Northern Ireland-style sectarianism is coming to Britain. We should all be terrified
While Keir Starmer buries his head in the sand, our cities are being divided by fear and suspicion and beginning to look like Belfast
There is a scene in The Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen stands in front of a crowd shouting “Nothing to see here!” while hundreds of fireworks explode behind him. In 2025, that has essentially been the Labour Government’s approach to the looming spectre of sectarianism in Britain.
With independent MPs campaigning on Gaza and little else, weekly anti-Israel marches across our cities that have effectively rendered parts of them no-go areas for Jews, and neighbourhoods demarcated by foreign flags or Crosses of St George and Union Flags, our communities are edging ever further away from each other in fear and suspicion.
Take Birmingham, where tensions are running particularly high.
In the run up to Christmas, the city council announced the installation of “hostile vehicle” barriers around its central Christmas market. The measures, officials said, were aimed at stopping would-be attackers driving into “pedestrian areas” during the festive season. There wasn’t the slightest acknowledgement as to who might be driving them, however.
Has the Second City become so divided that terrorism is inevitable? Will the threat come from Islamist extremists or a violent counter-reaction to Islamism? We weren’t told.
When authorities treat the symptom but not the cause, you can’t help fearing going into 2026 that Birmingham and plenty of other places are edging ever closer to Northern Ireland-style sectarianism. This is a tragedy.
The risks of sectarianism – cities becoming something akin to Belfast, with areas divided by faith and identity, operating as unofficial entities with their own leaders and cultures – were evident after the 2024 general election, when four independent MPs (plus Jeremy Corbyn) won their seats standing on an avowedly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel platform. In these cases the MPs appealed to their Muslim constituents on the understanding that enough would be prepared to vote on religious affiliation alone.
But its not just independents who are courting support along such narrow lines. It made me feel nauseous when a year ago, a Labour backbencher, Birmingham MP Tahir Ali, argued for the introduction of a blasphemy law. It came with a premonition that this was just an opening shot and that our establishment does not have the will to defend our civic unity and freedoms against those who would seek to undermine them.
This way of doing politics depends on separatism and exceptionalism. In the minds of its proponents all politics – and therefore society – is reduced to “community only” causes of grievance.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer’s government seems to have buried its head in the sand over the scale of the threat.
His party’s failure to address people’s concerns about the influence of political Islam for fear of losing Muslim voters who have already abandoned them for independents, the Greens and Your Party makes them look even more ridiculous.
Those fears were heightened last month when the MP for Dewsbury and Batley, Iqbal Mohamed – one of the independents – stood in front of a Palestinian flag at a Your Party rally in Birmingham, which appeared to be almost exclusively populated by Muslim men, and said: “[We] must take over the whole of Birmingham, the whole of the West Midlands, the whole of the UK.” Mohamed could perhaps argue he was talking about the newly-formed Left-wing organisation, but to anyone on the outside it looked and sounded like raw sectarianism.
The erosion of our civic unity is heartbreaking for a country that has, outside Ulster and pockets of Glasgow, largely avoided religious and identity-based sectarianism. If enough people feel there is a battle looming – it could be over education, freedom of expression, two-tier policing, women’s rights or a hot-button issue like Sharia law – then there is bound to be a counter-reaction. It’s very easy for it to get worse and very difficult to pull back from. And if Labour won’t defend the principles that are supposed to unite us, sections of the public will find their own.
The reaction could take many forms, from renewed assertiveness by other faiths and communities to the likely electoral backlash against Labour. In two short years Britain’s Jews have been made to feel – with good reason – that their country will not protect them and many are considering leaving as a result. And it’s surely not a coincidence that Tommy Robinson has begun to harness the latent power of Christianity in his campaign against what he sees as the malign influence of Islam in this country. We have witnessed community violence in Leicester over Kashmir. Everyone is on the defensive. It only takes one social media post to trigger something catastrophic.
Unless the Government acts, the paranoia that is fuelling the growth of sectarianism will become ever more entrenched, with white working-class Britons in particular finding themselves at the bottom of society, convinced every other demographic has it better. They’ve already watched the decline of their communities since the deindustrialisation of the 1980s; now they fear they are experiencing the erosion of their identity – and a sense of shock that they can be a minority too.
All of which means, like Ulster, we could soon have self-governed neighbourhoods in our cities festooned with flags so anyone passing through – friendly or hostile – will know with no doubt which tribe’s territory they are in. We could see the ends of terraced houses covered in murals, with each excuse for conflict offering up another hero for the cause, so instead of Bobby Sands or William of Orange, badly-painted images of Tommy Robinson or Hamas martyrs will adorn walls on the segregated streets of Burnley or Walthamstow.
In Ilford, Essex, close to where I grew up, for the past two years streets have been lined with Palestinian flags. Along the streets of towns nearby with a different demographic, the locals have heeded the call of “Operation Raise the Colours” and the Cross of St George and Union Flags adorn the streets of Romford, Basildon and Loughton. This visible declaration of loyalty to a “side” is repeated up and down the country, from Yorkshire to east London.
In Ulster the paramilitaries were extremists, but they had community support. In Britain, if one community takes to the streets, we can assume another will do the same in response. We’ve already had a taste of this after the Southport murders. It threatens innocent people on all sides. And it takes years if not decades to de-escalate sectarianism even when the violence stops.
Britain has changed at such speed and scale that I’m not sure many of us know who we are as a country anymore. That makes it hard to make the case for national unity and purpose, or that we have a set of guiding principles to live by. But until we agree on that, we will see more flags, more resentment and more “hostile vehicle” barriers.
[Source: George Chesterton - Daily Telegraph]
