Is the Muslim Vote Abandoning Labour?

As the red dawn breaks in the aftermath of the General Election, it’s time to take stock. Keir Starmer’s victory may be about as convincing as Jeremy Corbyn’s tailor, but he is nonetheless safely ensconced inside Number 10. The media meanwhile are too busy fixating on the Right-wing fracture in U.K. politics to notice the real story of the election: the impact of the Muslim vote.

This realpolitik was of course not wasted on Starmer’s predecessor, who not only won his Islington seat on a pro-Palestine ticket, but must have been kicking himself that his particular brand of terrorist sympathy and tolerance for antisemitism failed to meet so receptive an audience back in 2019.

Merely crunching the numbers does not tell the whole story. Those who put ‘Gaza’ at the forefront of their campaign won seats in Blackburn, Dewsbury and Batley, Birmingham Perry Barr and Leicester South (as well as Islington). But the Muslim vote was also highly influential, almost unseating Wes Streeting in Ilford North and Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley, and bizarrely returning Iain Duncan Smith to his Chingford and Woodford Green constituency after a former candidate split the Labour vote.

While the overall tally was short of the 20 seats Labour were predicted to lose over the Israel-Palestine conflict, Starmer will be gravely concerned by the exodus of Muslim voters. Polling just ahead of the election suggested their support for Labour would be down around 20%, but in constituencies where the Muslim population approaches 40% this turned out to be a whopping 33.9 percentage points.

With the obvious anger bubbling beneath the surface and indications that the Muslim vote is preparing to go it alone, one would have thought analysis of the situation would be of profound interest to the Labour Party. And yet, the science of extrapolation does not appear to apply to Muslim voters in the same way it does with the rest of the populace. Most commentators appear reticent when asked to draw conclusions, terrified of “lumping everyone from a Muslim background into having the same view”, as per Labour peer Ayesha Hazarika.

This is a curious state of affairs. I don’t recall UKIP’s “fruitcakes”, Brexit-voting “Nazis” and Reform U.K.’s four million “racists” being afforded such nuance. Moreover, the ‘not all Muslims’ canard is misplaced, if not downright deceitful. A cursory analysis of Muslim opinion should be enough to illustrate that: three out of four British Muslims do not believe Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th; 44% ranked the Israel-Palestine conflict in the top five issues of the election; almost half claim Jews have too much power over Government policy, and the same number would support the removal of an MP who took a different stance on the conflict. The majority of British Muslims have a favourable impression of Hamas, and these views increase rather than decrease among the younger population.

‘Not all Muslims’ then, certainly, but not a small minority either. A majority in many cases. Majority agreement on these matters is mainstream by definition. And while of course nuance is always welcome, what precisely would constitute the requisite level of agreement for the commentary to be permitted?

Naturally, the Israel-Palestine conflict is an emotive issue, and it should be perfectly possible to condemn the actions of Hamas while praying for an end to civilian casualties. It should not however, be governing U.K. politics. After all, iniquity is hardly in short supply across the globe. And yet, it’s not the injustice of ongoing African slavery that gets the protesters riled up each weekend in London. Neither is it the innocent slaughter in Ukraine, nor even the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China. No, the pro-Palestine mob reserves its anger for Israel having the temerity to defend itself. Perhaps then we should drop the ‘pro-Gaza’ euphemism and call it what it is – anti-Jewish sentiment.

While there is a certain delicious irony watching those who lit the multicultural fuse come face-to-face with the explosive consequences, it is profoundly depressing to see the left continually kowtow to the Muslim vote, even as it deserts them. Jonathan Ashworth, whose Leicester South seat hosts a 30% Muslim population, is a regular critic of “anti-Muslim hate” and “rising Islamophobia”. Alas, it wasn’t enough to save him. Jess Phillips, intimidated and booed during her acceptance speech by a pro-Palestine mob, insisted “They didn’t do it because they were Muslim, they did it because they were idiots”. I’d love to know why Phillips believes “idiocy” rather than “Muslim” is the appropriate causal explanation.

To those who say this is simply democracy in action, I prefer Churchill’s line: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the man in the street.” Democracy it may be, but it’s also mob rule, characterised increasingly by intimidation and violence. It’s not Reform voters issuing death threats to MPs in heavily Jewish constituencies, bullying Parliament into submission or forcing Batley schoolteachers into hiding. If that’s what constitutes democracy in action, then at the very least it deserves to be challenged frankly.

Britain is out of luck there unfortunately, because Starmer – a man who’d kneel for anything if there was a vote in it – is clearly not up to the job. Instead, Labour is more than likely to criminalise ‘Islamophobia’, and it is telling that Starmer’s first act in office was to demand a “clear and urgent” ceasefire from Netanyahu. The question now remains, how many concessions will the Muslim Vote extract from Starmer before it goes it alone in 2029?

Frank Haviland is author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and Editor of the New Conservative, where this article first appeared.