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Nigel Farage is worried about democracy. Specifically, he’s worried about his Reform party losing the Gorton and Denton byelection, feeling that they are the victim of “sectarian voting and cheating”. Sectarian voting is a peculiar little concept: if it means “everyone sharing the same belief system has voted the same way”, isn’t that all voting? Is it a problem if everyone in the same NCT group also voted the same way? Surely there’s more to it.
Drill down a little further, and the problem is “family voting”, wherein one family member dictates the votes of all the others. One volunteer polling observers group says it witnessed this in 12% of cases, but it hasn’t been clear on what it means or looks like. Does the head of the family stand at the door saying, “You know what to do” to a crocodile formation of cousins? Would they not have been more likely to do that by WhatsApp? I have personally been the victim of family voting, when in 1997 I wanted to spoil my ballot and my mum told me to vote Labour and stop being stupid. Taking the incredibly long view, it’s possible that I was not stupid, but too late now, I’ve already been party to election rigging.
The talk of family voting all felt quite racially coded and, thank God, in the absence of Alan Turing, Kemi Badenoch was on hand to break that code. On X, she blamed the result – in which the Tory vote was so low that, not wearing my glasses, I thought it was the result for most extreme anti-immigration party, Restore Britain – on “the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes”. There’s a lot going on in that sentence, which somehow manages to conjure supernatural peril, dystopian industrialisation and organ theft into one terrifying reality: Muslims exist, and they’re allowed to vote.
The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, arrived with the helicopter view. What if we got ahead of the problem by making it impossible for the non-British-born ever to gain a solid enough foothold that they were able to vote? In what would be the biggest legislative shake-up for asylum seekers in a generation, Labour seeks to make refugee status temporary – renewable every 30 months. If your country becomes safer over that time, you’ll be sent back home. Just eyeballing the world at large, I don’t see anywhere getting any safer. It seems unlikely, too, that Mahmood’s changes will get past her party, many of whom look at her Farage-lite posturing and think: “That is the diametric opposite of everything I believe and care about.”
Pity the contestants in this race to the bottom, since, unique among races, no one knows where the finish line is. Just when they’ve exhausted themselves with dog-whistling vindictiveness, some joker will come along offering to strip voting rights from anyone who’s ever visited a mosque, and they’ll have to pick themselves up and start running again. Pity the spectators more, though, because this is absolutely nauseating to watch.
About a year after Brexit, I was in Berlin on a panel of feminists, and one said that the best successor to the suffrage movement would be a campaign for votes for refugees. “These Europeans,” I thought. “They say the kookiest things. When you’ve just escaped a war zone, you’ve got 32p a week of discretionary income and an apple is a quid, you’re struggling with the language and as you do start to master it, it turns out the newspapers hate you for no reason, the last thing you want to do is engage with what ‘Liberal Democrat’ means.”
The intervening 10 years have changed my mind. “Can that person vote?” is the only language many politicians understand, and has delivered them a readymade out-group of people who can’t, which they bounce between each other. Islamophobia and anti-immigration arguments have become the currency of this “ideas” marketplace. There is no point begging for humanity and universalism case by case. Whatever it takes to make everyone a person again, in the eyes of the discourse: let’s fight for that.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
