Sectarianism as Political Cover
When independence is framed as infiltration, the system’s decay is complete.
The word sectarian has been dusted off and rebranded for modern use. It’s no longer about Belfast or Derry, Protestant or Catholic. It’s now about who gets to belong in British politics. When ministers talk about “sectarian platforms” or “political Islam,” what they’re really saying is that independent Muslim voices, or any voices that refuse to play by party rules, are a problem. The meaning has shifted. Sectarianism no longer means religious conflict; it means political disobedience.
The narrative that “political Islam” is creeping into British life didn’t appear from nowhere. It’s being manufactured with purpose. The 2024 General Election was historic: 419 independent candidates stood across the country, the highest number in modern British history. Six of them won. Five in England, one in Northern Ireland. Only the five English independents, all of whom happened to be Muslim, have been cast as suspicious or “sectarian.” The sixth, in Northern Ireland, was barely mentioned, no warnings, no editorials, no talk of infiltration. That selective scrutiny says everything.
These independents were not fringe figures. Many had spent years inside the major parties, Labour, the Conservatives, and even the Liberal Democrats, before being expelled, suspended, or forced out for challenging official lines. Some opposed their parties’ positions on Gaza, others on local issues or corruption. I know this first-hand. I stood as one of those 419 independent candidates in the 2024 election. I experienced the same treatment, hence I resigned my membership after seeing how party bureaucracy was being used to silence dissent, manipulate selections, and shield leadership from accountability. It wasn’t democratic engagement; it was brand management. It was a deliberate, concerted effort in the midst of the Israel/Gaza conflict. Make of that what you will, but that will all come out.
That’s the quiet truth Westminster won’t acknowledge. The movement of independents didn’t emerge from ideology; it emerged from exhaustion. It grew because people realised the party system no longer represents the public, only itself. Independence became the last space left for integrity, and because so many of the successful candidates were Muslim, the establishment has decided to reframe democracy as being in danger. When Muslims organise politically, they’re not celebrated as active citizens; they’re accused of sectarian plotting. The very act of participation becomes suspect.
The hypocrisy is staggering. For years, British Muslims have been told they don’t integrate, that they stay on the margins of civic life. Yet when they demonstrate the very essence of democracy, organising, holding hustings, running campaigns, voting strategically, they’re branded infiltrators. What’s being described as “sectarian politics” is simply representation breaking out of the parties’ control. The anxiety isn’t about faith; it’s about losing power.
Take ‘The Muslim Vote’ campaign, the media’s favourite shorthand for this so-called threat. In reality, TMV was just one component of a far broader democratic awakening. It organised publicly, held hustings, endorsed candidates, and mobilised turnout. That’s what political engagement looks like in any healthy democracy. But TMV was easy to single out, because it made a visible point: Muslims, like everyone else, can vote tactically, think strategically, and refuse to be taken for granted.
For every seat where TMV was active, dozens of others saw independent campaigns rooted in completely different causes, such as housing, poverty, environmental neglect, corruption, and community disillusionment. The 419 independents weren’t a bloc. They were evidence of a nation that had stopped believing in its political institutions.
The numbers are telling. The 2024 general election turnout was 60.5%, the second lowest since 1885. Nearly 17 million registered voters didn’t vote for anyone. In surveys, the top reason wasn’t apathy; it was distrust. The Edelman Trust Barometer recorded that only 21% of Britons believe political parties act in the public interest. That’s the true crisis of integration, not cultural, but institutional. The parties haven’t lost Muslim Britain. They’ve lost Britain, full stop.
So when Muslims participate in the same democratic process everyone else does, the outrage isn’t really about faith; it’s about exposure. Their participation shows what the establishment fears most, that civic engagement doesn’t need party permission. The moral panic over “political Islam” is a projection of that insecurity.
Yet, while Muslim independents are scrutinised for the audacity of winning seats, no one questions the Church of England’s unelected power. Twenty-six bishops sit in the House of Lords as of right, with the authority to speak and vote on national policy. That is religious influence embedded in the unwritten constitution. It’s accepted as heritage, not infiltration. Britain still calls itself a Christian country, even though less than half of England and Wales now identify as Christian (2021 Census). In a multicultural democracy, representation should reflect the population, not preserve hierarchy. But the old guard clings to its privileges while denouncing others for exercising theirs.
That’s the real contradiction: a state church is normal, but a Muslim councillor is a threat. It isn’t about religion; it’s about who’s allowed to belong while wearing it.
Beneath all of this runs a deeper anxiety. Demographic change, not Islam, is the real shift. Britain’s population is younger, more diverse, more urban, and more connected to the wider world than any generation before. For the political class, that’s the existential crisis. Religion is the pygmy, the small, convenient stand-in. The larger fear is that the old levers of control, fear, loyalty, and nostalgia, no longer work. A younger electorate raised on pluralism doesn’t buy the narrative that British identity depends on exclusion. So instead of adapting to the country as it is, the establishment constructs a phantom enemy inside it.
This is why “sectarianism” has become the perfect cover story. It converts demographic reality into cultural anxiety. It recasts democratic participation as infiltration. It allows the same institutions that have alienated voters for decades to claim they’re defending the nation. But a democracy that brands representation as extremism is one that’s already failing.
The fixation on “political Islam” isn’t about national unity; it’s about self-preservation. It gives the Tories relevance in opposition, lets Labour perform toughness without reform, and offers the media a perpetual moral panic to sell. Meanwhile, the real fractures, housing, wages, and local collapse, remain untouched. Britain’s disintegration wasn’t infiltrated from outside; it was engineered from within. Market-driven, media-fed, politically sanctioned.
If independent MPs are now being called an existential threat, that says less about them and more about the fragile system surrounding them. Because independence, in its purest form, is the antidote to capture. It’s not a rebellion against Britain; it’s Britain remembering what democracy is supposed to be.
The Britain we know hasn’t been wrecked by religion. It’s been wrecked by those who mistake control for order and fear for patriotism, and if independent voices, Muslim or otherwise, now look like a threat, then perhaps the real danger to Britain isn’t who stands for office, but who still believes they own it.
Third part - why Political Islam is being thrust into mainstream politics.