Remona Aly
Sunday 22 September 2024 The i Paper

‘This isn’t just about Gaza’: Why Labour risks losing some Muslim voters for good

‘This isn’t just about Gaza’: Why Labour risks losing some Muslim voters for good

It was a level of anger against Labour over Gaza that even those who co-ordinated the campaign to defeat its MPs were surprised by.

The Muslim Vote (TMV) led the mobilisation of millions of voters that saw five Labour candidates lose out to pro Gaza independents in the general election and several more come close (see box 1).

They were on the wrong end of a slick online campaign, which used social media to endorse a national slate of candidates this summer amid the fury about Israel’s destructive response to the October 7 Hamas killings.

But i can reveal that TMV was originally going to back Labour MPs who had called for a ceasefire.

“The plan was to endorse a total of 12 including people like Zara Sultana, Diane Abbot, John McDonnell, and Naz Shah,” Abubakr Nanabawa, TMV’s spokesperson and coordinator tells i.

But the idea was dropped like a hot potato. “We got a very serious backlash from members, leaders and individuals of local Muslim communities and grassroots organisations who are supporting us. They were against Labour as a whole generally, no matter whether the Labour MP voted for a ceasefire. So we made the decision not to endorse the main parties.”

Sultana, Abbot and McDonnell were all elected anyway. So was Shah, but only just – she had to endure a gruelling campaign in Bradford West where she faced two independents who would have been beaten her if their votes were combined.

Box 1: Victorious pro-Gaza independents

Iqbal Mohamed won Dewsbury and Batley with a 6,934 vote majority and nearly double the votes of his Labour opponent

Shockat Adam won Leicester South with a majority of 979, unseating Labour’s former Shadow Paymaster General Jonathan Ashworth

Ayoub Khan won Birmingham Perry Barr with a 507 vote majority , beating Khalid Mahmood who had held the seat for Labour since 2001

Adnan Hussain won Blackburn with a majority of 132, just beating the sitting Labour MP Kate Hollern

Jeremy Corbyn held his Islington North as an independent, winning 7,247 more votes than Labour’s candidate

The revelation – that the level of antipathy towards Labour became so severe that even those MPs who always backed a ceasefire were deemed beyond the pale – may be a sobering one for the party’s decision makers as they gather in Liverpool this weekend for their victory conference.

Some in Labour give the impression that they believe there is limited further threat from Muslim disaffection to a party that has just won a landslide. Jonathan Ashworth, the former shadow cabinet minister who lost his Leicester South seat to a Gaza independent tells i that these new MPs are “single issue” politicians who are now “sinking with trace”.

‘Building back lost trust will take a long, long time’

But others are less sure. Naz Shah may have clung on to her seat but she fears that Labour faces a major task in winning back Muslim voters and that “to build that trust back takes a long, long time”. She says the impact of how her party initially responded to Gaza has been “deep” at “an emotional, psychological level”.

If Labour fails to heal those wounds then the demographics of a growing Muslim population and the potential for higher turn outs could see independent candidates inflicting even more damage next time round.

One Labour adviser i has spoken to says that Sir Keir Starmer needs to personally do much more to engage with Muslims so that he can better understand their point of view.

And neutral observers believe things could soon get much worse for his party. More in Common carried extensive polling and focus group research involving more than 10,000 people in the week after the election and found that Muslim voters in safe Labour seats “felt they had long been taken for granted”.

Luke Tryl, the think tank’s executive director, predicts that Labour could easily lose another ten seats to pro Gaza independents (see box 2) and suggests the party is not taking the threat as seriously as it should do. Losing 14 seats might not have made much difference in this year’s election, but in a tighter future contest they could be crucial.

And he points out that are indirect threats for the party from independents in further seats, where they could split Labour’s vote and let the Conservatives back in.

Box 2: ‘Labour were lucky’ – at least 10 more seats at risk next time

Labour could easily lose many more seats to independents at the next general election, says Luke Try,l executive director at the More in Common think tank.

“There are a number of seats now, nine or ten seats, where Labour doesn’t have a very big majority over independents,” he says. “And if these independents continue running again, if they build up, lots of these independents could continue to build a bigger force in local government, which I don’t think gets looked at enough.

“Our recent polling had Labour down to 29 per cent [nationally], and that would see them lose eight [more] seats to the Workers Party or independents, that’s just with a straight swing. Places like Birmingham Yardley, Ilford North – Wes Streeting’s seat, Slough, Bethnal Green.

“The other thing to remember, and it’s a bit harder to quantify this, is that there are other seats where, if independents take a chunk of the Muslim vote and Labour don’t, then it will help the Conservatives with their recovery.

“Labour were lucky, in a sense, in this election, their national poll share was quite big, the lead over the Conservatives was 11 [percentage points], but if that lead is narrower, then the independents have a double impact.

“They can take the seats where you assume to be largely left-wing votes because of how they’ve traditionally voted, and let the Conservatives in. Peterborough would be an example of the sort of seat which would be at risk.”

It would be “a really risky diagnosis”, Tryl says, for Labour to think that the new independents and the problems they cause for the party will soon disappear.

At TMV, Abubakr Nanabawa, is determined that they won’t. He sees this year’s results as a breakthrough in terms of what is seen as possible outside the established parties. “It’s created a sense of hope and optimism,” he says. “People do think now [that] alternative candidates can win.”

His organisation is not without controversy. Another newspaper has reported that of the “dozens of pro-Palestine candidates” it endorsed “a handful have shared conspiracy theories”. It also accused TMV of supporting “intimidatory tactics” online, that it has “retweeted video of Labour politicians being yelled at while out leafleting”.

Nanabawa responds telling i that: “Individual candidates can respond to any allegations made against them. I am not aware of these nor can I speak for them.” And he argues that “holding MPs to account is not intimidation” – “as long as it doesn’t cross the line to threats or physical abuse” – but is “in the spirit of democracy”.

The problem for Labour is that however questionable, or not, the tactics of those supporting alternative candidates are, the challenge they present may not be going away.

Starmer interview that sparked Labour’s Gaza problems

The concern over the party’s response to Gaza can be traced all the way back to Starmer himself and an LBC interview he gave at last year’s Labour conference when he said Israel had the right to withhold water from the territory as a response to the Hamas 7 October attacks. A source who has advised the Starmer, tells i that is down to the Prime Minister to ensure that similar blunders are not made in the future.

“Keir Starmer needs to have authentic relationships – actual friendships – with Muslims in his inner circle, so they form part of his daily thinking space,” says the source who is close to Labour’s efforts on community cohesion. “It needs to go beyond only appearing once a year for iftars [fast-breaking meals during Ramadan], which can feel transactional. I believe if he had authentic friendships, he wouldn’t have said that about Israel having a right to cut off water and electricity.”

The repercussions of that short radio interview are still reverberating around British politics. The independent MPs who beat Labour insist that the conflict in Gaza is not the only reason for their success, but they also acknowledge that it was the biggest one.

Iqbal Mohamed the independent MP who won a majority of nearly 7,000 in Dewsbury and Batley – a new West Yorkshire seat that Labour might have seen as its natural territory – describes Gaza and mainstream politicians’ response to it as a “massive issue”.

“There was a Russian missile attack on a hospital in Ukraine and the uproar, the condemnation was deafening,” he says. “Hospitals and schools and refugee camps and safe areas have been bombed in the last nine months in Gaza, and there has been silence.”

Shah believes that the “raw anger about Gaza will now become organised” and is worried about what could come next for Labour.

Anger over Labour’s initial response to the Gaza conflict was a lightning rod for the online abuse and threats Naz Shah MP suffered this summer.

“It was Nigel Farage’s eighth attempt to get into Parliament, and as a big national party, they’ve only got four Reform MPs,” she says. “Five independents got elected on Gaza with just five weeks of campaigning before the elections. So, what happens when that raw anger becomes organised and sophisticated, and we [Muslims] are the youngest population in Britain? In five years – what does that look like electorally?”

That extra level of organisation is already underway at TMV. “We have to ensure that we’re ready for the next election,” says Nanabawa. “So it’s about looking at the data, analysing, where we come close, analysing where we’ve had successes and where we could do better.”

How the situation could get worse for Labour

Like Shah he believes that there is potential for this challenge to Labour to get much bigger. He thinks better coordination between candidates to avoid split votes and the possibility of more Muslims being persuaded to vote in areas where turnout has been low, could mean more victories.

Box 3: Getting the vote out to turn near misses into wins

The Muslim Vote began working out how to take even more seats at the next general election as soon as the July vote was over.

The campaign’s coordinator Abubakr Nanabawa, sees “split votes” as a “key” issue to be addressed.  He gives the example of Ilford North, where Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting who was defending a majority of more 5,198 was just 528 votes away from losing the seat altogether, to another independent candidate, Leanne Mohamad.

She “should have won,” says Nanabawa. “If the Green Party [whose candidate got 1,794 votes] stood down, there’s a very strong chance she would have won.”

He points to Bethnal Green in east London where George Galloway and the Respect Party defeated Labour in 2005 in the wake of the Iraq war as another example. This year Rushanara Ali, Labour’s new building safety and homelessness minister, held on in the newly configured seat of Bethnal Green and Stepney.

But Nanabawa notes that her electoral performance was “extremely poor” – Ali saw the enormous 37,524 majority she had in 2019 in the old Bethnal Green and Bow comstituency in 2019 collapse as she won by just 1,689 votes.  “If you add the votes of the Greens, Lib Dems and the independent, you know, it would have been a very comfortable defeat,” he says.

The idea that TMV would be able to persuade the Liberal Democrat and Green parties to stand candidates down to clear the way for independents it is backing seems far from certain. But that’s not the only tactic it’s looking at. Nanabawa also thinks there’s potential to increase the number of Muslim voters.

“Turnout [in July] was extremely poor,” he says. “It was even lower in Muslim areas than it was in others. Now I don’t think that’s a reflection of our faith. I think that’s a reflection of working class communities refusing as there would be no difference.

“We want to go into these communities early on, working with the local Muslim community there and the wider community, really, to establish strong networks in these target areas to ensure that when the next election comes around, people are instantly ready to be active and start engaging in the process straight away.”

“I think there’s a real opportunity,” he says. “People will see that they can vote for alternative [candidates with] realistic chances of winning these seats.”

It’s the current lack of engagement and unhappiness with the status quo that could prove to be Labour’s Achilles Heel in these constituencies. More in Common has conducted focus groups with Muslim voters over the course of a year and found that “disillusionment with Labour cannot be attributed to Gaza alone”.

“Conversations quickly expand to encompass broader concerns that Labour takes Muslim votes for granted and that their communities have been neglected,” the think tank concluded, in its post general election report published in July.

Gaza had a similar effect “to the role that Brexit played in un-anchoring Labour voters in the Red Wall – a trigger for wider discontent”, the think tank’s focus groups found.

‘Muslim voters were taken for granted’

Tryl sees both Brexit and Gaza as the sparks for this electoral change but not the fundamental reason for it. “The underlying cause,” he says, “was that Labour took [Red Wall and Muslim voters] for granted.”

His think tank’s report notes that: “Many of the seats that swung most dramatically to pro-Gaza independent candidates are also the most deprived constituencies in the country. These voters live in some of the most ‘left behind’ parts of Britain, and in most of their seats all they have known is a Labour MP representing them…

“The vote for Gaza independents is about more than just Gaza, it’s a signal that they have had enough of their traditional party of choice overlooking their priorities.”

That is exactly the conclusion that the new independent MPs that i has spoken to have reached. And they believe that the early decisions that Labour has made since winning power, like cutting winter fuel payments, will only have exacerbated voters’ concerns.

In Dewsbury and Batley, Iqbal Mohamed says his constituents did not just ask him about Gaza, but about “education, health care, cost of living, climate change and consumer protection”.

“Winter is around the corner,” he says. “There will be people around where I live who won’t be able to turn on the heating. How is this a fair and just society?”

The Sunday Times reported that the new MP may have breached electoral laws that ban people being put under “undue spiritual pressure” to vote a certain way, because he called for people to register to vote and “vote for just leaders” at a prayer meeting in June. But Mohamed denies any wrong doing and tells i: “This was a perfectly lawful appeal to register to vote, and Labour and Conservative candidates frequently speak in religious settings including mosques during election campaigns.” He says he is dedicated to serving constituents “of all faiths and none” and hopes to tackle a wider disaffection with politics.

Early decisions in government could lose even more support

Pointing to recent Parliamentary votes in which Labour backed the two child benefit cap and taking away most pensioners’ winter fuel payments, new Birmingham Perry Barr independent MP Ayoub Khan says: “I don’t see this government building support, I see it losing support because it’s not making the right decisions.”

At TMV, the organisation that helped get these MPs elected, Abubakr Nanabawa, says their breakthrough shows just how “loose and vulnerable” Labour’s base in these communities is. Shah saw first hand this year how easily support for Labour can fall away, in Bradford, and warns her party that an end to the Gaza conflict will not put the genie back in the bottle. “I don’t think [the independents]are going to disappear,” she says.

Ashworth takes a different position. Despite his shock defeat in Leicester South, he isn’t convinced that the threat from the new independents has any legs.

“I would warn against any politician assuming that a subsequent election is in the bag for them,” he tells i. “Their constituencies are very divided. They’re sinking without trace in Parliament and they’re not going to be able to deliver for their constituents. But that’s their problem.”

He adds: “You know, in 2019 Labour collapsed in the Red Wall. And we just had a landslide victory. You really can’t judge one general election for the next.”

It is Labour’s response to that 2019 drubbing that Tryl says the party now needs to replicate, to “take the exact same approach that they took to thinking about how they won that trust in the Red Wall”.

And he warns: “If some of these independents who have been elected proved to be quite good as champions, other people might think: ‘Well I want that too’.”

Ashworth doesn’t sound too worried by that prospect and also seems to suggest that time is on Labour’s side: “The next general election is four, five years away,” he says. “All kinds of things can happen.”

Local elections loom

But local elections could also be a test for his party and will come much sooner. Tryl thinks there is potential for the independents to “build a bigger force in local government” and that’s what they expect too.

“In Birmingham, we’ve got a local election in 2026, there’s already a feeling on the ground that people will not be supporting the Labour councillors,” says Ayoub Khan.

“The financial situation in Birmingham is dire to say the least. Council tax has been increased by 20 percent over two years. Services are being taken away. Vulnerable individuals are not being catered for. I would be totally surprised if Labour holds on to Birmingham at the next local election.”

“Politics is changing,” he adds. “Over the next several years, people will see what we as independents support, what we present, and if they align with our views, you may just see an enormous shift, it’s possible.”

Of course, as one of the successful independent MPs, Khan would say that. But what can Labour do, to guard against the risk that he is correct?

At TMV Abubakr Nanabawa admits he is “not a fan of the Labour party” but thinks there is a way for it to could win back disaffected voters if it “delivers on Gaza, delivers on the NHS, and improves on daily conditions on the ground”.

He even suggests that, unlike this year, Labour candidates could end up getting TMV backing in the next election: “If the Labour party delivers on foreign policy or domestic policy, on being strong, local community, constituency MPs, in five years time, I promise you, their candidates will be endorsed by us, The Muslim Vote… it’s all about delivery.

Conversely, he says: “I see Labour as a very shallow coalition, which by 2029 would be very easily dismantled.”

Naz Shah, has her own prescription for her party: “Proactive engagement is really key,” she says. “With women in particular, and young people who are an absolute must. We need young Labour activists to be those bridges for us”

But she accepts “it’s not going to happen overnight”. “I’m hoping it will get better for Labour,” she adds. “But I worry whether it’s going to get better for Muslims.”

Iqbal Mohamed thinks Labour and the whole political establishment is failing to recognise the significance of his victory and those of other independents.

“I think people, academics, politicians, political commentators, the media, need to study these seats and constituencies and present it in an honest way,” he says. “This is not sectarian Islamist politics. That is an absolute lie. They’re afraid of the people finding their voice. They’re afraid of people taking back their democracy. And I think the movement has only just begun.”

 

The Government responds

“The Prime Minister has continued to engage and listen to representatives of the Muslim community as seen when he met with faith leaders following outbreaks of violent disorder last month,” a Government spokesperson told i.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “The situation in Gaza is horrifying and we are appalled by the scale of civilian casualties. From the Prime Minister down, we have repeatedly urged Israel to improve aid access, minimise civilian casualties and engage seriously with negotiations for a ceasefire deal.

“The UK Government remains focused on pushing for an immediate ceasefire, to bring an end to the devastating violence in Gaza. This is essential to ensure the release of hostages, the upholding of international law and to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

 

This article was originally published in The i Paper on 22nd September 2024. To view it click here.