I also think it’s wrong to dismiss Muslim voters as just motivated solely by single issues as well as agency denying . As I said on @bbcnewsnight.bsky.social last night voters we spoke to shred affordability and cost of living in common as reasons to turning to the Greens.
Congratulations Dr Marta!!
Labour have alienated the voters they had on the left, and failed to win over any of the voters they have courted on the right. Now their core appeal is all but gone and ever growing numbers of voters have exit options on the left, right and in the centre.
Welcome to the Valley of Electoral Death.
Maybe broadcasters could take a breath, and think about checking their discourse against the common sense check. This is v obvious if take 60 seconds to think about ethnic minority voters not being monoliths (Pensioners, students, white working-class can all get narrativised as monolithic blocs)
The secrecy of the ballot matters
Those on X with racalised and radicalised view using anecdotes about family voting do not mean that they want Asian women's autonomy to express their own vote; they mean they don't want Asians to be voters, and need mass deportations
bsky.app/profile/did:...
Almost all of the discussion on X is based on the Reductio Ad Absurdum idea of monolithic ethnic minority bloc voting, based on real-time radicalisation and racialisation, underpinned by stoking the 32 examples reported about "family voting" into a weird incoherent explanation of a stolen election
I also had this come out in 2025 :)
Immigrants Against Immigration: British Ethnic Minority Brexit Voter Attitudes to Immigration - cup.org/3WPrz1S
Say the quiet part out loud about “family voting” & “South Asian-type election practices”. These assume Brown men are telling their wives how to vote & that Muslims, by nature, violate democratic norms. Trope of Muslim women being oppressed and unable to participate fully in democracy is tiresome
Gorton and Denton first thoughts - incredible result for the Greens who won the long battle to be the best placed anti-Reform candidate - helped by being the obvious anti-Labour candidate for disappointed progressives. As I noted in the Observer last month, a Revolt on the Left is growing
One casualty of the racialisation of class: people fail to recognise that most Bangladeshi and Pakistani people in Britain are working class
That they have the highest rates of poverty
And that historically economic and related factors have been the key driver of their voting behavior
Black women often carry out work their colleagues don’t, such as promoting equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives.
The policy fixation with numbers and “control” may do little to quell qualms over immigration which (partly) reflect concerns over growing racial and ethnic diversity and will not necessarily be stemmed by greater controls on immigration
Meanwhile, white British Leave voters appeared to conflate immigrants with British ethnic minorities into an undifferentiated mass. Their discussions of immigration elicited e.g. criticism of BLM and minorities not making the effort to integrate
Reinforcing (some) immigrants as a threat to the nation and endorsing the need for strong borders
was used to claim their insider status and demonstrate their commitment to protecting the nation from the “wrong” type of immigrants
I find that ethnic minority Leave voters tended to be motivated by opposition to Eastern European immigration. They tended to valorise their own position as 'good immigrants' while denigrating Eastern Europeans as criminal, lazy and fraudulent welfare claimants
New article in @journalrep.bsky.social on British Ethnic Minority Brexit Voter Attitudes to Immigration
Congratulations Joe!
