UK politicians are in a race to the bottom but there is a simple, unexpected way to help refugees | Zoe Williams

"Sectarian voting is a peculiar little concept: if it means everyone sharing the same belief system has voted the same way, isn't that all voting? Is it a problem if everyone in the same NCT group also voted the same way? Surely there's more to it. Drill down a little further, and the problem is family voting, wherein one family member dictates the votes of all the others."

"The talk of family voting all felt quite racially coded and, thank God, in the absence of Alan Turing, Kemi Badenoch was on hand to break that code. On X, she blamed the result on the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes. There's a lot going on in that sentence, which somehow manages to conjure supernatural peril, dystopian industrialisation and organ theft into one terrifying reality: Muslims exist, and they're allowed to vote."

"The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, arrived with the helicopter view. What if we got ahead of the problem by making it impossible for the non-British-born ever to gain a solid enough foothold that they were able to vote?"

Following Reform party losses in the Gorton and Denton byelection, Nigel Farage raised concerns about sectarian voting and family voting as forms of election rigging. Sectarian voting—where people sharing beliefs vote similarly—is presented as problematic, though this describes normal voting behavior. Family voting claims, allegedly witnessed in 12% of cases by polling observers, remain poorly defined and lack clarity on actual mechanisms. The discourse surrounding these concerns appears racially coded, with political figures attributing losses to Muslim community bloc voting. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's response suggested preventing non-British-born individuals from establishing sufficient foothold to vote, revealing discriminatory undertones in the broader discussion.

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