Can our institutions survive migration?

Why you have to understand Somali clan politics to understand Liverpool's local government

Earlier this year, in a move that shook the world of geopolitics, Liverpool City Council officially recognized the Republic of Somaliland.

As I pointed out at the time, Liverpool is so broken it has been run by central govt for the last 3 years. It has 140,000 on the social housing waiting list, some of the most deprived areas in Britain & the worst GSCE results. If you are a councillor, these are your responsibilities; foreign policy is not. Do your job.

However, the recognition of Somaliland raised a more worrying issue than who was supposed to be collecting the bins; in an era of mass migration, can British institutions remain fit for their intended purpose? Or, after 30 years of mass migration, do you have to understand Somali clan politics in order to understand local government in Liverpool?

The UK plays host to the largest Somali community in Europe. Whilst the 2021 census reported 176,645 people in England and Wales identified as Somali (a 230% increase over the previous decade) some estimates range upwards to half a million, many of whom have settled in Liverpool.

As Robert Jenrick revealed in The Telegraph this year, in the first quarter of 2024 the government issued more family visas to the dependants & relatives of Somali nationals than it did work visas to physicists, chemists & biologists from all other countries put together.

Somalia is predominantly an ethnically homogenous society, with Somalis making up about 85% of the population. The remaining 15% consists of Arabs and Bantus, the latter being a widespread ethnic group found across sub-Saharan Africa. Somali society is organized into various clans, each tracing their lineage to a common ancestor. These clans are further divided into numerous subclans and, at a broader level, are grouped into larger clan families. Clan relationship is regulated by the Somali customary law, xeer.

The Isaaq are the main clan family in Somaliland, the breakaway republic in Northern Somalia formed after the Isaaq genocide. The Somaliland lobby in Liverpool is therefore representing the interests of a single, specific Somali clan.

That highlights a wider problem with the effects of immigration. Liverpool was reorganized as a municipal borough in 1836 under the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which standardized the operations of boroughs across the country. It is – like many of our institutions – a product of a different world. It is simply not set up to deal with clannish systems, and is ill-equipped to prevent its own abuse by people jury-rigging them to clannish ends.

How might our institutions be affected by imported clannishness? A 2014 paper from the International Conference on Accounting Studies, of all places, may help us understand. The study aimed to report how the management control practices of a Telecommunication firm - the pseudonymous SOTEL - was affected by, and navigated successfully, Somalia’s traditional clannish society.

In SOTEL, the study found clannishness played ‘the key role’ in management.

It was founded in 2000 by businessmen who shared a common clan background, and their kinship ties were key in allowing them to develop enough personal trust to form the company. Additional shareholders were invited through clan networks, adhering to a predetermined ownership ratio based on the representation of each clan or sub-clan in the region, whilst key leadership roles were also distributed based on clan size and influence; for example, the General Manager is from the largest sub-clan, while the CEO is from the second largest.

To expand operations into other clan regions, new shareholders were selected from local clans or sub-clans, primarily prominent business figures from those with the most significant political influence. Even job vacancies are filled based on clan affiliation; the company’s key positions are filled by employees recommended and guaranteed by its owners. As security is a major concern in Somalia – not to mention the non-existence of any regulatory institutions - owners prefer to trust their clan relatives over hiring strangers. However, in order to prevent SOTEL appearing to belong to a specific clan or sub-clan, non-key employees were recruited from various clans to give the company an ‘inclusive’ appearance.

This "clan power-sharing", the report notes, mirrors Somalia's political system, adopted by the Somali clans to share political positions since the collapse of the central state in 1991; ‘ensuring all clans are represented and no single clan dominates.’

It should also be noted the report found the ‘cultural controls’ – which have essentially been outlawed in modern Britain – are completely informal.

What might an institution given over to clannishness look like?

It might look very much like an NHS that gives patients preferential treatment on the grounds of their political beliefs, as Jess Phillips claimed she received earlier this year. As I wrote at the time, ‘the allocation of urgent medical care for an MP following lines of sectarian allegiance raises questions about how often such cases are happening out of the public eye, and what other issues doctors are deciding care based on other than medical need.’

It might also look very much like Liverpool Council, an institution that is consistently failing in its basic and original function and is instead being used as a vehicle to advance clan-based policies, regardless of whether they are within its remit.

Whatever a set of institutions inflected with clannishness looks like, it is certainly not an improvement. The reforms necessary to prevent this from happening will probably strike the British public as strikingly illiberal; but if we continue with unintergratably high rates of immigration from clannish societies, it is hard to see what else British institutions can do to avoid becoming SOTEL, and having clannishness play a key role’ in management.