One need not share the apocalyptic visions of Britain’s near future animating much of the Right to see a similar, dreamlike paralysis in the face of our own national disintegration. The facts, when outlined, are bleak. Elected on a mandate of renewing Britain, Keir Starmer is now the least popular prime minister in British history, whose party’s landslide victory may yet prove terminal. If we assume that Starmer’s time in office is now drawing to a close, then it is his fate for his premiership to have been bookended by being heckled by angry crowds at the scene of two stabbings: the first in Southport, the second in Golders Green. That footage from North London revealed the Union Flag fluttering from lampposts, a now England-wide dynamic which only took effect after Southport and the ethnic riots which followed, shows how quickly we have stumbled into creating a simulacrum of the Shankill Road even among loyal and placid suburban British Jews. Neither of these two attacks were Starmer’s specific fault; his fate is just to embody the modern Westminster state, loathed by its people.

Seemingly cursed from the start, it is hard not to feel some grudging sympathy for Two-Year Kier. True, he is unsuited both ideologically and temperamentally to keeping a fractious country together. But who else could do any better? Every news story, every headline, looks like an extract from some future documentary recounting the disintegration of a state. Just weeks before the elections, Starmer’s St George’s Day video message once again possessed all the attributes of a late-stage imperial bureaucrat trying to dampen an ethnic revolt outside the capital. And rightly so: the political salience of St George’s Day, which is entirely new, is the symbolic rupture between the English people and their form of government that Westminster represents.

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The Ulsterisation of English politics

By Aris Roussinos

That rupture, indeed, is closer to the resurgent Celtic nationalisms than it is their antithesis, and is best understood as part of the same process that has led the governments of all three devolved nations to be led by parties eager to terminate the Union. On the other pole of national politics, the Greens, by virtue of their support for Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism, are functionally Westminster’s only political faction committed to the logic of an independent English state: in technical terms they are therefore more of an English nationalist party than Reform, the ambivalent flagbearers of Unionism, whose support base nevertheless rests upon English dissatisfaction with Westminster. The logic of party political fragmentation is also one of national dissolution, consciously intended or otherwise.

The two legacy parties of British mass democracy, meanwhile, have shrunk to regional London parties of the Westminster statelet. Losing their leafy shires to the Liberal Democrats, and the suburbs to Reform, the Conservatives are now the party of Metroland Hindus, socially conservative West Africans and Clapham Yimbys. No longer a national mass party, Labour has become a London-based workers union for those who actually run the Westminster state — the civil servants, lawyers and thinktankers who now make up Labour’s voting base — and the social housing tenants to whom they distribute their patronage, or at least those who have not yet been seduced by their own ethnic parties, whether openly, as in Tower Hamlets, or under the Green mantle, as in Waltham Forest. Politically, it is the British state’s seat of government that has now become the periphery, buffeted by events it can no longer control.

And in turn, further than London than they have seemed for centuries, it is on the peripheries that the twilight of Westminsterism is now most highly evolved, and the country’s future determined. Northern Ireland, waiting for its devolved elections next year, remains, as it has been since its abortive birth, a thing apart, incomprehensible to British observers, and viewed with a mix of horror and disdain by political elites in the Republic. Indeed, the anxiety within Ireland’s coalition government that Farage will “bounce Ireland into a referendum it is not ready for” reads more like fear of a border poll succeeding than of it failing. Yet the exultant glee expressed by Sinn Féin at the election results in Scotland and Wales, which show, as my own abstentionist MP claims, that “people are looking beyond Westminster towards a brighter, more positive future, free from the shackles of the British government”, is difficult to dispute.

The SNP’s victory in Scotland, despite all its internal feuding and record of incompetent governance, once again demonstrates the existence of a hardcore voting bloc for independence above all other factors, even if it is outweighed by a slim unionist majority, divided, as in Northern Ireland, between opposing factions. In Wales, initially ambivalent about devolution, Plaid Cymru, seeking independence, is now the party of government, yet with only a slim lead over Reform, which has now taken on the responsibility of defending the Union.

Yet the headline take — that both countries now share pro-independence administrations — obscures the more meaningful political reality that, just like Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are now more or less evenly divided between those wanting to preserve our shared state and those wishing to dismantle it. With no immediate route to independence for either, the likelier outcome than near-term secession for is therefore a repeat of the dysfunctional deadlock of Stormont, with the concrete work of governance taking a backseat to the symbolic politics of national identity. Political paralysis, and the radicalization of the voter base into two binary and directly opposing conceptions of national identity, now appears unavoidable. The hopes of Celtic nationalists rest on framing a now probable Reform government as an English nationalist party, the Westminster state assuming its final, most reductive, and cartoonish form.

Yet Reform’s hopes, in both Scotland and Wales, must be that the accelerating immigration into both Wales and Scotland — immigration supported by Plaid and the SNP respectively — eventually inspire defections among Celtic nationalists of the ethnic rather than civic variety, with the novel and rapid peripheral adoption of England’s demographic churn eventually producing an equivalent political response. Indeed, 12% of Reform’s vote share in Scotland is now assessed to have come from defecting SNP voters. Yet the tussle between Unionism and nationalism works in precisely the opposite way in Northern Ireland, where the mass immigration lauded by Sinn Féin has the effect of strengthening the Unionist vote, by importing people with no particular emotional bond to Irish nationalism, who are in many cases wards of the Westminster state, dispatched to Ulster by the spreadsheets of Whitehall bureaucrats rather than any personal choice. The same two poles — the traditional nationalisms of the British state and the new ones created by mass immigration — are in interplay across the Kingdom, with long term effects difficult to predict: other than bitter and dysfunctional polarization and the counterintuitive ambiguities inherent to nationalism, far beyond the apparent synchrony of yesterday’s results.

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How Gorton beat Denton

By Aris Roussinos

With Reform, a personalist movement led by a figure ambivalent about the Union, now adopting the mantle of Unionism in Wales and Scotland, it is ironic that its own pitch to English voters is not so different to that pronounced by Sinn Féin’s South Down MP Chris Hazzard: that “Westminster does not serve our people.” Rare is the English voter who would now disagree. The zeal with which Reform’s new English voter base has taken to flagging its own ethnic enclaves is an outward manifestation of the collapse of post-industrial England’s Labour coalition into opposing ethnic blocs. As the pollster Luke Tryl observes: “We are seeing some of the most fragmented results in councils that combine a white working class vote with a large ethnic minority population.” The political polarization reshaping British politics is simply the reflection of an already-existing social polarization decades of willed Westminster blindness failed to prevent and which it is now too late to undo.

In England, Reform’s success in Bradford, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, just as much as the rise of the South Asian Muslim identitarian candidates — or where electoral demography requires it, the Greens as a temporary substitute — reflects this binary process of self-sorting into ethnic factions. The belated protestations of horror from liberal pundits amazed at the inevitable consequences of their worldview have come too late to arrest this dynamic. The Greens, for now, may be a beneficiary, though the party’s coalition of radicalized young women; geriatric millennials seeking yet another lifeboat from the wreckage of the Corbyn project; and Muslim identitarians is hardly more stable than the Labour bricolage whose rubble it picks over.

Yet something similar could be said of Reform, whose working-class and petit bourgeois coalition is deeply divided on economic questions, papered over by a shared, and newly assertive identity. There is no logical reason, other than the total unqualified success of a future Reform government, for the same structural forces demolishing the 20th-century parties not to do the same to Reform in turn. England’s genuine ethnonationalist contingent, currently celebrating as online outriders Rupert Lowe’s success in his Great Yarmouth fiefdom, is more likely to find the failure of a Farage government a profitable hunting ground than any immediate attempt to supplant Reform as the dominant party of the Right. Whether there will be a Britain left for them to restore is quite another question.

For there is, in all that Reform’s path to government seems inevitable, no real certainty in Britain’s future politics other than extreme volatility. Reform’s vote share has decreased from its greatest highs: unless the party fully cannibalizes the Conservatives, or enters coalition with them, it is not on course for a stable majority. There is just as much a likelihood of a coalition of England’s Left parties, propped up by peripheral nationalists, as there is of Farage entering Downing Street, in doing so accelerating the dynamics of disintegration and dysfunction on which Reform relies. Should Reform achieve power, it is highly likely to find its program frustrated by the functionaries of the Westminster state, heightening the already mutinous mood of provincial England. The dysfunction of the Westminster state accelerates its disintegration into identitarian voting blocs, and the state’s disintegration in turn accelerates its political dysfunction: and all the while, the country gets poorer, angrier and worse governed. There is more to Ulsterization than just flags on lampposts.

Let us look at the problem objectively, from first principles. In every country in the United Kingdom, the winning message from last week’s elections has been that Westminster, as it currently exists, simply does not work. In the peripheral nations, the electorally dominant solution is to break away and start again. In England, it is to gamble on Reform as the last chance of resolving this mess. The world that Starmer entered power to preserve, of optimistic, 1990s cosmopolitan liberalism, is already gone forever: his political failure, rather than deriving from his personal flaws, was to attempt to rule a country that no longer exists. Yet in attempting to mend and preserve a Westminster state whose very failure is propelling him to power, it is hard for even the most sympathetic observer to see Farage — a far more polarizing figure than Starmer — working the same raw material into something more stable.

The state may not break apart, then, but it will continue to hollow out, as its constituent peoples old and new continue to sort themselves into smaller political units, focused on ever-narrower and more bitterly opposing ends. The process now underway, which Starmer’s doomed two years in government has radically accelerated, is still very far from assuming its final form. Indeed, Farage is just as likely to prove a catalyst of disintegration as a nation-builder. Some unhappy marriages fall apart; others stagger on, in hope that things might change, or fear of the alternative. The difference between the two outcomes is as often a matter of chance, and circumstance, as willed choice. Westminster is no more in control of how things end than any individual voter. Like the cartoon Yugoslav, all we can do is continue, motionless, to watch the headlines scroll, and wait for events to unfold as they will.

In the same way, the emerging narrative that the Green Party’s Gorton and Denton by-election victory marks the emergence of a new, “sectarian” Britain does not seem quite correct. The existence of South Asian Muslim voting blocs is not a new development. Rather, the novelty is their accelerating abandonment of the Labour Party which once took their votes for granted — corralled through the clan and family patronage systems co-opted by Labour’s Northern England machine politics. But the political contest in Gorton and Denton, a matter of simple demographic arithmetic, was fundamentally one tipped by ethnic rather than religious mobilization: it was no more sectarian than, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin are devout Catholics, or the Shankill Protestant Boys Flute Band are devoted practitioners of quiet Bible study.

Indeed, there is little in the Gorton and Denton result to dissuade adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British political development from the theory. As the Manchester Evening News observes, the constituency is a highly segregated one, with 96% of residents in Denton East and Denton West self-describing in the 2021 Census as “White” — an awkward category, in this instance largely coterminous with ethnic British and Irish ethnic identity — declining to a low of 85% in Denton North. In the western half of the constituency, on the other hand, only 6% of residents in Victoria are white, and only 8% in Levenshulme North: a lower percentage, it may be noted, than of Catholics in Belfast’s proverbially Ulster Loyalist Shankill Road ward. At least in Northern Ireland the fact that elections are won in the census rather than the voting booth is open and taken for granted: in Britain, cultural taboos forbid such accurate depiction of reality. The Gorton and Denton by-election, given the polarized electoral map of its constituents, may just as accurately be termed the Gorton versus Denton by-election, in which Gorton proved the victor.

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Zack Polanski’s pre-election claim that “the public have moved on” from immigration was therefore disingenuous: his Green victory was built on the foundation of historic South Asian immigration in a constituency highly segregated along ethnic lines, in an election novel only for the increasingly overt nature of the ethnic mobilization and counter-mobilization now becoming the stuff of modern British politics. As Abubakr Nanabawa, the organizer of the Muslim Vote pressure group — which in this election backed the Greens “to block Reform, and to end Labour’s assumption that our communities can be ignored, disrespected, and still counted as automatic” — observed, this was to be an election decided by demographic heft, in a “constituency, with 76,000 potential voters, approximately 26% of whom are Muslims… split demographically into the Gorton side, which is more ethnically diverse, and Denton, which is more white working class,” in the latter of which the “the Right-wing Reform party has made inroads”. As Nanabawa pointed out back in 2024, “political parties and candidates ignore the concerns and priorities of Muslim voters at their peril, for their sway will only continue to grow, shaping the trajectory of British democracy” — a prediction also made, openly or implicitly, by Reform, as a threat rather than a promise, and as a means to mobilize the dwindling ethnic majority.

Ascribing the process to Muslim sectarianism thus obscures the nature of the ethnic mobilization now in play among Reform just as much as the Greens: as pre-election Opinium polling revealed, among white voters, Reform dominated the contest, with a vote share approximating that of the Greens and Labour combined. Indeed, at 57% of the population, the proportion of white voters in Gorton and Denton exactly matches that projected for the UK as whole by 2050. If the political maps of Britain are increasingly ethnic ones, then we can expect future elections to proceed accordingly, if in less binary form than Northern England. The rise of the Greens and Reform each now accelerate that of the other. The speed and extent of demographic change means that the collapse of the former mass parties of 20th-century Britain now appears baked in, even if neither the Greens nor Reform is likely to remain the ultimate protagonists of British political contest.

Against this argument, the writer John Merrick, one of the more astute Leftist  critics of the Right’s increasingly ethnic framing of British politics, dismisses the observation that the Palestine flag has become a marker of South Asian Muslim ethnic mobilization by remarking that objecting to Israel’s war on Gaza is not solely a Muslim concern. Indeed, he accuses those who have made this observation, particularly me, of attempting to “to lay the blame on specific ethnic groups” for what he terms the “widespread sense of alienation among often young British Muslims”. In that revulsion to the Gaza war is not solely a matter for South Asian Muslims, he is correct. Yet if Green strategy were merely a matter of principled internationalist politics, rather than of appealing to narrow ethnic loyalties, one struggles to imagine why the party should also wave the Pakistani flag in its campaigning, or release Urdu-language videos linking Starmer to India’s President Modi. Both are simply overt examples of ethnic Pakistani political mobilization, which, partly through willed ideological blindness and partly through mercenary electoral calculations, the Left chooses not to examine too closely. It is permissible, indeed electorally necessary, for progressives to engage in such open ethnic organizing: yet it remains taboo for them to remark upon it.

Free from such squeamishness, the Green Party’s Deputy Leader, Mothin Ali, is closer to the mark in noting that Matt Goodwin’s campaigning materials made repeated references to the defense of “Christian” identity, in what Ali termed “something that is quite sectarian that is harking back to those troubles [sic] in Ireland”. This is simply the Ulsterization thesis correctly observed, and applied for political gain, by the Green Party. Gorton and Denton was historic in that it was one of the first mainland British elections to be fought along near-overtly ethnic lines. Like Labour, the Greens mobilized white progressives and South Asian Muslims together against what they portrayed as Reform’s dangerous identitarian politics. As a national spectacle rather than a local campaign, specific political goals took a backseat to “keeping out Reform”, a party whose perception as one focused on narrow ethnic British interests is the unspoken context of all the Labour and Green rhetoric of “hope against hate” and “unity against division”. This is simply ethnic politics for a political system unwilling to name what it has become. Having lost both British Muslims and the white working class, Labour is at least now free to condemn their respective political manifestations.

Certainly, ecological issues no longer seem matters of particular interest to the Green Party, a development that appears to have passed Labour by. The pivot of the election was better understood by Jeremy Corbyn, announcing the need to vote Green to “defeat Reform, defeat the fascists and the racists”, which, translated out of Leftspeak, means parties addressing ethnic British voters and their collective interests as openly as the Greens so effectively did for their own new voters. In this, given the legal restrictions and political taboos against overt ethnic mobilization of the British electoral majority, progressives currently possess the upper hand, permitted to engage in open ethnic pandering while condemning the same approach for their Right-wing rivals. How long either of these political norms, a relic of Britain’s stable Nineties demographics, can last will determine the politics of the coming years. The radicalizing effect of the “Boriswave” and of the dispersal of boat migrants among parts of Britain previously unaffected by mass migration, causing race riots in Middlesbrough and protest marches in deep Middle England, lay in disrupting the unspoken, indeed accelerating ethnic segregation of provincial British life. What was hitherto politely implicit is increasingly becoming the central matter of Westminster politics.

For now, in any case, the Green coalition has proved a winning one. Yet, as Your Party has found in its struggle balancing narrow ideological zealots on the one hand, and British Muslims on the other, the alliance of young white progressives and South Asian Muslims is an inherently unstable one on matters other than defeating the Right in elections. It is, simply, a marriage of polling convenience rather than a political philosophy. All the internal contradictions displayed by Labour’s marriage of soft-Left social progressives attempting to represent religious social conservatives is true of both Your Party and the Greens, with each now possessing a far narrower electoral base than Labour at its height, given the near-wholesale defection of the white working class to Reform. Cannibalizing the Labour vote in urban districts containing a specific demographic cocktail of white progressives and South Asian Muslims is a strategy with a ceiling: one that can certainly topple Labour as the dominant party of the Left, but is unlikely to deliver the country.

Yet Reform, too, suffer from their own unstable electoral coalition, of white working-class Labour defectors, married to interventionist economic policies, and its largely Thatcherite lower-middle and middle-class voter base stretching inland from the party’s Eastern England Saxon Shore. If they are to sweep the country, in a political context increasingly shaped by ethnic mobilization, then it is ethnic British voters as a whole, including Liberal Democrats in their tacitly homogenous enclaves, to whom they will have to appeal. Doing so may be a harder task than winning the Red Wall, though further Green success, now that the collapse of the two mass parties of a vanished Britain appears certain, may yet work in Reform’s favor: it is risky to assume that in a direct contest between the two, the wavering British center will ultimately choose the Greens.

Certainly, the “sectarianism” discourse now apparent from political commentators who would shudder to be associated with Reform hints at a growing disquiet with the Greens’ open courting of ethnic bloc votes. Yet it is really no different, in its essential form, to the same process that once worked for Labour, to the absurd ethnic pandering of Tory politicians like Bob Blackman to the Hindu nationalist vote, or indeed to the claim by Zack Polanski, in his previous Liberal Democrat incarnation, that a vote for the Lib Dems is “a vote for Israel and a vote for Judaism”. The Greens have not advanced any particularly religious policies, and are unlikely to do so, given the fragile nature of their electoral coalition. If the issue is that British Muslim voters, of mostly South Asian origin, are an increasingly important electoral bloc, then the issue with which centrist commentators are increasingly perturbed is one of demographic change itself, rather than its second-order religious accretions. In just the same way, Reform’s recent pledge to forbid the conversion of disused churches into mosques is not a matter of bringing them back into Christian usage but of preventing their passing into the hands of the demographic “Other”: the issue is an ethnic rather than religious one, with religion functioning as a barely euphemistic marker. The charge of “sectarianism”, Greens are correct to observe, is here merely a dog-whistle for British politics increasingly centering around the questions posed by demographic changes which centrists are unwilling to otherwise notice, let alone navigate.

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The Green victory changes everything

By Jonny Ball

The reshaping of Westminster politics into a battleground between the party of limitless open borders on the one hand, and of mass deportations on the other, will make overt what British political taboos still barely manage to keep implicit. If Reform are the Conservative Party’s DUP, a populist party cannibalizing the mainstream conservative vote on ethnic lines, then, even in the months since I first wrote about mainland Britain’s Ulsterization, Reform have already found in Restore its TUV, an even more Rightward challenger which may, as demographic anxieties proceed, eventually come to cannibalize its vote. The Green victory in Gorton and Denton accelerates Labour’s demise, but Reform’s strong second showing — and the demographic patterns underlying it — should be of at least equal note to Westminster commentators, who would be better examining the country like anthropologists than psephologists.

Rather than civil war, as darkly hinted at by Danny Kruger should Reform fail to win office, the more likely outcome is simply the formalization of voting along ethnic lines in highly segregated communities, and the consequent foregrounding of symbolic politics — of flags and monuments and the jealous rivalry over communal space — in areas where the two politically opposing voting blocs about each other. Gorton and Denton, a demographic bellwether for all Britain, acts as a crystal ball in which our near future can be divined. Both the Greens and Reform are able, for now, to ride the polarization of their supporters into Westminster. But for both the risk, as these dynamics accelerate, is that each of their new voter bases may soon enough outgrow them. It may not be the form of politics the parties of the Westminster center would wish for, but it is the one they have gifted us, before they finally shuffle off the stage.