Join Britain's fastest-growing independent political community which provides more than 90,000 readers with counter-cultural evidence, analysis, and debate that challenges the establishment. Our work is funded by our readers. Become a paid subscriber to unlock every single article, join our live weekly discussions with Matt, our group chat, leave comments, and know you’re helping the silent majority.
Six months ago, after campaigning at the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election, I attracted a wave of criticism for daring to suggest that democracy in the United Kingdom is being undermined by a sinister new force: sectarianism.
For more than a month, while campaigning on the streets of Greater Manchester, my team and I watched in horror as voters in heavily Muslim areas of the seat put their loyalty to their religion and clan-based networks ahead of any loyalty to Britain.
And what made this even worse was having to watch the Green party, including its leader Zack Polanski and candidate Hannah Spencer, openly encouraging this new threat by campaigning in different languages, pitting Muslims against Hindus, and focusing far more heavily on foreign conflicts in the Middle East than striving to improve the lives of the local British people, in Gorton and Denton.
At the time, I was heavily criticised for daring to point this out. Many people, including Polanski and Spencer, said I was a “sore loser”. Countless others said I was using “the Trump playbook” to try and delegitimise an election result.
And in the weeks after the by-election, after a surprisingly brief investigation, Greater Manchester Police announced they had found “no evidence of any intent to influence or refrain any person from voting”. Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about.
But this week, a major bombshell investigation reveals why I was right all along to warn about what is happening to our democracy, and our country.
The investigation, by the Daily Mail newspaper, looked at what has been going on in Birmingham, our country’s second city. And what it found, like that by-election in Greater Manchester, should be a wake-up call for the entire country.
After having to submit Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Birmingham City Council, because yet again nobody is willing to tell the truth, the investigation found that council staff and election workers had witnessed blatant attempts to violate and usurp our democracy in no fewer than fifty polling stations.
Just think about that. In no fewer than fifty polling stations across Birmingham, staff witnessed attempts to interfere with democracy. What kind of things are we talking about? Here’s what the paper found:
“A list of incidents obtained by the Daily Mail showed presiding officers repeatedly had to tell voters it is against the law to enter a booth with someone else and tell them which candidate to pick - and received abuse in return.
In the city’s Jewellery Quarter, voters ‘became aggressive’ with an officer after being told not to talk to each other in polling booths.
A man in Balsall Heath was said to be ‘trying continuously’ to ‘influence voters’ - and when stopped he accused officials of fraud …
In another part of the inner-city area, a man was witnessed trying to ‘influence voting’ through ‘Islamic gestures, blinking eyes, hand signals’ …
Elsewhere a father was seen holding ‘all the poll cards’ for his relatives and ‘was advising’ each one on how to vote’. The presiding officer … told them to go into separate booths but conceded: ‘It was clear that votes were being influenced.”
While the Electoral Commission and West Midlands Police are now rightly being urged to formally investigate these claims, as I wrote in an exclusive essay for the Mail, the truth is that none of this should surprise us.
Because the findings are not only consistent with what I witnessed in Manchester but a body of evidence which points to a clear conclusion. Sectarianism, especially in heavily Muslim areas, is wrapping its tentacles around a large swathe of our political system and squeezing the lifeblood out of our democracy.
While the likes of Zack Polanski and Hannah Spencer attacked me for daring to talk about it publicly, the evidence was already clearly there. Back in February, after the polls had closed, an independent monitoring group named Democracy Volunteers took the unprecedented step of going public with its conclusion illegal family voting had been visible in 68 per cent of polling stations in Gorton and Denton.
Family voting is what happens when a father or husband basically escorts his family into the polling station and tells them how to vote, and usually according to what local ‘community elders’ or clan bosses have instructed. Here’s what the report said:
“We rarely issue a report on the night of an election”, wrote the group, “but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high.”
Again, think about that. Illegal family voting in more than two-thirds of all polling stations in a major city. This isn’t a banana republic. This is Britain. And yet the same kind of illegal, illiberal, and unBritish political practices that one might witness in a banana republic are now going mainstream in the home of parliamentary democracy.
Then, amid the country’s local elections, in May, after Greater Manchester Police said they had found “no evidence” to support my claims of election interference in Gorton and Denton, the very same police force arrested five people on “suspicion of conspiracy to defraud as part of an investigation into alleged offences committed leading up to the local elections”. The arrests, later increased to six, mainly took place in Tameside, an area which happens to cover part of the Gorton and Denton seat.
And then, at very same time, the election monitoring group Democracy Volunteers reported that it had witnessed no fewer than 291 potential breaches of the secret ballot across the nationwide local elections in May, with these attempts to interfere with democracy being visible in close to one in five of all polling stations (much like it had witnessed three years earlier, in 2023).
So, what do we have? A major investigation by a national newspaper, based on Freedom of Information requests, uncovering widespread election interference in one of our major cities. An investigation into a parliamentary by-election finding much the same. And an investigation into nationwide local elections finding similar things.
The evidence, it appears to me, is now irrefutable. What we are witnessing in Britain is exactly what I warned about back in February: the rising threat of sectarianism, illegal family voting, and electoral corruption. And far from being confined to one or two local areas, this sectarianism appears to be spreading rapidly across the country, putting clan and religious loyalties ahead of any loyalties to Britain.
While the political left, the Labour Party, and the likes of Zack Polanski and Hannah Spencer will continue to deny this reality, largely because they now depend heavily on these same diverse areas and clan-based networks for votes, one person who has shown he is not willing to ignore it is Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK.
I remember, after the by-election result was announced in Gorton and Denton, Nigel Farage calling me in the early hours and saying something profound. “We will not save our country”, he said, “unless we first fix our democracy”.
What he meant by that is what Reform UK subsequently put forward as a sensible policy response to this dangerous new threat. We need to dramatically restrict postal voting in this country. We need to end the right of people from the Commonwealth who are not British citizens to vote at British elections. And we need to stamp out illegal family voting in polling stations.
Because if we do not do these things then what we are already witnessing in the likes of Greater Manchester, Birmingham, and many other areas across the country won’t just become more visible from one election to the next. It will end up hijacking and taking over our democracy, putting entire areas of the country out of reach and further consolidating the kind of ethnic and religious block voting that we usually see in Third World countries.
So, we really do need to act now. Because I agree with what Farage told me during that late night phonecall. We will never save our country unless we first save our democracy.
Paid subscribers join Matt Live EVERY Monday evening at 7pm UK time on the Substack App to discuss the big issues of the day. Make sure you join us if you can!
People have fought, suffered and died so that democracy, liberty and the rule of law might endure. Yet today we too often stand passive, shrugging our shoulders as the principles of a secular and democratic society are treated as negotiable. Multiculturalism must never become an excuse for tolerating doctrines—religious or political, that place themselves above democratic law, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, or freedom of speech.
At the same time, those entrusted with preserving our intellectual and cultural inheritance have too often come to regard it chiefly through the lenses of Critical Theory, Marxist thought and post-colonial guilt. A civilisation that loses confidence in its own principles will eventually lose the determination to defend them.
The hour is late. We must recover the courage to say, without apology, that the achievements of the Enlightenment, reason, liberty, secular government, individual rights and democratic self-rule are worth defending. We must neither surrender them through complacency nor barter them away in the name of tolerance. Tolerance cannot require the toleration of intolerance.
It is five minutes to midnight. The task before us is not to despise other peoples or faiths, but to defend, firmly and without fear, the free society generations before us sacrificed so much to secure.
They know it happens.
We know it happens.
They know, we know it happens.
Yet it still happens.
---
The police don't care.
The media don't care.
The courts don't care.
Labour and the Tories don't care.
---
As a consequence, we are surely headed for civil conflict.