The Labour government has shown itself to be impotent on some of the most significant issues facing this country. Any sound-minded person would struggle to justify their hardline position against a national inquiry into the child grooming gangs, or their silence on the rampant proliferation of Sharia Law courts across England – 75 now in total. Their fixation with pushing through a harmful definition of ‘Islamophobia’ and unpreparedness to outlaw first-cousin marriage are equally inexplicable.
These are irrational decisions for a government to take and ones that so clearly work against the national interest. So why have Keir Starmer and the Labour Party taken them?
Keir Starmer is facing pressure on his party
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Last year was the year that the Muslim vote began to exert real influence on the electoral landscape of Britain. Coordinated by groups such as Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Voice, the community was more prepared than ever, as an electoral bloc, to turn against a Labour Party that was not doing as they wanted.
This mobilisation saw George Galloway returned to Parliament as the MP for Rochdale lectern, Jonathan Ashworth left red-faced in Leicester, and five Gazan independent MPs now sitting on the House of Commons’ green benches.
The message was clear; that if Keir Starmer was not prepared to champion the demands of this section of British society, most particularly on Gaza, then they would have no problem inflicting electoral pain on his Party. It is well known that the Labour voter coalition rests on the underlying assumption that the Muslim vote can be relied upon, and until recently this assumption was an accurate one. In the 2019 general election well over 80 per cent of British Muslims put their cross next to Labour. At last year’s ballot, Labour lost 300,000 votes in those areas with large Muslim populations and was down 11 per cent in areas where one tenth of the population are Muslim.
Downing Street has clearly set out to arrest this slide, and the electoral reasoning for doing so is clear. New analysis by the Centre for Migration Control found that the Labour Party have 80 MPs in seats with a sizeable Muslim population of at least 12 per cent, including Secretaries of State Wes Streeting and David Lammy.
There are 89 such seats in total, with five of them snatched off Labour by Gazan Independents in July. These seats may very well have larger religious populations within them – whether Christian, atheist, or Hindu – but none that are as capable of voting as such a cohesive bloc; a feat made possible in Muslim communities by their tight-knit nature and clear hierarchical structures. The 2003 Brent East by-election showed that, with a prevailing headwind, a Muslim population of just 10 per cent, voting en masse, is enough to turf out a Labour incumbent.
There are 60 seats currently held by a Labour MP who could have their majorities wiped out if the Muslim vote were to go elsewhere, without the need for any other group to change its voting behaviour. The Safeguarding minister, Jess Philips came close to falling a cropper of this dynamic, ultimately winning her Birmingham Yardley seat by just 693 votes.
Since this wakeup call, she has shown herself hesitant to take any steps that could cut into her wafer-thin majority and anger the 45.1 per cent of her constituency who are Muslim. It is hard to argue against the suggestion that this is why she has played a pivotal role in refusing calls for a national grooming gangs inquiry – something which would cause discomfort amongst those communities where the crimes proliferated.
With record levels of migration seeing hundreds of thousands of people from South Asia enter the country each year, the acute problem that this poses Labour will only grow. We can already see these effects at a local level, where those without British citizenship are eligible to vote in council elections.
Currently the Labour Party control just over 100 local councils in the country, nearly a quarter of these have a Muslim population that is over twice the national average. The Party also has 6,500 councillors across the United Kingdom, with 17 per cent of these representing a ward where Muslims account for at least one in five of the population, and 10 per cent of them are in areas where the Muslims population is over 25 per cent.
The picture is clear, that Labour cannot afford to alienate the four million Muslims who live in this country. The problem is that, as the party of government, they will often be required to take decisions that put them at odds with this group. The evidence so far is that they are not prepared to do so, and are more than willing to put the national interest as a distant second to their electoral considerations – justifying such cowardice with vacuous notions of maintaining “community cohesion”.