Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, in speaking in this debate, I declare my long-standing association with the National Secular Society. I will be drawing on material from the think tank Policy Exchange, where I am a distinguished fellow.

As time is so limited, I will make only two broad points: first, that the effective exercise of multi-party democracy in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country such as the United Kingdom depends on the preservation and defence of a secular public space; and, secondly, that the guardrails of that exercise, as seen by voting at elections, are increasingly broken, and unless we move to improve them public trust in the institutions and in politics itself is likely to erode, with worrying consequences.

Earlier this year, the National Secular Society published a report based on polling by More in Common called Britons and Secularism. Using More in Common’s well-known segmentation of groups into seven categories—for brevity, I will not detail them now—it found that 50% of the population is either unhappy with the social contract such that they have lost faith in traditional institutions or feel abandoned and overlooked by political elites—of course, by that we mean the political parties represented here—or, alternatively, they are highly distrustful of institutions and feel entirely disconnected from society.

While there is a clear consensus in the public mind that religious expression should be tolerated, this is accompanied by unease when religion seeks to impose itself where it is not wanted or is used to obstruct the rights and freedoms of others. The public are deeply uneasy when religious groups receive special privileges from the state, such as the IHRA or Islamophobia definitions. This latter point is extremely important to social cohesion, as the public holds a settled liberal instinct that faith belongs in the personal sphere and that the public space should be governed by shared civic values such as equality, the rule of law and the right to criticise ideas, including religious ones.

A further feature of public scepticism is the role of religious charities, and here I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, where,

“the public draws a clear red line against any blurring of charity work … and believe that the promotion of religion should not automatically grant charitable status”.

In questioning support for the legal activities of religious charities, including the ideas, for example, that being gay is a sin or that women should obey men, around three-quarters of those polled were against either idea. They fly flagrantly against the law in this country on discrimination, and it is something for the Charity Commission to tackle more vigorously than it has done to date.

This brings me to my second theme: the rise of Muslim sectarianism in elections. Much is known of far-right populism, but we do not worry enough about the rise of Muslim sectarianism with loyalty to one’s own religious and ethnic group trumping all other public policy offers from the mainstream parties. The two groups most associated with this are The Muslim Vote, which I will refer to as TMV, and Vote Palestine, which have successfully carved out certain constituencies into bloc votes to win elections. Policy Exchange’s second report into this trend, Islamopopulism Part 2, highlights how both groups have positioned themselves to direct Muslim voters towards candidates best able, in their words, to “punish” principally the Labour Party but also the Conservatives.

We know that all mainstream political parties face pressure groups that want them to move in a certain direction, but when real intimidation is employed against prospective parliamentary candidates going about their normal duties in election campaigning, and when this remains unprosecuted in law, we are in real danger. One only has to look at the treatment suffered by defeated MPs Jon Ashworth or Kate Hollern, or those recently elected such as Jess Phillips, Shabana Mahmood, Naz Shah, Roshanara Ali or Wes Streeting, who faced unusually toxic levels of abuse from some Muslim voters. What discussions are the Government having with the Electoral Commission on forthcoming legislation regarding criminal offences for the harassment of or hatred directed at candidates in elections?

I ask this as we have seen an increase in custom-made electoral literature, both print and digital, in non-English—not a translation of leaflets from the languages of our country, English, Welsh or Gaelic, into others, but leaflets containing entirely different messages in languages that a neighbour does not receive or that an opponent cannot read without specialist translation. We saw ample demonstrations of this in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, with videos carrying inflammatory material in Urdu, which if said in English would have encountered a vigorous response from the majority of the voting public. I do not have time today to go into what those different dog whistles contained, but suffice it to say they were not run-of-the-mill political opposition messages.

Part of the problem lies with the Electoral Commission itself, which publishes its information in a multitude of languages as the norm. This works against efforts at integration and social cohesion. Why, when it takes several years to become a citizen and to vote, is the assumption from our independent Electoral Commission that voters will not understand English? Once the commission sends a signal that our citizens can never expect to form the mainstream of the voting public, what hope is there for integration or incentives towards active citizenship? It is time that we ensure that electoral and printed campaign materials must only be produced in English, Welsh or other UK languages. The Electoral Commission cannot be expected to chase around checking compliance in material in potentially dozens of different languages.

I conclude by coming back to where I began: the British public, who do not want this. The More in Common research is clear that shared civic values, equality and the rule of law take precedence over unrestrained religious strictures in the public mind. They are deeply uneasy when religion imposes itself in the public sphere. The public understand this. I hope that in time the political parties will too.