We must all reject sectarian politics – on both moral and political grounds
Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer celebrates with party leader Zack Polanski and others after winning the Gorton and Denton by-election, Manchester, England, February 2026 (AP Photo/Jon Super / Alamy)
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The result of the Gorton and Denton by-election is clearly a huge disappointment for Labour. Now is the time to ask what we’ve learnt from this campaign and what it means for our national politics.
Earlier this week, Zia Yusuf was interviewed by The Times under the headline “Reform will restore Britain’s Christian heritage”. In the interview, Yusuf outlined policies including preventing churches from being converted into mosques, enacting mass deportations of illegal migrants, and persuading British expats to return to the UK.
At the same time the Green Party was releasing campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla – both languages of majority-Muslim regions of the world – that feature images of Keir Starmer with Narendra Modi and David Lammy with Benjamin Netanyahu. The message was clear enough to the roughly one in three Gorton and Denton voters who are Muslim: the Labour government likes Hindus and Jews so Muslims should vote Green.
It encourages white, working-class voters – who aren’t invited to be one of these interests – to seek their own identity politics in turn
This by-election may be remembered as the moment that sectarian religious politics re-entered the mainstream of British electoral life. It is not wrong that particular groups find some affinity with a political party. But the attempt to mobilise religious interests against one another – Christian against Muslim; Muslim against Hindu and Jew – is profoundly destructive.
My first job was in Northern Ireland running a reconciliation programme for a national Christian denomination. We challenged sectarian divisions and helped communities step back from the politics of religious blocs in a context where religious symbolism and rhetoric were sometimes used as a means to shape identities in opposition to others.
It is genuinely shocking, then, to see political parties activating a new sectarian politics. Tensions around community cohesion, integration of migrants and what some are calling ‘cultural coherence’ are running high as it is. If our national life fragments into rival sacred identities, Britain as a whole will suffer. As a practicing Christian, I say that the people of Gorton and Denton deserve better than being subjected to faith-inflected populism.
As a Labour politician, I must also look inwardly. We are not immune from these temptations. In recent years, we have at times indulged in what the American political theorist Mark Lila, analysing Hiliary Clinton’s failed 2016 Presidential campaign, called “identity liberalism”: the courting of sectional interests (Latinos, women, the LGBTQ community, and African Americans) rather than attempting to build a genuine, broad-based coalition around common goods.
This is both a moral and a political mistake, because it encourages white, working-class voters – who aren’t invited to be one of these interests – to seek their own identity politics in turn. Thus this kind of progressive politics has eroded the centre ground that the Labour Party thrives on and, in a sense, both the Greens and Reform are the result of that mistake.
Conversely, in the early Labour Party, ethnic, racial, religious and even ideological identities were, on the whole, downplayed as against class interests. The focus was about having access to dignified, well-paid work, a decent place to live, proper healthcare and education. Here was an institution in which the secular could bond with the religious, the political liberal with the Marxist, the Protestant with the Roman Catholic, the immigrant with the Brit. Divided interests could find common cause – competing demands were balanced – what GDH Cole called a broad movement on behalf of the ‘bottom dog’. In this way, Labour built what was effectively a movement for a socio-political covenant.
This is the kind of politics our country still needs. We, Labour, must consciously reassert a unifying civic and economic story strong enough to hold us together. We should invite other parties to do the same, and trust the voters to decide. Common good politics built on majority coalitions – not sectarian politics – is the only form of politics Britain should be interested in.
David Smith is Labour MP for North Northumberland
