On March 9th the Government published its social cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters: Towards a More Confident, Cohesive, and Resilient United Kingdom‘. Leaving aside the document’s dissonances, anyone of a certain age might regard this as somewhat curious. Thirty years ago, there was no need for a strategy on “social cohesion”, nor much awareness of the concept. Britain was a cohesive society, not an “island of strangers”. What changed?

The answer, of course, is that Britain is now, after two decades of unconstrained and mismanaged immigration, a fracturing society. The by-election in Gorton and Denton in February signalled the direction in which British politics is moving. The Green Party’s victory was widely lamented as a triumph of sectarian politics. Lamentable, but hardly surprising. It is the natural working out of the politics of multiculturalism.

The Greens ran a campaign directed explicitly at mobilising the constituency’s large Muslim electorate. The Labour Party accused the Greens of “whipping up hatred”. Election messages circulated on social media in Urdu and Bangla, highlighting images of Keir Starmer shaking hands with Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi – figures widely associated in the minds of many Muslim voters with the conflicts in Gaza and Kashmir.

Whether such tactics are judged as “shameless” or as “ugly, grubby and divisive” is beside the point. The Greens were responding to the political imperatives that now shape British elections, which incentivise appeals to group identity: in the case of the Greens, addressing voters not as independent citizens but as members of religious, ethnic or diasporic communities whose political sympathies often reside beyond Britain.

This is the culmination of state-sanctioned multiculturalism, the premise of which is that distinct communities can maintain their cultural and religious identities while participating within a shared civic order. In reality, it encourages and rewards political mobilisation along ethnic and racial lines.

The electoral consequences are unmistakable. At the 2024 General Election five Members of Parliament were returned as “pro-Gaza independents”, forming a parliamentary bloc larger than several established minor parties. In parts of northern England and the Midlands with sizeable Pakistani-heritage populations, this electorate increasingly functions as a voter base: candidates who align themselves with its priorities prosper, while those who do not struggle to compete. The result is that MPs cease to act as representatives of territorial constituencies and instead emerge as advocates for identity-based interests.

In London the repeated electoral success of Sadiq Khan also reflects the consolidation of a political coalition rooted in the city’s transformed demographics. Further afield, in New York, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor illustrates a similar tendency within American urban politics.

The growth of identity politics is visible in electoral results, voting patterns and campaign strategies. However, once politics begins to organise itself around group identity, sectarianism is the inevitable result. Nor is this unprecedented. The United Kingdom has seen this story before.

Read More: Britain’s Sectarian Future – Coming to a Constituency Near You