The Bains Agenda

At the time of writing, politics is broken. This is the worst I have seen it in my lifetime and that feeling is shared by many.

Multiple wars, the terrifying rise of the far right, social cohesion is fractured and politics has now become more about social issues than economic.

But it is the ideas that stretch back thousands of years that is currently affecting our politics and yet neither left nor right will tackle it. Bafflingly, our media barely mentions it either and that is religion.

I have no issue with religion. I’m a humanist but I love the fact my background is Sikh, Sikhism has wonderful theological ideas. Christians, Muslims, Jews etc. have all done kind things and sometimes their book told them to.

However when your religion tells me what to do, or you use it to justify violence, or it causes conflict or its used attack groups such as LGBT people, that’s a problem.

The right weaponise Christianity and the left are massive hypocrites and intellectually dishonest when it comes to Islam.

Non-religious people outnumber Christians in UK now for the first time ever and most British people do not believe in God. This includes myself. So why we care so much – I don’t know.

At the last election, four MPs were voted in entirely based on the Palestine issue. This isn’t inherently an issue. For the record, I don’t agree with Starmer’s position on Palestine either.

These MPs are social conservatives, they are not friends of the left. We have seen them come out in favour of cousin marriage, alienate Zarah Sultana, mangle the Your Party project and when it comes down to it – they will choose Islam over leftist politics. They literally tell you on X.

But even Labour’s Tahir Ali MP tried to pass a ridiculous Islamophobia definition – this is a general problem.

The left will not deal with the problem of Islamic identity politics because it benefits them. They simply do not wish to upset potential voters. However I would argue this is typical of the left who infantilise minorities whilst claiming to stand for them.

Obviously, some Muslims like other religious people unfortunately only care about their religion and vote on it. However, they are not the majority and it’s ironically prejudiced to think so. Most British Muslims are firmly patriotic despite media narratives and feel British despite all the lies about them from the left and right.

It’s telling that non Muslim leftists are such cowards and prejudiced about Muslims. But this always happens to minorities and always will.

For years we have had bishops in the House of Lords. Why? These people are not experts, they are not elected and that is not democracy. I would get rid of the House of Lords entirely but if we are to keep it, at minimum the bishops must go.

That is institutional religious bias. Most of the country doesn’t even believe in God and most are not Christian anymore so who are they representing?

Even more worrying, this will likely get worse. Reform UK currently top the polls. The Christian right which currently pushes Trumpism is directly targeting the UK as their next goal.

Thanks to the people of Humanists UK of which I am a member I can tell you that the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian group involved in overturning Roe v Wade, has expanded its UK operations. The UK arm of ADF received 1.1 million from its USA parent in 2024.

Farage is directly involved in this American imported Christian right nonsense and Reform MPs voted against abortion rights recently.

Neither the left nor the right will deal with this. The left tends to play whataboutism or downplay the realities of Islamic identity politics when those like me bring it up and similarly the right are total hypocrites who will agree with me on that point then deny they do same with Christianity.