Chasing Islamic vote could kill Labour off

SECTARIANISM corrodes the soul of every society it infects. It undermines democracy, promotes discord, spreads distrust and fuels dysfunction. Having grown up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, I recognise that dark truth only too well. My homeland was scarred by communal hatreds that descended into some of the worst violence and terrorism seen in Europe since the Second World War. Fortunately, the historic Good Friday Agreement of 1998 heralded a new era of peace.

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But with tragic irony, just when sectarian politics began to lose potency in Northern Ireland, they put down new roots in Britain, through the rise of militant, politically engaged Islam, fed by exploding mass immigration and officialdom’s attachment to identity politics.

Civic life in modern Britain - with its ideological emphasis on hierarchies of victimhood and ever more exquisite calibrations of racial difference — provides the ideal environment for this sort of separatism to flourish.

Labour, which until recently had the overwhelming support of Muslims, is now the party most threatened by this. This explains why it resorts to ever more desperate acts of appeasement, such as this week’s shameful handling of the rape gang scandal, wherein groups of Muslim men groomed and abused vulnerable white girls on an industrial scale.