The British MPs who put sectarian interests first and foremost
BRUCE NEWSOME
AN increasing number of Britain’s elected officials are prioritising foreign interests and minorities over British interests. Such a shift in parliamentary norms shouldn’t be dismissed as representative of diversity. It enables distorted policy, foreign influence, protection of minority criminal gangs (such as Pakistani child rapists and Somali fraudsters), two-tier justice, self-segregation, ‘third-world tribalism’ (as articulated by Suella Braverman, and condemned as ‘bigoted‘ by the Guardian), and the proliferation of foreign conflicts.
We’ve seen the evidence anecdotally. For instance, 20 Parliamentarians came together to lobby for British funding of a new airport in Kashmir, even though some had opposed expansion of London Heathrow.
Meanwhile the Pakistani-born Mayor of Birmingham posts meetings with Pakistani diplomats and footballers, but not his city’s collapsing public services. He raised the Pakistani flag on the anniversary of Pakistan’s independence, but took down British flags during the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign (since August), claiming safety issues.
In November, that same city banned fans of an Israeli football team from visiting Aston Villa, claiming intelligence of threats to them. Within days, we learned that the so-called intelligence was less about threats in Birmingham, more an exaggeration of Amsterdam’s policing challenge during the same team’s away game there. Just this week, we learned that West Midlands Police itself exaggerated the policing challenge, and consulted multiple local Islamic groups but no Jewish group. Matt Goodwin rightly characterises this as ‘political Islam’ and says we must push back.
Yet Birmingham isn’t even the most sectarian of Britain’s municipalities. A corrupt and bigoted Bangladeshi-Islamist party, Aspire, runs the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. A 2015 court case laid out a whole catalogue of corruption against previously-banned mayor Lutfur Rahman, the convicted electoral fraudster who set the party up. Aspire could take the two associated Parliamentary seats from Labour in 2029. Elected councillors in Tower Hamlets have been campaigning for office in Bangladesh simultaneously. This is the council that tolerated Palestinian flags on public signposts and lampposts for months after Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023, but has been quick to remove British flags since August.
We should also ponder whether British aid is corrupted by sectarian interests. For instance, the government increased aid to India while India’s economy was growing and was running a space programme that Britain had long abandoned. Britain increased aid to Pakistan too, while private remittances to Pakistan from Pakistani-Britons increased (and while British welfare benefits to Pakistanis increased).
That last insight comes from Whitehall Analytics, a little-known private operation. Now we know from its rigorous content analysis that some MPs spend half of their parliamentary activity on foreign and sectarian interests.
Drawing from Hansard records, Whitehall Analytics coded nearly 150,000 parliamentary questions to ministers, tabled by 140 Labour MPs, serving from January 2018 to December 2025 (continuously).
To test the causes, Whitehall Analytics observed their ethnicity, the ethnic composition of their constituencies, and their majorities in the general election of 2024.
Ethnic-minority MPs make up 26 of the 140 MPs. These MPs submit roughly twice as many questions as the others, and their subjects are more likely to be sectarian.
Whitehall Analytics categorised their questions into four groups: (1) Palestine, Gaza and Israel; (2) Asylum, refugees and aid; (3) Pakistan and Bangladesh; (4) Islam and Islamophobia.
Ethnic minority MPs are much more likely to ask questions about asylum, Palestine and Gaza. Most are biased towards their countries of heritage, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Take Afzal Khan, the MP for Manchester Rusholme and former Lord Mayor of Manchester. A time-series analysis of his questions reveals a consistent emphasis on (in order) Palestine and Gaza, asylum and migration, broader Islamic issues, and Pakistan and Bangladesh. Nearly 50 per cent of his questions centre on these topics.
Afzal Khan is not an outlier. Yasmin Qureshi, representing Bolton South, asks more questions about asylum and Gaza than local education and infrastructure.
White Labour MPs have become biased towards their growing minority constituents. Whitehall Analytics shows that the percentage of an MP’s questions on sectarian topics increases with higher South Asian ethnicity in their constituency and smaller election majorities.
The South Asian ethnicity percentage in the constituency is practically as strong a predictor of MP bias towards the four categories above as is the MP’s own ethnicity. A small election majority is a weaker predictor.
This is profound: constituency demographics, as much as personal identity, drive sectarian questioning. In an increasingly diverse electorate, representatives pander to sectarian interests to secure votes, even if those representatives are white British.
I have a theoretical explanation, though my fellow political scientists prefer to ignore it.
An ethnic or religious minority is a more efficient target for the MP, because the minority is more likely to vote as a block. Ethnic and religious minority ‘block voting’ wins, because the white, secular-Christian majority doesn’t vote as a block. Whites, secularists, and Christians are still voting on the issues, as normative in settled democracies, rather than identity. But ethnic and religious sectarians put ethnic and religious unity before any one issue. Some ‘community leaders’ and clerics, as in Tower Hamlets, collect ballots, tell constituents how to vote, or bribe them.
This analysis isn’t racist. It’s proof of sectarianism in UK politics – a sectarianism that is inherently racist. This analysis is anti-racist. Anybody labelling this analysis as an ‘ism’ is protecting sectarianism.
In a nation facing housing shortages, energy crises and economic woes, should any Briton prefer elected officials whose parliamentary efforts are skewed toward foreign countries, foreigners, or their children?
Sectarianism is not going to reduce demographically. The foreign population is growing faster than the British population, and foreigners tend to have more children. More than 40 per cent of all babies born in England in 2024 had at least one foreign-born parent.
So, we need to discuss institutional safeguards against sectarianism in politics.
Let’s start with restrictions on dual citizenship for elected representatives. Many democracies impose such restrictions to ensure focus on national interests. Some offices, such as the US Presidency, are restricted to home-born citizens. All British citizens should be free to run for office, on condition that they give up any other citizenship.
But restrictions on citizenship and country of birth are insufficient. The analysis above proves that politics is sectarian not just because of foreign-born and dual citizenship, but because white British MPs pander to minority blocks.
This suggests that we need to stop foreigners and their children congregating in certain constituencies. Most of the constituents in Tower Hamlets, for instance, are foreign-born!
One solution is redistricting to raise the proportion of white British constituents. Under current statute, the Boundary Commission is not empowered to redistrict by ethnicity or religion.
We also need to counter accelerating self-segregation, independent of constituency boundaries. Ban religious and ethnic home-schooling (except within the family). Redistribute children from non-white schools (known in America as ‘bussing’ since the desegregation of Southern schools in the 1960s). Ban foreign funding of clerics and places of worship.
More generally, British authorities need to stop privileging minorities. For instance, the Charity Commission terminates the non-taxable status of charities focused on traditional values, but lets mosques get away with hate speech with no more than a warning.
Two-tier justice, policing, and public services encourage segregation.
Authorities should promote equality, integration, and unity.
All these solutions start in Parliament, where current MPs can make a difference right now by calling out Members who pander to foreign and foreign-born loyalties or neglect domestic issues.
This article (The British MPs who put sectarian interests first and foremost) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
Leave a Reply