Britain's new Islamo-Leftist alliance won't last, but it might kill Labour first

Telegraph

2 days ago

Is there space for a new party on the Left, bringing together pro-Gaza activists, radical socialists and possibly Greens? Labour strategists are terrified by the prospect. They know that the only thing they have going for them is the split between the Conservatives and Reform. An equivalent split on the Left would remove that advantage.
If you want to understand why Labour caved in so expensively to its rebels on benefits reform, look no further. The party was not prepared to take the Whip away from any more MPs for fear of pushing them into a Corbynite bloc.
Luckily for Labour, the Leftist insurgency has so far been more gauche than sinister. Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South who lost the Labour Whip last year, announced in a post on X late on Thursday night that she and Jeremy Corbyn were forming a new party, only for the Absolute Boy to mutter grumpily that he had agreed to no such thing.
As I write, no other Labour MP has joined and – the most unkindest cut of all – Momentum has refused to endorse its former idol.
Might there yet emerge a serious challenger party, capable of hoovering up 10 or 15 per cent of the vote, and so putting the parties of the Right back into contention?
To answer that question, we need to go back to Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. That upheaval was the moment when political Islam became a major factor in world affairs. We should put equal stress on the two parts of its name: Islamic Revolution. Leftist radicals, both in Iran and in the West, loathed the Shah because they saw him as an ally of Britain and the United States, and initially backed the ayatollahs.
Most egregious of the Useful Idiots – perhaps Useless Idiot would be more accurate in his case – was Michel Foucault, the archetype of a Left-wing French intellectual, down to his polo-necks and cigarettes, a man whose anti-colonialism was so ferocious that he has escaped cancellation despite the revelation that he paid Arab boys as young as nine for sex. Foucault's dislike of organised religion did not prevent him praising the 'political spirituality' of the mullahs.
The Iranian Revolution marked the birth of what the French call 'Islamo-gauchisme'. The ayatollahs had nothing in common with the Left beyond their hatred of monarchy. But they were anti-Western and, in the climate of the Cold War, that was what counted. Iran's Communists formed a tactical alliance with the ayatollahs, imagining that they would emerge as senior partners. Instead, they found themselves proscribed, arrested, tortured and, in 1988, shot in batches.
It was an early lesson in where the balance of power lies in these Red-Green alliances. Socialism can exert a quasi-religious pull on its followers. But, alongside an actual religion, it gets squeezed.
Which brings us back to Jezza and our opening question. Is there space for a new British party that brings together the various strands of the far-Left, fissiparous, cantankerous and envious as they are? Could the bearded Bolshevik unite conservative Islamists and revolutionary socialists around the one position which, for very different reasons, they share, namely hostility to the West in general and Israel in particular?
On paper, the answer is no. The radical Left is already (to use a word Corbo likes) rammed. There is the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party. There is the Socialist Party (England and Wales), the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialist Equality Party. There's Left Unity and Transform and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and… oh, you get the picture.
Then again, all this was just as true in 2015, when Corbyn, who had had dealings with most of these groups, swept to national prominence. Might the circumstances of that fevered, phantasmagoric year replicate themselves?
It is still not easy to explain Corbyn's 2015 appeal. Similar candidates had contested previous Labour leadership contests: John McDonnell in 2007, Diane Abbott in 2010. Corbo himself had been an unnoticed MP for more than 30 years. Yet a series of factors somehow made the old boob a cult figure and, in 2017, came close to putting him in Downing Street.
One of those factors was the radicalisation of the growing Muslim electorate. An extraordinary 85 per cent of British Muslims voted for Corbyn in 2017, and 86 per cent in 2019, though the Labour figure fell back in 2024 with the rise of the pro-Gaza independents.
Sectarian voting is ugly, whomever it benefits. Those elections also saw massive swings to the Conservatives among Jewish and Hindu voters. Indeed, the sole Tory gain in 2024 was the strongly Hindu seat of Leicester East.
The trouble is that confessional voting encourages complacency and corruption. When communities feel obliged to vote for 'their' team, candidates make less effort to convince on grounds of either ideology or competence.
We are accustomed to the idea that British Muslims lean Left, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Many first-generation Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants were low-paid manual workers, often employed by the state. But that is less true today: British Muslims are likelier than the general population to be self-employed.
In Muslim-majority democracies, the Left tends to be secular. The more religious parties, on top of being socially conservative, are the more prone to cut taxes and reduce regulations.
This should not surprise us, for Islam is the only great religion founded by a businessman – a businessman who used his last sermon to preach the sanctity of property. Jesus said some hard things about wealth, and it was not until the sixteenth century that Christians stopped holding up poverty as their ideal. But Islam never had any problem with the idea that money, honestly acquired and put to good use, was a blessing. The Prophet, after all, had established tax-free markets and rejected calls for prices to be regulated.
Across the Islamic wold, from Morocco to Malaysia, anti-Western feeling is stronger on the secular Left. But in Britain, Muslims were for a long time seen primarily, not as people who believed in the Oneness of God and the finality of the teachings of Mohammad, but as a non-white minority to be slotted into a victim role in an imagined hierarchy of oppression. That is why British Islamo-gauchism rests on anti-colonialism, and especially on the portrayal of Israel as the ultimate colonial oppressor.
George Galloway understood earlier than most how the balance was shifting. Having once won awards from Stonewall, he began to describe himself as 'socially conservative', made sceptical noises about the portrayal of gay relationships and came out against abortion and euthanasia, while at the same time growing a beard, boasting that he did not drink and littering his speech with Islamic expressions.
A challenger party that aims to get into double figures will, I suspect, lean more to Galloway's approach than Corbyn's. Which makes me wonder how many revolutionary socialists will go along with it.
Let me suggest an early test. In Apsana Begum's Poplar and Limehouse constituency, 39 per cent of residents identify as Muslim and 24 per cent as Christian. If she is the next Labour MP to defect, it will tell us much about the likely orientation of the new party.
The Red-Green coalition, which came together in the hideous mésalliance known as Stop the War, might hold for a bit longer. But, in time, omnicause Lefties will be squeezed out – though not, one assumes, thrown off buildings like their Iranian colleagues.
The face of Britain is changing, and our parties are changing with it. Some Corbynites may live long enough to wonder, whether, in getting rid of something they disliked, they ended up enabling something worse.