Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Yeah same.

I think that is part of the challenge for Labour. It's like a annual review that sort of concludes that you need to be consistently better at everything you do and the boss thinks your personality's shit. If it was just tilt left or tilt right, or whatever that would be a lot more easy for Labour to fix.

Incidentally on the personality - there is a streak in Starmer' personality that I find contemptible in a leader. I've mentioned it before but the way he blames other people in his team publicly. But I saw a line in the Guardian today from a "friend of the PM" that "Keir would not have been able to live with himself if he had been forced out of office early without showing the country who he really is and what he's about." Which I just find insufferably self-indulgent

[Razgovory]

By the by, just as a couple of examples of the overlap of political networks and how diasporas can stay involved in poliics with globalisation. Just yesterday Bangladesh issued an Interpol red notice for the arrest of the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq who has been convicted (in absentia) of corruption - rather unfortunately she was Keir Starmer's anti-corruption minister - related to her aunt, Sheikh Hasina who was the authoritarian/illiberal democrat Awami League PM of Bangladesh who was overthrown a year or two ago.

Another I think more interesting example is Mohammed Sarwar who is the father of the Scottish Labour Party leader, Anas Sarwar. Mohammed Sarwar was I think the leader of Glasgow council for a while - certainly a big player in Glasgow politics. He then became a Labour MP for a Glasgow seat until 2010 when he stepped down. Gordon Brown nominated him for a peerage but this was blocked following advice from HMRC. He then has an entire second career in Pakistani politics - he's twice Governor of Punjab (once under Nawaz Sharif's party, once for Imran Khan's) and a Senator in Pakistan.

And I think diasporas have always maybe retained an interest in the politics back home - just look at Irish-Americans. But with remittances and the internet and easier, cheaper air travel - there is just less distance. So Sarwar's career is exceptional but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common.

There's less of this with Indian politics because I don't think India allows for dual citizenship. But there's growing BJP/Tory overlap. It's probably also relevant that for national elections (so MPs) the UK allows anyone who is a lawful resident and a citizen of a Commonwealth country to vote.

I have a question:  Why do the Indians vote right and the Muslims vote left in Britain?

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'm not entirely sure why but I watched a 30 minute video on YouTube where Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Starkey discuss monarchy in the 21st century. My presumption is their views are not mainstream even on the right, but the short of it is they both believe the monarch should be "constitutionally active", essentially acting as a constitutional referee. They both said that the country had essentially been "attempting" to use the Speaker of the House of Commons for this role, but that the "extreme partisanship" of John Bercow whilst in that role exposed that it isn't a suitable role for the Speaker.

However, they both also seemed fairly anti-Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles, saying that QEII oversaw a huge constitutional decay of the monarchy. They were very down on the private secretaries of the monarch, saying that this was a role which had previously been given to a person of high competence who well understood the monarch's valid constitutional role, but had degraded to going to low competence individuals by the mid-20th century. They specifically called out Tommy Lascelles as representing a decline in quality in that office with injurious effects on the monarchy.

Rees-Mogg said that QEII had wasted a good bit of her monarchy on useless obsession with the Commonwealth, which he blamed for allowing "insidious ideas" like "reparations" to seep into British life.

Starkey stated that in his view, where the monarch should exercise real constitutional power, they should also no longer be active in speaking about "issues", and that King Charles should be told to "shut up" on topics like climate change.

They both also linked the declining constitutional role of the monarch with Parliament ceding its effective control of certain British institutions to apolitical systems--they cited things like Parliament had historically controlled who became a Bishop in the Church of England, and both said that practice should have been maintained to prevent the "absurdities" now found in the CoE (my understanding is neither men are Anglican so I'm not 100% sure why they care.) They also cited that Parliament used to, and should again, control leadership appointments at leading universities.

Like I said, my impression was these views are probably not very common even among the British right.

[Sheilbh]

I have a question:  Why do the Indians vote right and the Muslims vote left in Britain?

I don't think that's necessarily right yet.

Historically Labour have been the party of minorities. That goes back to its founding - one of the first socialist societies to affiliate with Labour was Poale Zion from Jews in the East End. My family's from Liverpool - the Irish Catholic vote was Labour, the Protestant English or Scottish vote was Tory (same in Glasgow). Those associations and the strength of those identities reduced over time - but as recently as the 1970s Liverpool was the most Tory city in the country. Labour was the party of the Race Relations Act, of civil rights and anti-racism and also, crucially, in the early post-war it was the party that had historic links to freedom movements and was associated with decolonisation and the Commonwealth. People like Nehru were very close to people in the Labour Party. There were a number of Labour Party politicians who were personally very close to a whole generation of national liberation leaders because they'd been in the same societies and the like in British universities, or at the bar, or in London. I think you still see a very faint echo of this in Northern Ireland were Labour's sister party is the SDLP which supports Irish unification - Labour doesn't operate in Northern Ireland and repeated Labour party conferences have backed Irish unification.

So I think there's a history there for minority communities voting Labour. However we don't have much data on it because the voting patterns of different communities has been tracked a lot less in opinion polls etc in the UK than the US until relatively recently. There is far better data starting with the 2015 election and a real effort to get into it.

However my understanding is that the UK is not like the US in that race does not seem to be a significant indicator of voting behaviour. What I mean by that is that the strongest indicators of how someone will vote in the UK are basically age, education and whether own or rent their home (broadly speaking Labour win with younger, more educated, renters). If you adjust for those things then race doesn't seem to be a factor in voting behaviour (and minority communities are significantly younger than the White British population, more likely to go to university and far more likely to be renting). Obviously the existence of inequalities in some of those areas indicates other ways in which race impacts people's lives.

To an extent this takes us back to the Poale Zion and Irish voters because the same is true there but happened earlier. However British Indians don't vote right - but about 70% of British Indians are homeowners, which is about the same as White Britons and their vote breaks down in a similar way (especially as British Indians are younger and more likely to be graduates). So part of this is just about the relative economic "success" of various communities in the UK - there are signs communities are going on a similar journey as British Indians. They're (broadly) more likely to go to university than the national average, get middle class jobs and buy a house in the suburbs. And the voting patterns basically resemble that. I think there's a big question of how or if that plays out as we're moving from two party politics to multi-party politics - there's some early polling that actually has a not insignificant British Indian vote for Reform so again it may just match national patterns but I'm not sure.

Having said all that the Tories have made a big pitch for British Indian and African voters in recent years - in part just by recruiting people to become MPs and identifying talent that can go into the cabinet. That top-down decision to create a sort of talent pipeline to make the party "look" different than it did in 2010 when I don't think there were any non-white MPs is a big part of how they've gone from a British Indian leader who is a practicing Hindu to a Black woman who has said she's effectively a first generation immigrant who grew up in Lagos. From 2015 on there's a lot more focus on India, so in 2015 David Cameron addressed a big joint rally in Britain with Modi - he predicted (correctly) that the first British Indian PM would be a Conservative within ten years. Zac Goldsmith's campaign to become London Mayor against Sadiq Khan was sectarian. They had a lot of Islamophobic campaigning specifically in British Indian Hindu areas. I also think this is where the Labour links with a previous generation of anti-colonial leaders can be a hindrance - because they've also tended to be quite pro-Pakistan on Kashmir, quite pro-Sikh on issues around the Golden Temple etc and have been painted as "anti-India" as India becomes less INC and more nationalist/BJP.

With British Muslims it varies - there is clear evidence there was a swing against Labour in areas with a big Muslim community in 2024 and it was overwhelmingly over Gaza. But even there there have been some very early reports that British Bangladeshi voters are starting to swing Tory - in part because there's a generation that's gone to university, got a middle class job and is now buying houses in the suburbs in Essex. And geography plays a part on this - so part of the reasons British Bangladeshis are graduating at a significantly higher rate than the national average and earning more etc is because that diaspora is overwhelmingly in London. British Pakistanis are nowhere near as concentrated and often live in declining mill towns and other post-industrial areas - I think that is the one area where my guess is that if you adjust for everything many of those seats (like Bradford) should probably be going Reform. For obvious reasons they're not but the same dissatisfaction and frustration apply in those towns and, as with the "Red Wall", Labour are the historically dominant, establishment party that has perhaps taken them for granted.