Britain like you've never seen it before

The messy unpredictable reality of multiculturalism.

Photo by Edson Rosas on Unsplash

It was one of the most shocking moments of election night. Jon Ashworth, Labour's shadow health secretary, lost his seat of Leicester South. A senior party figure taken out, by a grassroots campaign, against the direction of political change. 

For a moment, it seemed like it might be part of a wave. In constituency after constituency with high ethnic minority populations, Labour MPs were being challenged by independent candidates and pushed right to the line. Wes Streeting just about clung on in Ilford North. Jess Phillips just about survived in Birmingham Yardley. But it was eye-wateringly tight. 

This was the Gaza moment. Labour support seeping to independent pro-Palestine candidates as a protest over the party’s policy in the Middle East.

Or at least, that was how we reported it, using the crude categories we deploy in political coverage. But away from Leicester South, something else was happening, which no-one really talked about or even noticed.

Just a few streets down from the polling station where Ashworth was discovering his fate, very strange things were happening in Leicester East. It did something which was unheard of in the 2024 general election: provide a Tory gain. It happened predominantly because of a fragmentation of the vote, but there was another reason lurking under the headline effect. Leicester East has the largest Hindu population of any constituency in Britain and Hindu voters are much more likely to vote Conservative than Muslim voters. 

In Harrow East, which has a very large Hindu population, the Tory general election result only fell one per cent on its 2019 performance, not least because of continued Hindu support for the party. When local MP Bob Blackman later swore-in as an MP, he showed how grateful he was to the community, placing his hand on both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita.

We rarely talk about this. We talk about ethnic minority voters as if they are a homogenous mass, an undifferentiated block of voters who we assume are Labour loyalists. Sometimes, at our most sophisticated, we break voters down into ethnic categories - white, Asian, black - but this is utterly inadequate. There are big meaningful political distinctions between Hindu Asians and Muslim Asians, black Africans and black Carribeans.

Both left and right are guilty of this. Progressives have this hazy benign view of multiculturalism as a positive thing. Aren't all these languages fascinating? Isn't that music lovely? And imagine how many neighbourhood dining options we'll have. But it's really no more specific and grounded in reality than the immigrants-are-bad attitude we see from reactionaries. All the various groups that live in Britain are generalised into a default not-white option. 

There is almost no assessment of the different identities, life experiences and political behaviour of ethnic minority groups and how they differ from one another. There is no embrace, nor even very much interest, in the complex, granular reality of what multicultural Britain is actually like or how it thinks.

There are very few investigations into this. Records only became available in 1997, when Ipsos broke down general election data by ethnicity. In 2012 Ashcroft Polling published a key report into non-white voting and the Conservative party, but there have only been a few large-scale studies since then. They're hard to do, they've very time consuming, they're extremely expensive, and people are honestly pretty wary of them. They're scared they'll be seized on by the far right to exacerbate division. It all feels sensitive and dangerous - better just not to talk about it. 

This week was therefore a rather remarkable moment. On Tuesday, UK in a Changing Europe and Focal data published a new survey of ethnic minority opinion in the UK, by Sophie Stowers, Zain Mohyuddin and James Kanagasooriam. It's one of the most comprehensive assessments we've seen of the values and political beliefs of different ethnic minority groups. It’s really worth reading in full. For now I’m just going to focus on a couple of elements that really struck me.

It is not what you think. It will surprise you in all sorts of ways. It undermines left-wing myths as quickly as right-wing ones. It is often profoundly counter-intuitive and sometimes baffling. It is a picture of Britain as you've never seen it before .

We tend to view ethnic minorities as a left-wing voting block and there's some truth in that. In the 2024 election, the combined Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat vote share was 66% among ethnic minorities, compared to 26% for the Conservatives and Reform. Among white voters, the equivalent figures were 53% and 41%. 

But not all ethnic minorities are the same. British Indians, British Chinese and, to a lesser extent, black African voters are structurally different to other minority groups. They are far more right-wing on economic issues. Indeed, British Indians and British Chinese are more right wing than white people. They're more likely to say that an individual’s place in society is down to individual effort, that government should not redistribute income and that we should focus on growing the economy over redistribution. Bangladeshis and black Caribbeans, on the other hand, are far more left-wing. I found the image below to be one of the most fascinating graphs I've seen in a long time.

One of the chief divisions among white voters in modern British politics is university education. Once upon a time, more education meant a higher income, which meant a greater likelihood of voting Tory. Now everything is flipped on its head. As politics becomes more about culture than economics, the dynamic has changed. More education means more social liberalism, which means a greater likelihood to vote Labour. Over the last 20 years, non-graduates have drifted right and graduates have drifted left.

But strikingly, that process is not taking place for ethnic minorities. Among non-white Brits, graduate level education still makes you more likely to be Conservative, just like it used to do for white people. The split here seems to be predominantly economic, not cultural. In the words of the report's authors: "Class cleavages and patterns that have disappeared from the voting patterns of white Britons exist and are indeed getting stronger amongst non-white voters. The Conservative Party will continue to have its esoteric coalition of affluent minorities and nongraduate whites and Labour the opposite. In other words, the Lee Anderson - Rishi Sunak spectrum is a feature, not a bug, of right-wing politics."

One of the most important political maxims of our era is that 'representation matters'. It's so widely and deeply held that it barely even needs saying anymore. We simply assume that it is true. Our TV and cinema screens are much more diverse than they were even a decade ago. Films like Black Panther and Wonder Woman changed the whole notion of what a blockbuster could be. The same applies in politics. Suddenly it feels completely unremarkable that there are black people in Cabinet, that a British Asian was prime minister, that a black woman is running to be leader of the Conservative party. 

This all all feels like meaningful progress - one of the key improvements of the last decade. But then you read the data in the report and it runs directly counter to our assumptions.

On one end of the spectrum are British Caribbeans, who say that they often see themselves reflected in popular culture and sometimes in positions of power. And yet they also report much higher rates of personal racism. On the other end are British Chinese. They feel culturally excluded and ignored. But they do not report anything like the level of racism that other ethnic minority groups do. Check out the graph below. Again, it's one of the most interesting I've seen for ages.

This is probably the kind of finding that turns researchers off the subject. You can imagine all the most bovine muddle-headed fools - GBNews types, basically - making hay with this stuff. Representation DOESN'T matter! It might actually INCREASE racism! 

Obviously it doesn't show anything of the sort. There could be all sorts of reasons for these findings. But what it does suggest is that there is no link between representation and experience of racism, that the things we consider tests of our societal direction of travel are not as useful as we thought they were, that good and bad outcomes can co-exist.

Oh and one other thing: No-one ever talks about the British Chinese. They are the oldest Chinese community in Western Europe. They number half a million, comprising nearly 0.8% of the country’s population. They’re in every major British city. It is astonishing how rarely they are mentioned in any capacity. They are basically invisible: from TV, from film, from radio, from newspapers, from politics. It’s indicative of just how narrow and selective our view of diversity truly is.

We obviously need more work like this, but we're unlikely to get it. "Our study is flawed, the data has real limitations, and the analyses are constrained by survey length and researcher time," the authors wrote. "Almost none of the economic or social incentives to do work like this are positive."

And yet the absence of research in these areas is double galling when you notice how quickly our basic assumptions are challenged once we do it. They start to disintegrate underneath us.

The report starts to reveal multicultural Britain for what it is. Not the liberal rose-tinted sentiments about diversity or the reactionary hatred of difference, but a proper complex, concrete assessment of how different groups in this country are thinking and behaving. With a bit of luck, it'll prompt more funding in future. Because by God, we obviously need it.

Odds and Sods 1

The first three Origin Story books - on Fascism, Conspiracy Theory and Centrism - come out next Thursday. They look gorgeous - exactly what we wanted. Retro, fun, collectable. 

Last week I contacted the first five people to ever take out a paid subscription to the newsletter and sent them a free copy (guys, it'll be with you imminently, I’m posting today). Next week I'll do a little competition to get new subscribers on BlueSky, I think. We're doing a fairly epic tour of half the cities in the UK to promote it. I'll lay out a full list in next week's newsletter.

In the meantime you're invited to the launch party in West London on November 7th. Do come along - that night's going to be full on, coming right after the US election.

I went on Pod Save the UK to talk about the Centrism book on Wednesday. It's kind of an odd feeling. Every previous book I've done has been an expression of my own views: On what will happen with Brexit, what liberalism is and why it'll save you, what's wrong with Westminster and how to fix it. This time, I am outlining other people's views, so my entire posture kinda changes in a way I'm not used to. I'm not really reporting my views so much as encapsulating others's. It's enjoyable, but a very different mental space to be in.

I suppose that's a reflection of the gap between my usual punditry and Origin Story. The former is usually a bit all-guns-blazing for a particular position. The latter is more judicious and fair. I hate being fair, but sometimes you have to be. 

The thing is though: Origin Story does have a mission and these books do too.

We've tried to maximise their commercial appeal. They're designed to be popped in the basket impromptu while someone is by the till - a quick, reasonably-priced addition to the shopping bag. We've written them almost like adventure stories, full of thrills, comedy, suspense and bleak moral tragedy. By the end, anyone who has read them will be able to stand their ground at dinner parties or down the pub: knowing what ideas mean and where they came from. 

But all of that is for a reason. Origin Story is a mission to clarify terms so that they can't be used to make us hate one another. It's a defensive position against the mangling of language. It's an attempt to bring back the kind of debate which means we can all actually understand each other and, who knows, maybe even empathise with one another. It’s a demand for meaning and sincerity rather than tribalism and ignorance. 

But also money. We totally want to make money. SO you can buy them below if you don't have a copy yet. If you enjoy this newsletter, it'll be right up your street.

Fascism

Conspiracy Theory

Centrism

Odds and Sods 2

I've been rewatching Gavin and Stacey ahead of the Christmas special and this seems a good moment to remind you how deeply joyously goddamn wonderful it is.

It is terribly kind. It loves its characters, and yet it will not bullshit you about them. They're not sanitised. They're real. "I'm not going in there bareback," Smithy says to Gavin in the first episode, talking about Nessa. Perhaps we wouldn't have him say that now, or we'd have to find a way of distancing the programme from him. But the show always had that sense to it. Like it was saying: Yeah, he really is a twat. He's the kind of guy that says things like that. But also, you might like him anyway. There might be something worthwhile and vulnerable and funny about him despite all that. 

Those Essex boys Gavin is friends with feel completely real. They look and sound like the kind of guys that would try to beat me and my friends up when we were teenagers - lairy broken over-watered English kids. But the women who surround Stacey are just as real. Their sex lives aren't judged and nor are they held up like some kind of brave political statement either. At one point Stacey does something unspeakable with a whipped cream and a stripper. The next morning she laughs and says to her mum: “Oh mam.” And her mum, who spends most of her life making omelettes, whispers: “Tell me later.” I love that moment. It summarises so much about these people, the world they inhabit and the overwhelming love the writers have for these characters.

It is so good. So good. I always thought it was brilliant. I had forgotten just how perfect it truly is. You're in good time to start rewatching it now, in time for that Christmas special.

See you next week.