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I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
Although it doesn't actively proselytize as much as Christianity, Sikhism is not an ethnic religion; any person of any ethnicity can convert to it if they become convinced that its teachings hold the true answers about the Divine. Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
Now as an atheist, I'm not that big a fan of religious exemptions. But ultimately, they're a Chesterton's Fence whose origins are not very hard to dig up. Bad things happen if the government starts steamrolling over the faithful's objections with "there's not actually an angry sky man who will send you to Hell if you work on a Sunday/do indulgences/mix meat and dairies, get over it". Granted Sikhs are enough of a religious minority that pissing them off on their own wouldn't start a religious war, but it seems straightforwardly more principled for the state to say "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of any recognized religion" than "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of Christianity and Islam, but because there's so few of them we're going to functionally write it into law that you cannot simultaneously act in accordance with a belief in the divinely-inspired truth of the Guru Granth Sahib, and be a law-abiding citizen in our country".
We can do the same thing with tariffs. And then we don't have neighborhoods full of foreigners who will hide the Bataclan bombers after they make their getaway.
I don't agree with it, but the English have adopted weapons bans as a virtue. They also have religious freedom as a virtue. In accommodating immigrant Sikh values, they now have to accommodate exceptions in their weapons bans. These are two contradictory virtues. They can't actually coexist meaningfully. This is a conflict caused by immigration. Your proposed solution, essentially, is to jettison arms control in favor of religious freedom, i.e., that English society should change even more in order to accommodate the Sikh. It can be perfectly English to be Sikh! Well, it wasn't 50 years ago, and it wasn't even common until extremely recently. If the challenges of integrating migrants are to be solved by England changing to accommodate them, what's the argument in favor of accepting migrants? Trade deal: You change your society and culture and values, and we give you welfare consumers, a housing shortage, and endless supply of accusations of racism, and occasional stabbings. We will integrate on our terms, not yours, and maybe, just maybe, statistically, we'll perform better on some made-up statistical measures. Oh and you don't have a choice and this downgrade is permanent.
The UK already had hard-won religious freedom; it just didn't have meaningful representation of a religion whose commandments conflicted with a weapons ban, so the issue hadn't come up. It might very well have come up even with zero immigration, if a lot of white Englishmen had started converting to Sikhism out of some trend, in the same way that so many British hippies got into Buddhism.
And I guess I just don't see that big of a conflict there… I think "virtue" is a weird way to describe the weapons ban. I don't believe Brits think it's deontologically wrong or taboo to carry knives; I think they've adopted weapons bans as a technocratic, utilitarian policy. Whether religious freedom is to be thought of as a deontological line-in-the-sand or consequentialist utilmaxxing is perhaps more debatable, but in either case, this makes it sensible to trade one against the other depending on circumstances. Something like: "I believe that in a vacuum, it is good to minimize the amount of citizens permitted to carry knives, as doing so will reduce violent crime and I do not believe that people have an innate right to bear arms. However, I also believe that the state should rarely if ever ban religious practices. Therefore, the best way to maximize utility while respecting the constraints of respecting religious freedom is a weapons for ban for everyone except people whose religion mandates that they carry a ritual knife on their person at all times" is in no way incoherent or self-contradictory.
(Again, it seems isomorphic to other kinds of religious exemptions, i.e. "I do not believe that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of school whenever they like; but I believe it's important for the state to respect religious practices; therefore parents are allowed to let their kids skip school on their faith's recognized holy days, but not for any other reason". I don't think there's a "virtue" of respecting religious freedom, and a "virtue" of mandatory education, that are in conflict here in any problematic way, it's a very common-sensical status quo to end up with.)
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