An increasing number of Britain’s elected officials prioritize foreign interests and minorities over national interests, even their local interests.
This shift in parliamentary norms shouldn’t be dismissed as representative of diversity. It enables distorted policy, foreign influence, protection of minority criminal gangs (such as Pakistani child rapists and Somali fraudsters), two-tier justice, self-segregation, “third-world tribalism” (as articulated by Suella Braverman, and condemned as “bigoted” by The Guardian), and the proliferation of foreign conflicts.
We’ve seen the evidence anecdotally. For instance, 20 Parliamentarians lobbied for British funding of a new airport in Kashmir, even though some had opposed expansion of London Heathrow.
Meanwhile the Pakistani-born Mayor of Birmingham posts meetings with Pakistani diplomats and footballers, but not his city’s collapsing public services. He raised the Pakistani flag on the anniversary of Pakistan’s independence, but took down British flags during the “Raise the Colours” campaign (since August), claiming safety issues,.
And in November, that same city banned fans of an Israeli football team from visiting Aston Villa, claiming intelligence of threats that somehow could not be policed. Within days, we learned that the so-called intelligence exaggerated Amsterdam’s policing challenge during the same team’s away game there. Just this week, we learned that West Midlands Police itself exaggerated the policing challenge, and consulted multiple local Islamic groups but no Jewish group.
Birmingham isn’t even the most sectarian of Britain’s municipalities.
A corrupt and bigoted Bangladeshi-Islamist party (Aspire) runs Tower Hamlets, a borough of London. Aspire could steal the two associated Parliamentary seats from Labour in 2029. It is led by a convicted electoral-fraudster from Bangladesh. Along the way, an elected official in Tower Hamlets ran for office in Bangladesh simultaneously. This is the Council that tolerated Palestinian flags on public signposts and lampposts for months after Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023, but was quick to remove British flags since August.
We should also ponder whether British aid is corrupted by sectarian interests. For instance, the government increased aid to India while India’s economy was growing, and while India fulfilled a space programme that Britain had long abandoned. Britain increased aid to Pakistan too, while private remittances to Pakistan from Pakistani-Britons increased (and while British welfare benefits to Pakistanis increased).
That last insight comes from Whitehall Analytics, a little know private operation. Now we know from rigorous content analysis by Whitehall Analytics that some MPs spend half of their parliamentary activity on foreign and sectarian interests.
Drawing from Hansard records, Whitehall Analytics coded nearly 150,000 parliamentary questions to ministers, tabled by 140 Labour MPs, serving from January 2018 to December 2025 (continuously).
To test the causes, Whitehall Analytics observed their ethnicity, the ethnic composition of their constituencies, and the number of votes by which they won (their ‘majority’) in the general election of 2024.
Ethnic minority MPs make up 26 of the 140 MPs. These MPs submit roughly twice as many questions as the others, and their subjects are more likely to be sectarian.
Whitehall Analytics categorized their questions into four groups: (1) Palestine, Gaza, and Israel; (2) Asylum, refugees, and aid; (3) Pakistan and Bangladesh; (4) Islam and Islamophobia.
Ethnic minority MPs are much more likely to ask questions about asylum, Palestine, and Gaza. Most are biased towards their or their countries of heritage, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Take Afzal Khan, the MP for Manchester Rusholme, former Lord Mayor of Manchester. A time-series analysis of his questions reveals a consistent emphasis on (in order) Palestine and Gaza, asylum and migration, broader Islamic issues, and Pakistan and Bangladesh. Remarkably, nearly 50 percent of his questions center on these topics.
Afzal Khan is not an outlier. For instance, Yasmin Qureshi, representing Bolton South, asks more questions about asylum and Gaza than local education and infrastructure.
White Labour MPs too have become biased towards their growing minority constituents. Whitehall Analytics shows that the percentage of an MP’s questions on sectarian topics increases with higher South Asian ethnicity in their constituency, and smaller election majorities.
The South Asian ethnicity percentage in the constituency is practically as strong a predictor of MP bias towards the four categories above as is the MP’s own ethnicity. A small election majority is a weaker predictor.
This is profound: Constituency demographics, as much as personal identity, drive sectarian questioning. In an increasingly diverse electorate, representatives pander to sectarian interests to secure votes, even if those representatives are white British.
I have a theoretical explanation, even though my fellow political scientists prefer to ignore it.
