Polls indicate that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is losing the support of a large number of Muslim voters by refusing to call on Israel to cease fire permanently in its war against Hamas. The head of one West Midlands mosque said that congregants who were brought up to “blindly” support Labour are now “opening their eyes.”
Historically, polling suggests that close to three-quarters of Britain’s Muslim population feels electorally most closely aligned to Labour. This is changing; a flashpoint issue for some party members came when Starmer claimed in October that Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza. There is increased scope—what party officials have described as “huge pressure” from Muslim constituents—for significant defections from Labour’s electoral base.
Starmer’s even lukewarm support for Israel has led Muslim councillors to threaten to—and in some cases did—leave their positions; even a Parliamentary frontbencher felt it necessary to quit a Shadow Cabinet post. Although some Labour dissidents present the party line on a Gaza ceasefire as a betrayal, it looks more like pre-election blackmail, characterised by the relatively rare intrusion of religious communalism into British politics. Given that Hamas favours neither a ceasefire nor a two-state solution, these are peculiar challenges for a Westminster-based political party.
Many of Labour’s problems here are of its own making. It has for a long time opted to treat British Muslims as an undifferentiated electoral bloc, appealing to often self-appointed ‘community leaders’ instead of individual citizens. By catering to the concept of the ummah—which seeks to unite Muslims internationally into a homogeneous political entity—Labour is now finding foreign policy issues impacting disproportionately on its membership and wider support.
Hardly a day goes by without Starmer insisting that he has “changed” his party since the time when he worked under the then-leader Jeremy Corbyn, who once described—and later claimed to regret describing—Hamas as “friends.” But now his response to the Israel-Palestine issue may have put him on the defensive with British Muslim voters.
Labour’s position is shifting. Officials are now more critical of Israel’s response to the October 7th atrocities, insisting that “far too many innocent Palestinians … have been killed as part of military operations.” But such rhetoric, said the Labour-leaning Guardian, “is too little and too late for many Muslims.”
The newspaper suggests that even if Starmer now explicitly backed an immediate ceasefire, “it may not bring Muslim votes back into the fold.”
A grassroots group called ‘The Muslim Vote,’ has been explicit:
This election signals a shift – Muslim issues at the forefront. We will no longer tolerate being taken for granted. We are a powerful, united force of 4 million acting in unison.
Ultimately success is that the Muslim vote acts as one and emphatically supports those who backed the ceasefire and protests against those who did not.
Muslim voters are also bound to have reacted badly to Labour’s newfound rejection of the idea of recognising a Palestinian state. Even Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are opening up to this, prompting the Socialist Voice newspaper to jibe that “the Tories are now to the left of Labour on Palestine.”
These shifts will not have gone unnoticed by British Muslim leaders seeking to set up an Islamic political party, a proposal for which was rejected by the Electoral Commission last year. Such explicitly sectarian parties aren’t traditionally welcomed in the British system, but those working for a new “Party of Islam” will be spurred on by Labour’s loss of Muslim voters.
Murthaza Qadri, the imam at Walsall Central mosque, told the Guardian:
There was never much talk about politics before but now everyone cares, lots of people are speaking up. We’ve been brought up in an environment where we were blindly supporters of Labour, old and young. But now people are opening their eyes a bit more.
Aftab Nawaz, who this month resigned as Labour councillor over his party’s unclear stance, added that people in his community once “voted for the Labour party without even blinking, they wouldn’t read the manifesto.” But after leaving Labour behind, former constituents described him and other defectors as “our heroes.”
The Guardian fears that this whole saga, which is still far from over, “could spell trouble for Labour at the next election.”
