Alexander Bowen: ‘Independent’ candidates are anything but and we should all worry about that

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

When we, or at least I, used to think of independent candidates, those candidates looked a lot like Claire Wright, the independent Devon councillor who for three general elections in a row would give the Conservative MP for East Devon a run for his money.

They’d probably have worked in the NHS and spent their weekends at school bake sales, their manifesto would have been designed by some sort of community survey, and the key mobilising issue would be stopping sewage or keeping the NHS drop-in open. In short, they were probably a Liberal Democrat who didn’t quite want to admit it.

Those kind of independents do still exist, in the kind of places where honesty boxes still mean something and where The Vicar of Dibley is maybe a tad too contemporary, yet when I think now of independent candidates I think of hate. Go on a 300 mile drive from Devon to Burnley and you will see what the new face of independent candidates looks like.

That new face is people like Maheen Kamran who told Politics Home that her key issues in her local election campaign were school standards (respectable), sanitation (respectable if not a tad LibDemmy), Gaza (irrelevant though hardly unprecedented), oh and bringing back gender segregation. I say,  here though, I suspect even Burnley’s Victorian industrialists would have balked slightly at the idea of formally ‘segregating’ the public place as has been proposed.

Those views ought to be a surprise, and they ought to be fringe, but they aren’t. Kamran seems to have a good chance of winning, and anyone who saw last year’s election would hardly be surprised by independent candidates with extremist views winning. Four of these candidates were elected last year, and another half dozen were just a few percentage points off of taking out leading Labour figures like Wes Streeting, Jess Phillips, and Shabana Mahmood. The views of those candidates were just as bad as Kamran’s too – if not worse.

They were misogynistic, homophobic, racist, frankly any backwards view you could think of they held. They didn’t stop there either – they wanted to jail their political opponents, they supported terror organisations including groups that bomb British ships. Their allies are now standing for office, and these candidates are mobilising the resources that these elected MPs can provide.

Thursday then is our national sectarianism barometer. It will let us know how much further we’ve fallen in the last ten months but, once we’ve taken the temperature, what is to be done?

As individuals it means getting out and voting, and sometimes voting for whoever is best positioned to stop sectarian extremism. In Scotland people from all unionist parties are willing to go out and vote for the best placed unionist, whoever can stop the SNP. Well if you live in England and you are presented a choice between a paper Tory, a normal Labour candidate, and the likes of Maheen Kamran, the need to stop Little Miss Gender Segregation ought outweigh the antipathy of Starmer. He and his government might be terrible yes but at least his political bedfellows have values from this side of the renaissance.

Though lord knows that doesn’t extend to voting for Labour candidates whose top political issues are supporting building airports in Pakistan, trying to institute blasphemy laws, and insisting grooming gangs don’t exist. The Labour Party more broadly certainly has its own problems with sectarian extremism – giving birth to the Tammany Hall of Tower Hamlets under Lutfur Rahman – but still when push comes to shove, and it became clear Rahman was undermining the basic functioning of liberal democracy, they were at least willing to shove Rahman out of the door.

Ultimately though voting for however is best placed to defeat sectarianism is a sticking plaster for a symptom. Preventing Lebanonisation or Bosniakification, political systems where each ethno-religious group has their own party system and where the only thing that’s cross ethnic is the desire to rent-seek for their group, requires broader change.

As I wrote last year, when communitarianism broke through at the general election, there is plenty we can do and plenty of international examples to follow. Getting rid of the imperial hangover of non-citizen voting like nearly every other state on earth, ending defacto segregation in schools and housing with novel policies like those practiced in Denmark, banning separatist religious practices like the French do, there is much that can and should be done.

I wouldn’t hold your breath as far as Labour implementing any of those policies is concerned but, if on Thursday our sectarianism barometer records another temperature rise, with another two dozen or so Labour councillors lost to ethno-religious extremism, Labour may at last be willing to do something, anything, about it. The job of the Conservatives then will be to hold their feet to the fire and push them into making decisions that can be shirked for longer.

Badenoch has done a good job so far when it comes to naming the problem, now she must name the solution and challenge Labour to match it.