Britain considered the issue less decisively than Sweden in December 2024, when the Conservative MP Richard Holden introduced a Bill prohibiting marriage between first cousins. Although he cited genetic risks and coercion, his more original argument drew on conclusions reached separately by the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Jack Goody: cousin marriage helps preserve clan power by keeping property, loyalty and opportunity within the extended family.

Holden was opposed by Iqbal Mohamed, the independent Muslim MP for Dewsbury and Batley, who argued that prohibition would stigmatize minorities and prove difficult to enforce. Education, genetic screening and protection against forced marriage were preferable. Yet Mohamed also acknowledged the institution’s economic logic: cousin marriage strengthened family bonds and put families on a “more secure financial foothold”.

The two MPs were describing the same institution from opposite ends: Holden emphasizing the power the clan exercises over its members, Mohamed the protection it offers. Where governments are weak or indifferent, the extended family can become bank, welfare office, employment agency and court of appeal. But protection has a price. People who depend on the family cannot easily defy it. 

The liberal response to this issue tends to stop at individual consent. Are two adults entitled to marry? Are minorities being stigmatized? These are necessary questions, but they can obscure the distribution of power within which consent is exercised. Multiculturalism is acutely conscious of injuries inflicted on minorities while often reticent about systems of authority exercised within minority cultures. 

On the face of it, cousin marriage has little to do with Middle Eastern investments in the Shard, Canary Wharf or Manhattan office blocks. Still less do they appear connected to the Trump family’s increasingly intimate business relations with the dynasties of the Gulf. Yet they belong to the same structural landscape: a form of social organization resting upon blood, marriage, personal knowledge and reciprocal loyalty. This is very different from the other kind of social organization, more common in the West, which assigns property and authority to artificial persons — courts, universities, offices, companies and states — that exist independently of the mortal individuals temporarily occupying them.

Such distinctions can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Western modernity, following its millennium-long gestation within the Catholic Church, depended not upon abolishing the family but upon creating institutions powerful enough to compete with it. Goody, writing as an anthropologist specializing in kinship, and Henrich, drawing much later on comparative psychology and cultural evolution, arrived independently at versions of this argument. Both suggest implicitly that Max Weber’s celebrated account of the Protestant ethic and the emergence of capitalism begins much too late.

Weber explained the rise of capitalism partly through the moral psychology of ascetic Protestantism. Calvinists, uncertain of their salvation, looked for evidence of election in disciplined work, sobriety and accumulation. His argument is illuminating, but Protestantism encouraged capitalist behavior only because Latin Christendom had already constructed the institutional base upon which capitalism could build. Antwerp had become Europe’s leading commercial center under Catholic Habsburg rule before Protestant Amsterdam absorbed much of its displaced trade, capital and expertise. Venice, Genoa and Florence were wealthy long before the Reformation.

The more fundamental institutional revolution was Catholic. From late antiquity onwards, the Western Church attacked many of the reproductive arrangements through which kin groups preserved property and power. Its marriage program — arguably the most far-reaching exercise of social engineering in history — prohibited polygyny, concubinage, divorce, adoption and remarriage, as well as unions within widening circles of blood and affinity. In 517, for example, the Synod of Epaone in Burgundy decreed that unions with first and second cousins were incestuous and henceforth forbidden, along with marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law and aunts by marriage. The prohibition was extended to the seventh degree by Pope Gregory III in 732, and reaffirmed throughout the medieval period, although enforcement was uneven. The prohibition was later reduced to kinship of the fourth degree.

The Church’s stated reasons were scriptural and theological. Marriage created “one flesh”, and the incest prohibitions were held to protect the sacramental purity of marriage. But the institutional effect was also material. By restricting heirs, remarriage and the means by which lineages recovered property, the Church made it easier for wealth to pass into monasteries, bishoprics and charitable endowments. In his seminal work The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), Goody argued that this was no accidental by-product. By the Reformation, the Church and its affiliates had become the largest landholders in Germany and doubtless much of northern Europe. 

Suggested reading

Hartley, not Orwell, foresaw today's tyranny

By Hartley, not Orwell, foresaw today’s tyranny

The consequences, intended or otherwise, were revolutionary. Marriage restrictions weakened large kinship groupings. They encouraged smaller households, unions outside the lineage, voluntary associations and trust between unrelated people. In The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), Henrich argues that populations subjected most intensively to the Church’s rules gradually became more individualistic and more disposed to trust strangers. The Church did not merely preach universal brotherhood; it interfered with the institutions that made family the principal source of social identity. It broke the clan in order to save the individual soul.

But weakening kinship created a new problem. If property, authority and memory were no longer transmitted exclusively through blood, where could social continuity reside? The answer was the corporation, an originally ecclesiastical structure later secularized and appropriated by business. An abbey survived its abbots; a bishopric its bishops. Masters and students passed through Oxbridge, but the university and its colleges remained. Kings died, but the Crown endured. Offices, endowments and obligations acquired an existence independent of the bodies temporarily administering them. 

While promising eternity to believers’ souls, the Church created an earthly analogue of eternity in law. The corporation was an immortal body, distinct from the mortal governors, shareholders and employees composing it. Property could belong not merely to a proprietor and his heirs but to an institution that never died — the “dead hand” of mortmain. Protestantism may have supplied capitalism with Weber’s “this-worldly asceticism”. But it was Catholic canon law that supplied the indispensable legal fiction of corporate personality. Eternity, a diminishing expectation with the growth of religious skepticism, migrated from heaven to Companies House and Wall Street. 

The theological ancestry of the modern company is curiously neglected in conventional accounts of secularization. As I used to explain to my students, Jesus Christ was, in this structural sense, the original president of Coca-Cola and of every other corporation operating under Western law. The Enlightenment did not simply expel religion and leave autonomous reason in its place. It inherited legal and metaphysical inventions developed over many centuries by the Latin Church.

The contrast with Islamic societies is stark, though it is not a contrast between commercial sophistication and backwardness. Muslim jurists developed complex rules governing trade, credit, inheritance, partnership and charitable endowments, sustaining commercial networks from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean when much of northern Europe remained economically primitive. But Islamic law did not develop corporate personhood in the same expansive and adaptable form as Latin canon law. The waqf (Islamic trust) could preserve property for generations, but its purposes were fixed by its founder. Commercial partnerships remained tied to particular individuals and might dissolve when a partner died, whereupon his share passed among prescribed heirs, often fragmenting the estate.

Nor did Islamic law generally challenge endogamous marriage. Cousins are absent from the prohibited degrees enumerated in the Qur’an which also expressly mentions cousin categories among those permitted to the Prophet. In many Arab societies, marriage to a father’s brother’s daughter became especially valued, a practice seen by critics as a way of circumventing female rights of inheritance. Studies have generally placed consanguineous marriage at roughly two-fifths to more than half of all unions in Saudi Arabia, although rates vary by region and have declined in some younger and urban populations. Combined with inheritance rules, such marriages retain property and obligations within the extended family and reinforce lineage solidarity.

Suggested reading

What Ireland teaches us about Iran

By What Ireland teaches us about Iran

A related contrast appears in legal culture. Western justice came to revere the idea of depersonalized justice symbolized by the blindfold statue of Lady Justice holding a balance: abstract rules applied without regard to the litigants’ identities. Lawrence Rosen’s studies of Moroccan courts describe a different philosophy. The qadi assesses reputation and character, and seeks a settlement that restores workable relationships between contending parties. His authority lies not simply in imposing a rule from above but in knowing how the parties stand within a web of obligations. The relevant distinction is between trust vested in procedure and trust vested in personal knowledge.

The Western achievement was not moral superiority but the institutionalization of mistrust, nourished by the doctrine of original sin. Because human beings were assumed to be greedy, partial and mortal, offices and procedures were constructed to constrain and outlast them. Authority belonged — at least theoretically — to the office rather than the office-holder or their family. Official rules made nepotism harder: appointments could be challenged, accounts audited and conflicts exposed. While the West never eradicated favoritism, it forced favoritism to disguise itself.

It is here that Gulf sovereign wealth funds enter the picture. A sovereign fund, such as Norway’s, is supposed to embody depersonalized capitalism: professionally managed, globally diversified and capable of yielding revenue across generations. Yet in a Gulf monarchy it may also operate as an investment arm of the ruling establishment — simultaneously national treasury, investment company, diplomatic instrument and development agency. Its assets belong nominally to the state, but senior princes appoint managers, determine strategic priorities and use investments to cultivate relationships abroad. A decision may be commercially rational while also serving diplomacy, prestige and dynastic security. 

The results are visible across Western cityscapes. Qatar’s fund owns Harrods and the Shard, jointly controls Canary Wharf Group and holds a substantial stake in Heathrow. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns Newcastle United and has invested in Lucid, Uber and a multitude of technology and entertainment ventures. It also supplied $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners even after an internal advisory panel reportedly raised objections. Qatari and Emirati funds initially invested about $200 million each; in 2024 Qatar’s investment authority and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate supplied a further $1.5 billion between them.

There is nothing inherently sinister about Arab ownership of Western property. American private-equity firms, Russian oligarchs, European luxury conglomerates and British pension funds do not acquire moral purity merely by being Western. Gulf funds employ highly trained professionals and seek financial returns. Petrodollar capital, however, emerges from political systems in which personal confidence, dynastic authority, discretion, patronage and reciprocal obligation remain central to governance. Its influence lies not only in formal ownership but in the field of access, gratitude and dependency surrounding it. 

The Khaldunian paradigm is helpful here. Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African historian and political theorist, understood political power as arising from asabiyya — group feeling, or clannish solidarity. A ruling house governs because its members possess a cohesion unavailable to more fragmented populations. In time, luxury and dependence weaken that solidarity, exposing the dynasty to replacement by a tougher group arriving from the margins. 

Far from escaping this logic, the Gulf monarchies have modernized it. Oil revenues allow ruling families to transform lineage solidarity into ministries, sovereign wealth funds, global portfolios and high-tech security services. Kinship has not disappeared into the anonymized structures of the bureaucratic state; bureaucracy has become an instrument through which dynastic cohesion operates internationally. The Gulf sovereign wealth fund is Asabiyya Inc. 

Patrimonial capital becomes especially potent when it encounters Western elites predisposed to behave in like fashion. Kushner’s Affinity Partners offers the clearest example. After serving in Donald Trump’s White House, where he played a central role in Middle Eastern policy, Kushner obtained billions in commitments from Gulf sovereign funds. 

The scandal does not depend upon proving a crude exchange of policy for payment. It lies in the blurring of public and private realms. A president’s son-in-law conducts diplomacy with hereditary rulers and then receives capital from funds answerable to those ruling establishments. Public service creates private relationships; private relationships produce commercial opportunity; commercial interests shadow future public policy. The form may be corporate, but the substance is courtly. 

With Trump’s return to power, the overlap between his family’s businesses, diplomatic connections and political authority has become ever more conspicuous. Sons, sons-in-law, golf buddies, property developers, cryptocurrency promoters and Gulf princes inhabit the same web of transactions. The problem is larger than corruption in its prosecutable form. Bribery law assumes a reasonably clear distinction between public office and private gain. Today, that very distinction is being eroded, bringing about what could be described as “re-feudalisation”. Under feudal arrangements, government was personal: land, jurisdiction, family alliance and military obligation formed a single web. A favorite might simultaneously be ambassador, financier and beneficiary of royal patronage. The sovereign’s household was not neatly separable from government.

The modern state emerged by extracting office from the household. Treasury funds ceased, in theory, to be the ruler’s private money, while diplomats and civil servants served an institution rather than a family. These principles were never perfectly realized. But hypocrisy — the tribute vice pays to virtue — acknowledged the institutional ideal: nepotism had to be concealed because public and private interests were understood to be different.

Constitutional government still depends upon offices whose purposes cannot be privately inherited, purchased or repaid. It requires decision-makers capable of distinguishing friendship from duty, and national resources from family assets. Once that separation collapses, elections may mask continuity, but real power reverts to a pre-modern feudal order.

The Swedish ban on cousin marriage concerns much more than an uncomfortable minority custom. It asks whether liberal societies can discuss the institutional consequences of kinship without subjecting families to ethnic prejudice or romanticizing national culture. Cousin marriage endures because it performs vital economic and political work: it concentrates trust within the lineage. Prohibition alone cannot dissolve that structure. People will not abandon the protections of kinship merely because the state declares them undesirable; the state must demonstrate that its institutions are worthy of trust.

The medieval Church’s marriage prohibitions redirected trust outwards, towards voluntary associations and the artificial persons of the abbey, city and state. The modern West was built through that long and incomplete transition from blood to office, household property to corporate property, and personal rule to institutional authority. Today, that movement appears to be going into reverse. Citizens are invited to regard cousin marriage solely as a private choice while presidents convert public office into family opportunity. Governments speak the language of transparency while courting funds that combine national wealth with dynastic power. The artificial persons created to restrain kinship — the state and the corporation — are being reoccupied by kin-based households.

Sweden has outlawed the marriage of first cousins. The more difficult task is preventing the return of government by aunts and uncles, cousins, sons, sons-in-law and their cronies.

Today, Darwin’s conundrum has returned to Parliament. Richard Holden, the MP for Basildon and Billericay, has proposed a bill to ban first-cousin marriage in the UK. While the bill is highly unlikely to pass, it follows similar debates in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and reflects a swelling interest in the subject on the British Right. According to Holden, cousin marriage creates problems in three areas: health, freedom, and our national values. Muslim communities, particularly Pakistani ones, have been at the center of these debates due to their high rates of cousin marriages. Around 27% of the women in the most recent cohort (2016-2019) of the “Born in Bradford” study were married to their first cousin.

Is this sudden interest in cousin marriage driven by genuine concern for the communities involved? Or does it — intentionally or not — fuel anti-Muslim sentiment, fostering division by presenting cousin marriage as an unnatural and foreign practice?

Cousin marriage isn’t unnatural: it has been practiced around the world for thousands of years. But could it pose a health risk to the resulting children? If Darwin were alive today, he might be surprised to discover that, despite our better understanding of genetics, significant gaps in our knowledge remain. Roughly, the baseline risk of unrelated parents having a child with a major birth defect is 3%; for a child of first cousins, this risk increases to 6%. This means that the vast majority of children born from consanguineous marriages will be healthy. Of course, if there are known genetic disorders within the family, then this risk increases, and successive generations of cousin marriage can also compound the likelihood of having a disabled child — but this is by no means inevitable.

Nevertheless, these additional risks can be offset through prenatal genetic screening, which is currently offered to other at-risk groups. Older pregnant women, for example, are screened for Down’s syndrome, as are couples who are carriers of cystic fibrosis. We don’t ban these individuals from marrying or having children, and we don’t consider them a burden on the healthcare system.

Nor is it only the children of cousins who are at risk. The likelihood of health problems is increased whenever there is a higher chance that two individuals share genes. This can occur in small populations or in any close-knit community that marry among themselves — such as the UK’s Jewish community, or else the Amish in America or French Canadians. Would Holden also support banning marriage within other ethnic communities? I suspect not.

Beyond birth defects, the risks of cousin marriage are difficult to calculate. The Bradford study suggests that consanguineous children access health care at higher rates, and may also struggle more at school. The children of unrelated parents have a 7.4% probability of having speech and language difficulties; this figure rises to 11.3% for the children of first cousins. Yet we shouldn’t leap to conclusions. One issue with this analysis is that cousin marriage often correlates with poverty, which has an independent effect on health. Many of the areas in Britain with high rates of cousin marriage are extremely deprived, and while this analysis does control for poverty, it is unlikely to capture all aspects of socioeconomic disadvantage — making it unclear the extent to which genetics ultimately matter.

Holden’s second argument against cousin marriage — that it undermines the freedom of women — is similarly simplistic. He, along with other commentators including journalist Matthew Syed and researcher Patrick Nash, suggest that cousin marriage is often forced and harmful to women. They argue that cousin marriage produces a “clannish” inward-looking culture, which leads to strict control over the behavior of group members. In the case of women, this can mean having no choice over their husbands, and being subject to honour codes that dictate appropriate female behavior. Nash even argues that clan institutions are “known to condone abuses [including] spousal violence”.

Suggested reading

Cousin marriage isn't 'unspeakable'

By Kathleen Stock

Firstly, there are many forced marriages that do not involve cousins. So why target them indirectly via a ban on cousin marriage? That aside, the relationship between cousin marriage and women’s freedom is far more complex than Holden implies. There is a large body of research that suggests that exogamous marriage — that is, marrying outside one’s community — can actually damage a woman’s status and undermine her freedom. Across the world it has been, and still is today, much more common for women to move away from their natal kin to live near her husband’s kin. When a woman marries “out”, she often leaves her support networks behind; in moving into her husband’s household, she enters a community where she has little established status, reputation, or family protection. This isolation can reduce her bargaining power, and without nearby family support, she becomes vulnerable to exploitation by her husband and in-laws.

But when a woman marries her cousin, this separation from family doesn’t happen: and she may have greater status than if she hadn’t. In a survey from Bangladesh, almost 80% of respondents say that a key benefit of cousin marriage is that wives have influence over their in-laws. Men say something similar. In Lila Abu-Lughod’s 1986 ethnography of Egyptian Bedouins, men described how they could trust their cousin-wife because they “care about you and your things because they are hers” and that “after all she is my father’s brother’s daughter”.

These dynamics have been shown to protect women. In studies of domestic violence, including my own, women married to their cousins report less intimate-partner violence. This is arguably because the family connection creates accountability that may not exist in marriages between unrelated individuals. Though the results could also reflect a hesitancy to admit to domestic violence. Nonetheless, it is overly simplistic to say that cousin marriage is inherently oppressive to women, and it is telling that even when individuals have free choice over their marriage, many still choose cousins as partners, as documented in Bangladesh.

More from this author

The case for polyamory

By Olympia Campbell

But let’s be clear: cousin marriage typically occurs in conservative communities, where women frequently have low status and where interaction between men and women is restricted. For women navigating these environments, marrying a cousin can provide a degree of certainty and security in an otherwise potentially risky proposition. For many, it could be a strategic choice. The critical question — does cousin marriage create gender restrictions or simply exist alongside them? — is rarely addressed by those who condemn the practice.

Yet as mentioned, critics like Nash and Syed argue that cousin marriage not only encourages domestic violence, but also creates honor codes that can lead to honor-based violence — a punishment enacted for dishonoring the family through actions that can range from leaving the house without a male chaperone to premarital sex. It differs from intimate-partner violence, in that it is often perpetrated by a woman’s immediate family, such as her father, brothers, uncles, and cousins. My own research has tested this association, and finds that societies that have practiced higher rates of cousin marriage also tend to have stronger honor cultures.

Yet this connection should not determine modern policy, for several reasons. Firstly, even if cousin marriage historically contributed to the emergence of honor systems, banning it won’t necessarily dismantle them. Cultural norms can persist independently of their origins — and if men are intent on controlling the behavior of women, and the honor code is a useful tool with which to do that, then they will continue to use it. This might explain why, even as cousin marriage rates have declined around the world, honor codes have remained entrenched.

Neither has this theory been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is certainly not established enough to justify restricting personal freedoms, and much like many singular theories of human culture, is unlikely to ever be. Anyway, basing individual rights on scientific theories is fundamentally problematic; all theories should remain open to challenge and revision, and are unsuitable foundations for determining laws — as these very laws would be undermined as science gets updated.

In the end, emotive calls to ban cousin marriage accomplish little beyond sowing distrust towards certain ethnic groups. Concerns relating to health and violence against women would be better tackled by other policy levers. That would leave the intimate decision of marriage up to the individual, rather than the state.

Formerly in the historical deep freeze, it’s the fact that cousin marriage occurs disproportionately in British Muslim communities that has turned it into a hot button issue. Syed — himself of Pakistani extraction — first drew attention to its prevalence in an influential column last year, reminding us that where cousin marriage is practised over several generations, it exposes couples to a significantly heightened risk of bearing children with autosomal recessive disorders. Obstetricians in isolated rural communities have always known this, and now modern access to gene mapping is emphasising the risk.

But the real meat of Syed’s initial case was not medical but cultural — or at least, a bit. It lay in the claim that consanguinity increases the separation of certain ethnic and religious groups from mainstream UK values, encouraging them to be “clannish” and to become “ever more detached from the moral trajectory of wider civilisation”. Controlling patriarchs often have the upper hand in such environments, he suggested. Things like female genital mutilation and so-called honour beatings are more likely to take place there, along with corruption and a tendency towards groupthink.

More from this author

The futile fight for England's identity

By Kathleen Stock

And talking of the latter, in this week’s piece Syed adds a third complaint: the reticence of UK academics to discuss the problems, which he takes as yet more evidence that a culture of political correctness, timidity, and fear reigns in academia. As a result, he argues, information in the public interest, essential to the well-being of immigrant communities, has not been disseminated or even gathered properly in the first place. Researching the links between consanguinity and forced marriage, Oxford academic Dr Patrick Nash has related to Syed how he would be taken aside by colleagues and warned off the subject. And as the columnist himself looked into the available medical evidence, he says he struggled to find geneticists who would risk their careers to talk to him about it.

I have no doubt this bit is true. Still, I disagree with Syed’s assertion that the studied silence of British academics in this area reveals liberalism’s “unspeakable face”. On the contrary, I think it shows academics in quite a good light, relative to things they easily might otherwise be doing. Gender Studies lecturers — as far as I know — are not positively trying to destigmatise cousin marriage in the name of deconstructing oppressively hegemonic Western norms, which comes as something of a relief when you know their modus operandi. Equally, although it is not unusual to find philosophers arguing that physical disability is mere difference, socially constructed to be “bad” —  perhaps with the chaser that such construction maintains colonial and racist power games — few have been so bold as to go out to bat for the essential value neutrality of life-limiting haemoglobin disorders or congenital deformations. Weirdly, or perhaps not when you think about it, the job of dismissing the harm of birth defects seems to have been left to libertarian commentators, upping the ante by arguing that siblings should be free to marry too.

The best the progressive mindset can do in this respect, it seems, is to put the physical risks associated with consanguinity in context, by comparing them to risks with which the general public are apparently much more culturally comfortable. And so we find the authors of a report from a Bradford NHS Trust equating the risk of birth defects to married cousins with those of white women getting pregnant “at or after the age of 34” as a result of “choosing lifestyles embedded in liberal values such as preferring jobs, careers, bodily fitness and individualism”. Now, if you factor in cousin marriage happening generation after generation, this comparison isn’t right. But the deeper implied point is that, if girlboss white women can happily run risks to future offspring without attracting moral censure, there should be no particular problem for brown ones. Interrogating the avoidable harms of career-delayed motherhood in women is a bridge too far, it seems, even for the boldest of critics of the British way of life.

And there is another way in which Syed is wrong about the harms of cousin marriage being “unspeakable” — at least if we are being literal-minded. If it really was impossible to talk about such things, liberalised societies with high immigration such as Sweden and Denmark would not now be moving to ban cousin marriage; Robert Jenrick wouldn’t be seizing the moment to argue for the same thing in the Commons; and Syed himself would not be writing well-received columns about it. In fact, decrying cousin marriage is now apparently one of the most socially acceptable means of expressing disquiet about the legacies of immigration in liberal societies. And it might be worth examining why.

One reason seems to be that the two prongs of Syed’s argument bring unashamed social conservatives and shy sensible centrist types together in an unusual way. For those in the latter much larger category — normally wary of engaging in any discourse that would explicitly pit subjective British or Western values against those of immigrants — there is the objective shield of scientific data to protect them from anxieties about accusations of racism. As long as we are using technical-sounding words like “homozygosity” and “autosomal inheritance patterns”, and assessing quantifiable health risks to physical bodies, it seems clear that we are in the world of Rationality and Data — and who could argue with that? Equally, since physical health, in the basic sense of freedom from serious disease, is a prerequisite for doing nearly anything else, it is hard to imagine a contemporary value system that wouldn’t recognise its importance.

Equally, though, precisely because the acknowledgement of disease-free health as a basic good is foundational to most conceivable worldviews, it won’t get you very far in articulating a positive moral vision for society; and nor will it furnish much material for cultural critique. David Hume’s dictum that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is” is not quite right: some activities are obviously bad for us and limit well-being, given facts about human nature (severely limiting contact with other humans, say; staring at screens in dark rooms for most of the day; starving yourself, or cutting off physically healthy flesh). But what is true is that the recommendations thereby produced won’t be very detailed, confined mostly to ought-nots.

Meanwhile, turning to the more explicitly cultural arguments mounted by Syed, it seems they too are designed to attract nervous initiates in the art of sticking up for a specifically British way of life. For on closer inspection they hover mostly in the realm of the abstract. As noted, there are concerns about “clannishness” and “insularity” and the negative consequences upon “integration” with the mainstream, with only limited forays into naming specific objectionable practices like forced marriage or FGM. And perhaps this degree of distance from unpleasant particulars further helps incipient social conservatives, gingerly dipping toes in fraught culture wars, to feel less like they are engaged in full-frontal confrontation.

More from this author

Stonewall and the search for meaning

By Kathleen Stock

But at the same time, this still vague critique threatens to cloud the bathwater and so lose the baby. For — as has long been argued by post-liberal thinkers and is now becoming obvious even to civilians — the choose-your-own-adventure neoliberalism we now have in much of the UK, while pretending to be value-neutral in the public realm, is actually partisan as hell. Though theoretically speaking, liberalism pretends not to favour any subjective conception of the good, in practice elements of the British “mainstream” tend to champion malignly impersonal activities (replacing skilled workers with machines, breaking up mothers’ bodies for surrogacy parts, “assisting” frail and vulnerable people to die, etc) while simultaneously undermining the sorts of institution that enrich local social life for many (small businesses, public libraries and swimming pools, pubs, church congregations etc).

Much of this wrecking is done explicitly in the name of secularism, not religion. And in this context, a bit of “clannishness” and “insularity” among dissidents goes along way — or at least, when rebranded more positively as “showing solidarity”, and “building strong moral boundaries against the prevailing neoliberal tide”. Trade unions, parishes, and grassroots political organisations can be clannish and insular too, in both good and bad ways, yet as a society we would surely be much worse off without them.

Squeamish as some recovering liberals are to criticise immigrant practices directly, there is a temptation to zoom out a bit before taking aim, hoping that some of the generalised argument then sticks to the right targets. But the danger is that valuable things are destroyed in friendly fire. Literally incestuous communities definitely pose a problem for British society, but metaphorically incestuous communities may or may not do: it all depends what exactly goes on there. If we don’t want British Muslim girls to be forced into marriages, genitally mutilated, or beaten for perceived apostasy, there are quicker and less ambiguous ways to say it.