Some British smugness at America’s expense is justified: about crime rates, for example, and especially murder. However, widespread British smugness at the US tendency to take aim at presidents and public figures—most recently with respect to the failed attempt on Donald Trump—is not in order.
Yes, the US has four slain presidents to the UK’s solitary slain prime minister, but the US hasn’t lost a sitting congressman since 1978. In the same period, the UK has had five MPs murdered, four of them by sectarian terrorists.
Of these four MPs murdered in the name of one or another version of “God,” three were victims of Northern Ireland’s Troubles and only the last, Tory MP Sir David Amess in 2021, was killed by an Islamist. That Islamist, however, had already been after another Tory MP, Mike Freer. Freer, who is gay and pro-Israel, was eventually chased out of public life—late last year—when his constituency office was burnt down.
In the leadup to our July 4 general election, it was Labour’s turn to have both sitting and would-be MPs intimidated and harassed—with women and “the wrong sort of Muslims” as primary targets.
There have, of course, been other ghastly warnings of something like this coming down the pike, one of them as recent as February this year: George Galloway’s by-election victory in Rochdale.
Galloway’s method—and that of his pop-up political parties over the years, currently Workers’ Party of Great Britain, formerly Respect—is built on fusing religious conservatism and socialist economic planning with third-worldist positions on foreign policy. This is how he manages to ride on the coattails of widespread Muslim anger about Palestine while uniting working-class white and Muslim voters around law, order, and local amenities.
Rochdale is in Greater Manchester and was once a wealthy Victorian mill town—it did very well out of the Industrial Revolution. It was also the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement (where a business structure developed in Roman times was skilfully repurposed as a successful vehicle for working-class financial uplift).
There are still many fine old buildings to be found locally: once rich enough to put them up, Rochdale was later too poor to knock them down and replace them with hideous “New Town” brutalism. There is some evidence Adolf Hitler coveted Rochdale’s spectacular Victorian Town Hall, which is why (allegedly) it wasn’t bombed during WWII.
Rochdale spent many years as a Labour-LibDem marginal, itself politically unusual. Most marginal LibDem constituencies are held against Conservatives, and in wealthy parts of the country. The former party is where the latter’s (posher) voters go when they’re annoyed with Team Blue. Rochdale is poor, and in the 2016 Referendum voted heavily Leave. The LibDems, recall, were so pro-Remain they wanted to scrap the 2016 Referendum result without even troubling to hold a second referendum.
Rochdale now, however, presents a picture of sad decline, driven into the ground thanks to decades of profligate local councils, de-industrialisation, Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, and a string of inept and predatory MPs. And I mean predatory in the proper sense, not “he fiddled his expenses.”
Cyril Smith—a truly gross individual—was Rochdale’s immovable Liberal MP for decades. While he was MP (and even before he was elected), he molested boys at local children’s homes—including ones he’d helped found. In some respects, Smith provided a warning of the extent to which choosy-choice liberalism really can degenerate into licence. His misadventures fall on a Liberal Party continuum that includes party leader David Steel turning a blind eye to Smith’s criminal activities and the extraordinary Jeremy Thorpe “Dog in the Fog” scandal.
Galloway capitalised on all this terrible history, but a win wasn’t guaranteed until he was heaved over the line thanks to an unforced error. Labour disendorsed its own candidate (Azhar Ali) for saying very similar things about Israel-Palestine to, ahem, the eventual winner—George Galloway. Of course, Sir Keir Starmer forced Ali to walk back his comments and to apologise before disendorsing him. Coming so late, this meant Ali’s name could not be removed from the ballot paper on polling day, creating constituency-wide confusion.
Starmer claimed afterwards that Galloway would have lost had Labour managed its candidate selection process better. Given that Labour won Rochdale back on July 4—helped greatly by choosing Paul Waugh, a local boy made good born in (and genuinely proud of) the constituency—the UK’s new PM would seem to have a point.
Except Labour lost six seats amid its enormous landslide, four to a group now (unofficially) labelled “the Gaza Independents” and one each to the Conservatives and Greens. The Tory gain came about because various Islamic grouplets and former MPs—all on the left—split the vote in Leicester East so thoroughly the Tories overtook the lot of them on the inside, riding home on the back of an (undivided) Hindu vote. It was to be the Party’s only win. The Green victory came when Muslims and woke students in Bristol Central formed a red-green alliance, tipping out Labour’s (mildly) pro-Israel MP.
These odd results emerged thanks to the UK’s gimcrack, first-past-the-post electoral system. Labour’s landslide—nearly two thirds of Commons seats for a total of 411—discloses little love, based as it is on less than sixty per cent turnout and just over a third of the UK’s votes. This is only a little more than Labour won in 2019—when Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, was leader—and considerably less than what Corbyn achieved in 2017. Labour’s eventual vote share—33.8 per cent—was lower than any opinion poll.
Labour’s support is thus a mile wide and an inch deep. Many of Starmer’s MPs—including Cabinet ministers like Health Secretary Wes Streeting—sit on wafer-thin margins, making them even more vulnerable than usual in the event of by-elections and internal party conflicts. Talk of US-style “supermajorities” is silly—you don’t have a different kind of power with a big majority in parliamentary systems. If anything, FPTP has given Labour’s fractious, divided electoral coalition a spurious patina of unity. A divided electoral coalition, of course, helped do for the Tories when they had a large majority.
Meanwhile, Reform achieved 14.4 per cent of the national vote and five seats (six if you count the Northern Irish MP who caucuses with them), and the Greens four on 6.8 per cent of the vote. Salad days.
The ugliness of the campaign directed at some Labour MPs bubbled to the surface as polls were declared up and down the country in the early morning of July 5. “I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence,” Jess Phillips said, icily, as her majority was cut to a mere 693 votes and she was relentlessly heckled. “A young woman on her own delivering leaflets on polling day was filmed and screamed at by a much older man in the street,” she said in her victory speech. This came on the back of harassment throughout the campaign: slashed tyres, in-your-face street confrontations, and something probably more familiar to Americans than Britons—attacks on sitting MPs’ religious faith. Rochdale, in that sense, was a warning.
Muslims who supported Labour or who were—even worse—Labour MPs were labelled “infidels” who would “feel the wrath of Allah” and burn in Hell (along with most women, apparently). Iqbal Mohamed—who would go on to win Dewsbury & Batley—asked hundreds of worshippers to “follow the teachings of the Prophet” and vote for him. Shabana Mahmood—now the UK’s Lord Chancellor and a distinguished lawyer in her own right—was furious.
“This wasn’t just an assault on us,” she said. “This was an assault on democracy itself. British politics must soon wake up to what happened at this election in Ladywood and a handful of other seats across this country. While it will always be acceptable to disagree passionately it is never acceptable to intimidate and threaten. It is never acceptable to deny anyone their faith, to brand them an infidel,” she continued. “I know what a Muslim looks like. A Muslim looks like me. I know what Muslim values are. Muslim values are mine.”
That there were issues for female candidates in Muslim dominated constituencies was, thankfully, acknowledged. Phillips herself fudged the issue, blaming “men” as a group. Baroness Shaista Gohir, who leads the national charity Muslim Women’s Network UK, was more honest:
I’ve been really concerned observing what has been happening to the female candidates in areas where you have a significant Muslim electorate. Men have also experienced abuse, but it was much greater for women—they are seen as easy targets, they have been intimidated, harassed and that’s really concerning. It’s almost to try to put them off from politics, it’s also sending a message to women not to get into politics. When the dust settles, we have to learn the lessons from this and prevent this from happening again.
When I noted that Reform effectively has six MPs thanks to a Northern Irish interloper, I was inadvertently acknowledging the sheer oddness of Northern Irish politics. Reform isn’t being funny or cute by not running candidates in Ulster—or, alternatively, disclosing a new political party’s lack of organisational chops. Labour and Conservative don’t contest Northern Irish elections either. The reason they don’t has everything to do with historical sectarianism. To quote Bernard Woolley of Yes, Minister fame: “Ireland doesn’t make it any better; Ireland doesn’t make anything any better.”
In Rochdale, and then in a dozen more English constituencies, we have been treated to a taste of ethno-religious, communitarian politics that had once been Northern Ireland’s preserve—a politics known to be corrosive to democracy and its values.
In the days before devolution sought to confer power on Belfast’s toytown parliament in Stormont, to be appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was like spending a season in Purgatory. Posh pagan Romans sent to govern the restive monotheistic province of Judaea must have felt similarly, wondering who they’d offended in the Senate. Like ancient Judaea, Northern Ireland is a place of serious and barely repressed sectarian conflict. Keeping the peace there requires an artful blend of compromise and good faith.
Now, you could argue that the colonisation of the Ulster Plantation and surrounding counties was a terrible and immoral mistake, and the (ongoing) Irish border problem is punishment for the sins of our ancestors. The point is, in Rochdale, and then in a dozen more English constituencies at a general election, we have been treated to a taste of ethno-religious, communitarian politics that had once been Northern Ireland’s preserve—a politics known to be corrosive to democracy and its values. And, as with the original Plantation of Ulster, it’s the UK’s immigration policies over many decades under governments of all stripes that invited people to do exactly what they’ve done in the seats “Gaza Independents” now hold.
When the BBC’s Jon Sopel decided to engage in a little light post-general election anti-Americanism—an activity in which he was not alone—it was this reality he occluded. “Does it say something about the diff between US politics and UK that here, one of our main stories is woman pleads not guilty to throwing a milkshake at Nigel Farage,” he asked, “while there it is FBI investigation into the background of a shooter in an attempted assassination of Trump?”
This sort of thing is written by someone with no understanding of sectarianism’s seriousness—of the powder keg of marching season, of jurisdictions throughout the British Commonwealth where Catholics ran the police and Protestants the judiciary, of “mixed families” drafting up elaborate fee tail trust deeds to determine who gets what depending on who marries whom. “Have you forgotten the Troubles?” is a fair question here.
Now that we’ve got the kind of segregated voting you see in Fermanagh and South Tyrone in Birmingham and Leicester, what to do about it? One lesson the people of These Islands should have learnt is that Northern Ireland cannot be governed, solved in law, codified, or otherwise fixed without the consent of the communities living there. The same relentless logic applies to the deprived, heavily Muslim constituencies Labour has lost or is at risk of losing in future.
Thing is, behind Gaza and Islamic grievance politics lies something else, something legitimate. For decades, Labour was the party for Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants. Until 2024, British Muslims rewarded it with astonishing loyalty at the polls, but this support has not brought them widespread prosperity. By contrast, the UK’s non-Muslim (and often market-dominant) minorities—East African Asians, Jews, Chinese—have drifted Tory and LibDem. “[This] is a ghetto, and [Shabana] Mahmood should be ashamed of it,” a Birmingham Ladywood constituent told The Times a month before the general election.
He has a point. The roads of Birmingham Ladywood, Mahmood’s seat, sweat with traffic and pollution. In the month before polling day, uncollected rubbish, stinking in June’s warm weather, piled up near abandoned, shattered pubs. Voters complained to canvassers from all parties and none about potholes and rat infestations. More than half the children in the constituency, 52.8 per cent, are living in poverty. This is the highest rate for any seat in the country. Birmingham’s Labour-controlled council is not only broke but a national byword for incompetence. It’s reasonable—entirely separately from Israel-Palestine—for many Muslim voters to feel betrayed by a Labour Party that their families have voted for since they came to Britain.
The problem, of course, is that the four MPs elected—and the other half-dozen within striking distance of winning—campaigned near-exclusively on a platform whose chief complaint is a war 3,000 miles away about which His Majesty’s Government can do little except expectorate. “This is for Gaza,” they yelled in victory speeches at their counts.
And here we are.
