Rakib Ehsan and the ‘natural conservatism’ of British Muslims

Whose ‘faith’, which ‘flag’, and what type of ‘family’?

Dr Rakib Ehsan has been a presence — indeed, perhaps even an omnipresence — in right-wing ecosystems for some time. He is an independent researcher who studied Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, where he received a BA, an MA, and ultimately a PhD for a thesis entitled ‘Discrimination, Social Relations and Trust: Civic Inclusion of British Ethnic Minorities’. Over the last decade, he has written for a variety of vaguely right-wing outlets, such as Spiked, The Spectator, and Unherd, and is also a regular guest on GB News. He is an associate fellow of Bright Blue, a senior adviser at Policy Exchange, and a research associate at ResPublica. He joined X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2012, and is curious enough to semi-regularly interact with accounts to the right of the Conservative Party mainstream.

From the above paragraph, some readers might already have begun to sense that Ehsan is something of a ‘post-liberal’, and they would be correct. Although most of his articles focus on the failure of inter-communal integration in twenty-first century Britain — his academic specialism — his other articles cover such predictable topics as ‘regional inequality’, ‘neoliberalism’, and the failure of the ‘cosmopolitan left’ to accommodate the need for ‘rootedness’ amongst Britain’s ‘left-behinds’. Indeed, Ehsan is so post-liberal that he even voted for William Clouston’s SDP in the 2024 General Election.

However, Ehsan is not quite your ordinary post-liberal: Ehsan is a post-liberal with a twist. One of his core contentions is that in the coming decades, the natural home of ‘conservatism’ will lie in the myriad of ethnic minority communities; communities which, put together, are projected to outnumber the white British population at some point this century. This argument is put forward most explicitly in his book Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Minority Communities. Ehsan claims that the undeniable antipathy that many immigrant communities have towards ‘social progressivism’ will inevitably draw these groups away from the electoral centre-left. Furthermore, these communities feel a positive affinity with the countries they have settled in, an affinity which is not recognised and is in fact often being actively undermined by a racially ‘identitarian’ left, which is importing grievance politics into Britain from across the Atlantic. As such, Ehsan argues that the demographic doomerism that is widespread on certain parts of the Right is both unwarranted and self-defeating. All that is needed, Ehsan argues, is for the Right to realise their new natural constituency by mobilising their new compatriots’ shared love for ‘faith, flag, and family’. Of course, when confronted with a sea of green, black, and red in any significantly Muslim urban area, we might ask whose ‘faith’, which ‘flag’, and what type of ‘family’ immigrants and their descendants are attached to.

Otherwise, the book is classically post-liberal, with all the usual canards. ‘Critical race theory’, the Marxist-inspired ideology which maintains that Western societies are structurally biased towards whites, is a particular object of scorn. Ehsan claims that this is a distinctively American importation. This of course ignores the long ‘indigenous’ history of ‘critical race theory’ in Britain, which can be traced back to such far-left thinkers, organisations, and publications as the Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall, the Birmingham School of Social Studies to which he belonged, and the New Left Review to which he frequently contributed. In fact, ‘identity politics’ has been the normative operating principle of parts of the British state for many decades. As early as 1999, the Macpherson Inquiry endorsed the spurious notion that the police are ‘institutionally racist’, and similar ideas were widespread in primary, secondary, and tertiary education for even longer than that. The abolition of the Greater London Authority in 1986 was partly driven by the dissemination of far-left propaganda in urban London schools, long before ‘drag queen story time’. The Equality Act of 2010, which predated the US-based ‘Great Awokening’ by around five years, and which Ehsan praises, foisted upon the Public Sector the requirement to assess the ‘disparate impact’ of initiatives on people with ‘protected characteristics’. The wider post-liberal and/or anti-Woke narrative of ‘Americanisation’, perhaps most prominently put forward in Tomiwa Owalade’s book This Is Not America, serves the obvious purpose of permitting people to avoid challenging the far-left narrative head on, instead just waving it away as an ‘Americanism’ clumsily foisted upon Britain, a provincial outpost of the American Empire, by the metropole.

Ehsan further seeks to undermine structuralist interpretations of racism by claiming that white working class communities are often comparatively worse off than many ethnic minority groups. This somewhat self-congratulatory narrative of course ignores the aggregate advantages that many ethnic minorities gain from being the recipients of large swathes of social housing — most conspicuously true of Bengalis and Africans — in Inner London and other major urban areas. This allows many ethnic minority groups to remain in relatively economically dynamic areas that they otherwise could not afford, which has boosted headline wages for ethnic minorities while doing nothing for (or indeed actually harming) the still predominantly white, middle class taxpayer. The book further expounds upon the effects of ‘austerity’ and the purportedly ‘atomising’ effects that it has had upon ‘communities’.

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I do not believe Ehsan is a bad faith actor. Like many other non-white critics of the ‘excesses of multiculturalism’, I believe he feels a genuine affinity with the country he was brought up in. He is also motivated by what are — from his perspective, as a successful second-generation immigrant — legitimate concerns about the various polarising forces in twenty-first century British society, such as the increasingly explicit politics of racial ressentiment on the far-left, and the quasi-Islamism of the five newly-elected independent ‘pro-Gaza’ MPs.

However, particularly on X, Ehsan does sometimes show a slightly different face. He once reposted a video of a group of well-suited young Englishmen trading blows at the races with the caption ‘enriched by diversity’ — or words to that effect, the tweet has now been deleted — obviously attempting to parody the online right’s documenting of migrant crimes. (It should be noted that the men involved in this video were all friends and none of them pressed charges against each other.) While a minor transgression, there are other more persistent ways in which Ehsan reflects a kind of soft ethnocentrism, such as his frequent juxtaposition of a supposedly culturally bankrupt white working class with cohesive, pious South Asian immigrant communities.

While he is not malevolent, his takes are sometimes obviously wrong and have little predictive value, in spite of his evident familiarity with and frequent employment of quantitative data related to ethnic minority voting patterns. For example, in a May 2024 article for Spiked, he claimed that there was no monolithic Muslim vote. (The Pimlico Journal, by contrast, predicted that the ‘Muslim vote’ would indeed be an important factor in the election.) Yet in the wake of some of the most blatantly sectarian constituency campaigns in recent British history, he has bemoaned the advent of Islamic politics as a serious threat to the long-term health of British democracy.

Ehsan’s position is somewhat strange in the British context, lacking any obvious natural base of support. While the Conservative Party has repeatedly tried to connect with ethnic minorities, with mixed results (mostly only successful in the case of Hindus), this has generally been seen as a strategy most congruent with ‘modernisation’ and a leftwards shift of the Party; think of Cameron’s ‘A-List’ and its discrimination against the ‘pale, male, and stale’. In Britain, no-one other than Ehsan, or at least no-one as prominent and mainstream as Ehsan, has made the argument that it is precisely the purportedly ‘right-wing’ social conservatism of recent immigrants that makes them suitable electoral recruits; no-one else has really tried hamming up the Conservative Party’s (increasingly non-existent) opposition to gender ideology, gay rights, and the Woke to win over the hearts and minds of the denizens of Luton and Bradford, or least they haven’t in real life and off of X.

And to be fair to Ehsan, at least on first inspection his argument is not wholly without merit. It might be unusual, but that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily wrong. It might currently lack a natural base of support, but that doesn’t mean that a highly competent and charismatic political entrepreneur couldn’t build one. It is of course true that there is a chasmic divide between the social attitudes of the mostly white and entirely ‘socially progressive’ leadership of the centre-left and elements of its voter base, and that this could potentially be exploited.

Muslims, and to a lesser extent other ethnic and/or religious minority groups, genuinely do not like homosexuality being presented as normative, let alone the more novel gender-bending doctrines currently being promoted in state schools from Year 5 to Year 13. This can be seen in the 2019 protests — the epicentre being heavily Muslim areas of Birmingham — against the teaching of same-sex relationships in schools. But it is also reflected in sporadic acts of homophobic violence, the antipathy of Muslim pro-Gaza/anti-Israel marchers to ‘Queers for Palestine’, and the position of Workers Party GB on the issue. Surely there could be an opening for the aspects of the ‘socially conservative’ Right to tap into this growing disconnect? Additionally, the centre-right will need some number of ethnic minority votes in order to win. Thanks to Tory mass migration, many marginal seats have become increasingly ethnically diverse in recent years. And finally, wouldn’t it be funny if the Left, who have consistently patronised ethnic voter blocs and supported mass migration, were usurped by a new, syncretic Right? What a metaphorical own goal! There’s so much irony waiting to be materialised — so Ehsan thinks — for the demographic change that outwardly seemed to guarantee left-wing political domination without end to actually lead to their downfall, and in the process of doing so revive the Britain of coronation street parties, national service, and religious faith. Of course, none of this will appeal to the core Pimlico Journal readership, but you can at least see why some people might be attracted to such an argument.

Ehsan’s proposed political strategy is probably most similar to the various attempts to cultivate a multiracial right-wing voting bloc in the United States. This has achieved mixed, though perhaps not quite non-existent, results. The noughties ‘hispandering’ strategy of George W. Bush’s Republican Party sought to make significant inroads into Hispanic communities on the basis that they had the same shared ‘conservative values’ — faith and family — as white Americans. On the face of it, it seems odd to present lower-class migrants, mostly of Indian peasant stock and from countries with no continuous tradition of representative self-government, characterised by extreme wealth disparities, extended family structures, and socialist populism, as ‘natural conservatives’. While it is of course true that many Hispanics espouse ‘socially conservative’ beliefs — though often not actually reflected in their own lifestyle preferences — most have little time for the Anglo-American Right’s traditional support for small government and personal responsibility.

Figures from the Pew Research Center show that while many Hispanics did vote for Bush — he won 34% of their vote in 2000 and 40% in 2004, strong when compared to McCain’s paltry 23% and Romney’s 29% — this was partly a result of the GOP’s aggressive Hispanophilia — both tokenistic (eg., Jeb Bush speaking Spanish at rallies) and substantive (eg., support for an amnesty for illegal immigrants) — and its steady abandonment of fiscal conservatism. Hispanics have begun returning to the Republicans in the wake of Trump's caudillismo, but this support is primarily linked to the personalistic politics of Trump and the ‘pull up the drawbridge’ phenomenon found amongst established immigrant communities. In 2016, Trump’s vote share among Hispanics was 29%; in 2020, it increased to 32%. According to some pollsters, he is now registering a vote share in the high thirties among Hispanics, although it is yet to be seen whether this support will actually materialise on election day.

This has given hope to some commentators, such as Compact Magazine’s Sohrab Ahmari and the reactionary legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, the ‘integralist’ would-be ayatollahs of the Religious Right. Ahmari, Vermeule, and their allies have attempted to revive (or perhaps create) a ‘multicultural populism’, overlooking the fact that Trump’s support amongst ethnic minorities is significantly less than it is amongst whites, even more educated whites. And indeed, Trump’s solid base of support amongst Hispanics is not a consequence of explicitly appealing to this group in the language of ‘multiculturalism’, but rather is contingent on the nature of the economic boom he is remembered for engineering when he was president, perceptions of him as a ‘strong leader’, and the strongly negative Hispanic reaction to the Democratic response to the riots that followed the death of George Floyd.

This seems to suggest that the Right usually wins more support from ethnic minorities when it approaches them from a position of strength, rather than as supplicant. Self-affirming, quasi-nativist populism can be subliminally just as appealing to many ‘outgroups’ than explicit pandering to specific communal interests; a pandering that by its nature often alienates both white voters and often voters from other ethnic minority groups, and that in any case will always find it difficult to compete with the more aggressive pandering of the Left, especially when it comes to catering to the direct material interests of most ethnic minority voters. Moreover, Hispanic defection to the GOP can also partially be explained by the amorphous nature of the ‘Hispanic’ category: many Hispanics intermarry with and assimilate into the white middle class. There is no analogous trend to this in Britain, in which even relatively prosperous and/or well-integrated South Asian groups, such as Sikhs and Hindus, remain highly endogamous.

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So how does Ehsan’s position square with the actual political reality of multicultural Britain? While there isn’t yet comprehensive demographic data for the most recent General Election, there seems to be no real trend of an electoral shift to right-wing parties among minority groups, with the exception of Hindus. While this is partly due to this community being fairly prosperous, even this small success has substantially been due to outright communal pandering, as seen in seats such as Leicester East and Harrow East. And with the emergence of the ‘Hindu Manifesto’ and the de-assimilative effects of mass, increasingly low-class Indian immigration since Brexit, we will probably see this ‘model minority’ shift more decisively into the communalist rat race of majority-minority democratic politics.

Reform, a party which actually does attack the ‘politically correct’ ideology that supposedly antagonises non-white ‘natural conservatives’, performs poorly amongst non-whites. Besides the minuscule ‘other’ category, of which Reform won 14%, their support was generally less than half of that of the national average, winning 7% of black and ‘mixed’ voters, and just 3% and 5% for Muslim South Asian and Indian voters respectively. And this was in spite of the often comical tokenism of the party, with dancing West African supporters and Punjabi rap music featuring in some local campaign videos. The Conservatives also performed poorly, winning 11% of black voters, 7% of Muslim South Asians, 32% of Indians, 9% of the ‘mixed’ ethnicity, and 8% of the ‘other’ category. By contrast, Labour won 72%, 44%, 40%, 59%, and 48% of these respective groups. Yes, despite the Tories aggressively pandering to Hindus in many constituencies, Labour even won more of the Indian vote than the Tories, and by a reasonable margin.

In terms of longer term electoral trends, half of ethnic minority voters live in just 75 of Britain’s 650 constituencies. Prior to the General Election, Labour held all but five of these seats, winning an average of 58% of the vote in them, in spite of 2019 being a disastrous year for Labour nationally. In fifty of these seats, the non-white British population is the majority, and in the other fifteen they make up at least one-third of the population. All this somewhat blunts the political importance of winning the votes of ethnic minorities for the Right: they are heavily concentrated in a small number of seats, and the seats they are concentrated in are mostly not at all marginal. In 2019, Labour won every single constituency with a black African/Afro-Caribbean population of over 14%, and also won 40 out of 46 seats with an Asian population of over 15%, and 18 of the 20 seats with the most Indians. In 2019, Labour won 63% and 67% of the Asian and Black vote respectively; in 2017, 70% and 73%; and in 2015, 52% and 70%. As we can see, the electoral trend has actually been towards a consolidation of the ethnic vote bloc, with the exception of some defections at the most recent general election.

Muslim voters seem far more animated by foreign policy issues such as Gaza and Kashmir than by ‘culture war’ issues at home — let alone economic policy or other such dry matters — as demonstrated by the mass defection of Muslim voters from Labour to the Workers Party GB, the Green Party, and various ‘pro-Gaza’ independents. Labour support in areas with large Muslim communities fell by around twenty-three percentage points to 39%, with the party losing five seats to independents. Prior to the General Election, 51% of the ethnic minorities backing the Greens said Gaza was their number one issue. Amongst Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, 41% said that the situation in Gaza was the one of the major issues deciding their vote, as compared to 18% of all ethnic minorities, and just 5% of the general public.

George Galloway’s Workers Party GB is perhaps indicative of what ‘multicultural populism’ might actually look like. Galloway manages to selectively target his appeals to the electorate, complaining about grooming gangs in Rochdale (without specifying the perpetrators’ Pakistani ethnicity) and gender ideology in schools, while also pivoting aggressively to foreign policy issues that energise Muslims, all the while making vaguely non-denominational appeals to ‘God’. There is also something rather ‘ethnic’ about Galloway’s style, yet also recognisably British — a unique combination not replicated in any other white or non-white politician. The relative success of ‘pro-Gaza’ candidates at this election suggests that Labour-supporting ethnic minorities, specifically Muslims, can indeed defect from the Left, but only when their own ethnocentric policy interests are directly appealed to. It’s very difficult to imagine the British Right pulling this off, and for all his talents, even Galloway’s support amongst whites is limited: most whites correctly identify him as a Muslim ethno-sectarian bloc politician, whatever appeals he might selectively make on his leaflets. Given that Rochdale is not an especially Muslim constituency, it is somewhat unsurprising that Galloway lost his seat at the General Election. It is probably best to think of his February by-election victory as something of a freak occurrence, not the dawn of a new age of ‘multicultural populist’ politics.

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Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let us assume that winning the votes of ethnic minorities in Britain is both politically important and politically possible. Could Ehsan’s strategy of the Right appealing to ethnic minority voters on the basis of their supposed ‘social conservatism’ actually work?

In my own experience, it is conspicuous just how differently ‘social conservatism’ — even when the term is accurately applied — manifests itself amongst ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, to the ‘social conservatism’ found (increasingly rarely) amongst white Britons. Having worked in a comprehensive school with a large Muslim contingent, in which white British students were often five to a class or less, I find myself unable to agree with Ehsan’s assessment of the social values of Muslims in Britain, whatever they might claim in interviews and however they might respond to surveys.

Muslims are, both approvingly and critically, presented as pious and diligent in their religious duties; their women alternatively as ‘oppressed’ and ‘downtrodden’, or ‘demure’ and ‘modest’; their children as disciplined, often physically; and their youth as deferential to the elderly. In my experience, this depiction is not generally accurate. There are indeed some Muslim students who do meet the above criteria; hijabis who conscientiously highlight and take notes in cursive as you speak, address you as ‘sir’, and are conspicuously quiet. However, the general trend is not towards the hijabi ‘highlighter girl’, but rather towards the ‘Slay Queen’ hijabi vaper girl. These are students, frequently overweight, who manage to neutralise any of the conservative associations of the headscarf by wearing tight but poorly fitting leggings and plastering what is exposed of their body with makeup and cheap jewellery. The moniker ‘hoejabi’ has been in use for some time by now (first attested online as early as 2011), identifying this weird juxtaposition of tokenistic modesty and tasteless exhibitionism. These students are obnoxious, expressing themselves in the aggressive but plaintive intonations of MLE, perpetually self-victimising, and frequently interspersing curses with invocations of ‘wallahi’. As for the male students, Andrew Tate was a universal point of reference, with the ‘sigma male’ meme being synthesised with a distinctively ethnic ‘grindset’. Low-ride tracksuits were worn most of the year round, with the the full flowing thawb only making its appearance on World Culture Day.

To remark upon this is not just voyeurism or an opportunity to vent: the ‘hoejabi’ phenomenon is in fact emblematic of a wider trend towards an increasingly Lacedonian practice of Islam coupled with increasing politicisation and tribalism. The hijab, Ramadan, salat, etc., no longer primarily function as symbols of conservative religious practice, but rather as markers of ethnic separateness for an increasingly deracinated and impious Muslim community. While The Economist would undoubtedly interpret the apparent non-traditionalism of younger Muslims as indicating integration, in fact it represents anything but. These students, while taking full advantage of many of the liberties and comforts afforded to them by life in the West, have remained aggressively ethnically tribalistic, striving to make the lives of their white peers as unpleasant as possible. The situation in Gaza was remorselessly invoked, not out of genuine humanitarian concern, but to assert the moral primacy of Islamic politics and the central importance of the ostensible welfare of the Global Ummah. Muslim students expected both interest and active deference from white students to the importance of far away ethno-religious conflicts, and sought to spatially dominate school grounds with this in mind.

Ehsan’s argument therefore fails on two fronts. First of all, Muslims — especially younger Muslims — are not, in general, ‘socially conservative’. Islamic dress is held onto principally as a marker of their ethnic separateness to the majority white British population. And secondly, most Muslims do not feel feel any real affinity with Britain, at least not in the way that most white British people do. Yes, there is some recognition of Britain as a place of abode, and many might feel either ambivalent about or disconnected from the homeland of their ancestors, but most will either assertively or matter-of-factly describe themselves as non-British, perceiving national identity as intrinsically linked to ancestral origin. There are really no common grounds on which the British Right could appeal to these people, perhaps with the exception of some Muslim zoomers who are ‘redpilled’ anti-feminists who don’t like homosexuality and transgenderism.

While most of this discussion has been focused on the Muslim population of Britain, as this is the group that Ehsan is most interested in, it’s worth noting that younger blacks often exhibit similar pathologies, although usually in less conspicuously politicised ways. I won’t spend much time refuting the myth of the ‘naturally conservative’ evangelical African, as this has already been discussed in the pages of J’accuse, but it’s worth noting that younger blacks — irrespective of their geographical origin or the style of their parental upbringing — almost all incline towards idolising drill music. Frequent attendees of Sunday School will still discuss Top Boy, and many will still exhibit all the hallmarks of the culture surrounding gangs, whether or not they are actually personally involved in crime. When politics does come up, boys will express hostility towards feminism and support for Andrew Tate; amongst girls, explicit support for far-left and anti-white ideology is much more common, with Horatio Nelson literally only being referenced by them as a ‘slaver’.

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I have primarily discussed the second- and third-generation immigrants who make up the bulk of Britain’s ethnic minorities, many of whom are currently going through secondary education. But what of their parents, the vast majority of whom arrived under Tony Blair and Boris Johnson? Is this all just the result of the corrosive effects of a permissive British society that is eroding the ‘traditional values’ of ethnic minority communities?

Ehsan believes ethnic minorities are attached to ‘faith, flag, and family’. ‘Faith’ and ‘flag’ have already been discussed, but it is also worth spending some time considering how the significance of ‘family’ is radically different for most ethnic minorities than for most white Britons. The term ‘amoral familism’ best describes the social attitudes of non-white families from the ‘Global South’. Originally coined by sociologist Edward Banfield to describe the nepotistic social structure of southern Italy in the ’50s, it accurately reflects the petty familial self-interest and indifference to wider public welfare amongst many South Asian families.

The most egregious displays of this tendency in Britain can be found in the many Pakistani families still harbouring grooming gang members in Northern mill towns, or the Somali families protesting the ‘racist’ arrests of their children for gang rape, but the tendency also exhibits itself in more petty ways. In general, these communities show an indifference on the part of parents towards the various negative externalities that their offspring inflict upon wider society: uncles will rarely reprimand their relatives for drug dealing, or for joyriding in a Mercedes. The most direct experience that a teacher will have of this is when they report the bad behaviour of a feral student to their ostensibly ‘strict’ parents. Students who were violent and anti-social, and often were on course for permanent exclusion, rarely seemed to receive any serious domestic reprimand.

There was at times a genuine lack of comprehension on the part of the parents. These were people who often could not speak English in spite of having lived in the country for close to a decade, and whose entire understanding of the situation was thus mediated by their offspring; indeed, just how common this inverted generational power dynamic was seriously undermines Ehsan’s claims about ‘deferential’ social norms towards the elderly amongst Muslims. Other times, there was a semi-comprehension, but this was mitigated by a self-defence mechanism in which a child’s bad behaviour was downplayed so as to save face (presumably to staff and other parents). Often this was coupled with an attempt to shunt responsibility onto the teachers, who as ‘professionals’ should be moderating and correcting their children’s behaviour, along with with a vague, aspirational hope that their child was somehow still basically on the right track. Parents often seemed completely oblivious to reality. Niqabis would come along to GCSE Options Evening with their child, who had just spent half the week in ‘reflection’ (state school newspeak for ‘detention’), seemingly with not an inkling that their child was well on course for total academic failure. At other times, parents would explicitly abrogate any and all responsibility, arguing that the school either antagonised their students, or alternatively that they were just being ‘picked on’ by the (presumably racist) teachers.

The relationship these families had with British welfare state typified a similar indifference to the wider public interest. Students are ungratefully ferried to and from schools by state-funded taxis; education is provided free of charge, and indeed is usually much better funded in per capita terms than the schools in rural and small town provincial England; and, because of the location of the school, it was able to attract many well-qualified, enthusiastic, and able teachers who wanted to live in a fashionable urban centre. I don’t think any of the parents fully understood that everything they had access to wasn’t actually just manifested by an impersonal welfare state, but that they were in fact net recipients of other people’s taxes. Whatever else can be said of the white working class, there is still actually something of a stigma against being on welfare. And contrary to Harry and Paul, which popularised the archetype of the white chav who blamed his child’s bad behaviour on ‘disability’, for most of the white working class parents I have dealt with, if they cared, they cared; and if they didn’t, they didn’t. There wasn’t any of this strange, face-saving, halfway house; a kind of mimicry of disciplinarianism belied by an enormous indulgence towards the child.

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As such, it is undeniably the case that state-engineered mass migration will make it increasingly difficult for the Right to win future elections. Large swathes of the country, most notably much of London, are now in effect electorally unavailable. In spite of the genuine unpopularity and incompetence of a figure like Sadiq Khan, he is likely to remain Mayor of London for the foreseeable future simply by dint of the loyalty of the ethnic minority bloc vote. This will increasingly replicate across large parts of the country, and some formerly safe seats, such as those in southern English provincial towns and suburbs, will become increasingly marginal.

There is no real way that the Right, in whatever form it takes in the near future, will make significant​ political inroads amongst ethnic minority voters. The Right will always be associated — whether legitimately or not — with patriotism and with Britain, which will automatically put off voters with a tenuous connection to this country. Fiscal conservatism, in however moderated a form, will also not appeal to minority voters, who disproportionately benefit from financial redistribution from the net taxpayer — someone who, on average, is still very likely to be white — and seem to not feel so much of an urge towards genuine self-reliance, economic or otherwise. The ‘social conservatism’ of ethnic minorities is one that is completely alien to that of historic Middle England and the white working class. This should be unsurprising: obviously, the social norms and traditions of Africa and South Asia are completely and radically historically alien to our own; indeed, they can perhaps also partially explain much of the social dysfunction of these countries. In any case, many ethnic minority voters (especially South Asians) seem to only be energised enough to switch parties by foreign policy (or foreign policy related) issues, and pandering to this is a dangerous game to play, as some Tories who have pandered to Hindu voters in the past might begin to find out.

As net migration likely continues in the high hundreds of thousands annually for the rest of this decade, there will be some defection amongst minorities to the populist right, simply because of the sheer undeniable logistical constraints that this will place on British infrastructure. There will also be some resentment at the comparative ease that ‘freshies’ have had in migrating to Britain. Where there might be some more profound changes is amongst young, non-white men, who idolise Andrew and Tristan Tate, and imbibe a more ‘ethnic’ version of videos in the ’10s ‘feminism gets wrecked!’ milieu. As it stands, Reform is apparently polling well (in line with its national average) amongst the 18-24 cohort, particularly with men, although there is no ethnic breakdown of this support yet available. Some of this can probably be explained by the remorseless propaganda that this cohort has been subjected to in state schools, as well as the personal appeal of the memetic Nigel Farage on social media platforms like TikTok. But one thing is for certain: if reasonable levels of support amongst young, ethnic minority men for Reform do indeed materialise, it will not be due to ‘faith, flag, family’ paternalism, as the strategy suggested by Ehsan would imply, but rather to modern, non-traditional, globalised, ‘Very Online’ trends.

The best hope for the British Right is to replicate the GOP’s broadly successful consolidation of a predominantly white core voting bloc while also gaining sufficient defections from non-whites outside this core voting bloc to win elections, not through communal pandering, but through the strength of the ideology on its own terms. As global tensions rise, the foreign policy issues which have led to the far-left making inroads into Labour’s Muslim voter bloc will not end, something that will also help the Right. Indeed, this trend will most likely amplify, with a British Islamo-gauchiste party à la Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France insoumise perhaps being capable of fielding candidates nationally at some point in the future. Obviously, the Right should not focus too much of their attention on this — at least not beyond the purpose of voter mobilisation, and even in this they should be careful not to provoke Muslims into returning to Labour as a kind of self-defence mechanism — and should rather direct their attentions towards attacking mass migration (not Islam) directly, and undermining the party that was most responsible for creating such ethnic voter blocs in the first instance.