𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Wes Streeting thought he was drawing a line under his relationship with Peter Mandelson by publishing their WhatsApp messages. Instead, he’s accidentally exposed something far more revealing about Labour’s current predicament. Buried in the messages is the real story. Streeting frets that he’s “toast” at the next election after losing a supposedly safe ward in Redbridge, warning Mandelson that seats with large Muslim populations are slipping to Gaza-focused independents.

In Ilford, he fears, Labour could lose altogether. Strip away the Westminster drama and what you’re left with is an extraordinary admission: Labour now feels electorally hostage to bloc voting driven by religious loyalties and overseas conflicts.

We saw the same thing in the Rochdale by-election, when George Galloway triumphantly declared his victory was “for Gaza”. It’s astonishing that we’ve reached a point where British elections are being fought on the basis of foreign wars, and that we have British MPs openly worrying they cannot take certain positions because of how a particular voting bloc will react.

Is it really too much to ask that British politics centre on Britain rather than imported sectarian battles?

None of this is harmless symbolism either. The same fear of offending certain communities helped allow the grooming gangs scandal to fester for years. Authorities and politicians hesitated, terrified of being branded racist, and vulnerable young girls paid the price instead. Now that same nervous caution is shaping debate on immigration, policing and integration. The lesson Labour seems to have learned is not that this cowardice was disastrous, but that upsetting certain voting blocs is politically fatal.

Look at Birmingham, where Labour MP Tahir Ali has been campaigning for a new airport in Mirpur, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while his own constituents deal with bin strikes, rat infestation and crumbling local services. Or the case of Shahid Butt – a literal convicted terrorist – now standing for council office in a ward he clearly believes voters will simply overlook that history. The sheer audacity of it tells you how confident some candidates now feel that communal loyalty outweighs everything else.

The most glaring example of Labour’s paralysis, though, is cousin marriage. A confident country would confront this barbaric practice honestly. Instead, ministers tiptoe around it. Between 38 and 59% of British Pakistanis are estimated to marry first cousins. Babies born to first-cousin couples are up to three times more likely to suffer serious genetic disorders. And in some cities, up to a fifth of children treated for congenital conditions come from communities where close-relative marriage is common, despite those communities making up a much smaller share of the population.

Figures released last year linked more than two child deaths a week in England to parental consanguinity. Hospitals in parts of East London have recorded one in five child deaths occurring in families where parents were closely related. This is not abstract sociology. It is preventable suffering, repeated generation after generation, and an ever-growing strain on the NHS, which must expand specialist genetic and neonatal services to deal with illnesses that simply never needed to happen.

The social effects are just as serious. Researchers have repeatedly shown that close-kin marriage reinforces clan loyalty and community isolation. Baroness Casey’s reports on integration and grooming gangs both revealed networks built around extended family ties. In several notorious cases, abusers were brothers, cousins or uncles operating inside tight kinship groups where loyalty to the clan outweighed loyalty to wider society or concern for victims. Pretending this pattern does not exist helps no one, least of all the vulnerable girls failed by the system.

Yet Labour refuses even to contemplate banning cousin marriage, even though most Britons support doing so. Why? Because confronting the issue risks alienating part of what Streeting himself effectively describes as the Muslim vote.

And that brings us to the deepest problem. British politics should not be carved up into ethnic or religious vote banks. Citizens are individuals, not communal bargaining chips. When parties start shaping national policy to appease voters motivated primarily by events thousands of miles away, it corrodes social cohesion and breeds resentment among everyone else.

There is also a moral dimension here. Generations of men and women fought and died defending this country and the freedoms we enjoy today. To watch political parties now bend over backwards to placate groups whose political loyalties lie elsewhere is, quite frankly, a betrayal of that legacy.

Streeting thought publishing those texts would clear his name. Instead, he’s given voters a rare glimpse of Labour’s central weakness: a party increasingly driven by fear of losing sectional support rather than confidence in a shared national project.