine, why shouldn’t the Tories back Israel and India?

In a handful of seats, these instincts were rewarded. Despite overwhelming swings against the party in most of the country, Harrow East’s Bob Blackman saw little erosion in support in his largely Indian constituency. In large part, his victory can be chalked up to his direct appeals to Hindu voters, which often take the form of explicit endorsements of Indian PM Narendra Modi. Despite losses elsewhere, the Tories picked up majority-Indian Leicester East, their candidate Shivani Raja benefitting from vote-splitting on the left and a strong base of support amongst Hindus. 

In Leicester, a Hindu-backed Tory candidate sits side-by-side with a Gaza-focused independent — like it or not, this is the future of many of Britain’s urban areas — self-sorting, parallel institutional structures, and cynical electoral sectarianism. 

In the next Parliament, a considerable number of MPs will sit at the behest of a particular ethnic or religious community

For many Britons, this year’s election will be their first exposure to this sort of sectarian politics. Coupled with the rise of Reform, widely viewed as a means of expressing frustration with our historically high rates of migration, we might expect to see this provoke an identitarian backlash from the white British population. Like it or not, when one group begins to advocate for its narrow self-interest at the expense of others, other groups soon follow suit. In a best-case scenario, our politics descends into a zero-sum competition for limited resources, with the fiercest competition concentrated in a handful of inner-city seats. In a worst-case scenario, we follow along the well-trodden path of escalating sectarianism that characterised life in Northern Ireland for much of the 20th century. 

And in the short-term, it remains to be seen how Labour will respond to the haemorrhaging of their Muslim voters to lone wolf independents. Chase this group too aggressively, and risk losing support amongst respectable moderates — ignore them, and risk losing cabinet ministers like Wes Streeting. 

At the beginning of this campaign, electoral sectarianism was a nascent trend — it is now a feature of British political culture. In the next Parliament, a considerable number of MPs will sit at the behest of a particular ethnic or religious community, and will live to serve the perceived interest of those same communities. They will seek to influence our foreign policy and shape our domestic law in line with the priorities of these groups; given Labour’s track record, they may even prove to be successful. This particular Rubicon will prove exceptionally difficult to un-cross; without decisive action, sectarian politics is here to stay.