As Gaza crisis festers, will Muslim critics of British govt join forces with far-left?

Straits Times

11-07-2025

– British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is barely one year in office and his popularity is sinking fast.
But what Mr Starmer and his ruling centre-left Labour Party now fear most is the emergence of race politics in the shape of the potential rise of a new far-left political movement which will attract the support of Britain's sizeable Muslim community.
The proposed new party is unlikely to be formally Muslim, let alone overtly Islamic in its ideology. But opinion polls indicate that it will count on strong backing from British Muslims, and this factor alone may herald the rise of dangerous sectarian arguments in the country.
There are currently around four million Muslims in the United Kingdom. Due to the mass migration Britain experienced over the past few decades, their numbers are rising fast. Muslims accounted for less than 2 per cent of Britain's population in 1990 but now make up 6 per cent of the nation.
This unusually rapid rise – numbers are up by around 40 per cent since 2011 – means that a good part of Britain's Muslim community are first-generation migrants and therefore both less likely to be fully integrated, and statistically more prone to consider their faith as their defining characteristic.
But the more significant factor is that the overwhelming majority of the country's Muslims live in urban areas, so their impact on elections is often magnified because Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system – as it is in Singapore – rewards those who can concentrate their support in key areas.
According to the latest electoral surveys, British Muslims account for a large share of the electorate in at least 50 out of the country's 650 constituencies, and probably can determine the elections in a further 20.
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Traditionally, most Muslim votes went to Labour; in the 2024 general election , all the 32 constituencies with the largest concentrations of Muslims went to Labour. But Labour's share of the Muslim vote is shrinking rapidly, from 80 per cent in the general election held in 2019 to barely 60 per cent in last year's general ballots.
Both domestic and international factors have contributed to this trend.
For years, Britain was rocked by a long-running scandal over the activities of male grooming gangs, preying on vulnerable young girls.
Most of these gangs appeared to have been formed by men of Pakistani origin, while most of their victims were Caucasian girls. These criminal activities were first identified two decades ago. Yet the police seem to have done nothing for many years, allegedly because state prosecutors feared the racial implications of any action.
The ringleaders of these gangs are now serving long prison sentences, and far-right politicians are using the stories of their crimes as arguments against Muslims and even Islam. Labour's apparent inability to silence these attempts to smear an entire community and faith have angered many Muslim voters.
However, the biggest source of Muslim alienation from Labour is the war in Gaza and the British government's apparent unwillingness to adopt a more critical stance towards Israel.
At last year's general election , a score of Muslim candidates ran against Labour, citing Gaza as their main concern. No less than four out of these were duly elected as MPs; all seized constituencies traditionally held by Labour and are now sitting as independents in Parliament.
Until recently, Mr Starmer still hoped that this was just a temporary protest. But instead, the alienation of Muslims from Labour is being boosted through an emerging political pact between Muslim critics of the government and far-left rebel politicians.
Chief among them is Mr Jeremy Corbyn, the standard-bearer of the far-left in Britain, and a former Labour leader.
Mr Corbyn, who was thrown out of the Labour party but still held his old constituency and now also sits as an independent MP, plans to form a new party which will include the existing four Muslim independents in Parliament.
At first sight, an alliance between the far-left and Muslim lawmakers seems odd. The two have different priorities, and an increasing number of British Muslims are self-employed, rather than being the low-paid industrial workers the far-left seeks to attract.
But the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza is now drawing some Muslim voters and far-left activists together. They are 'tied by grievance politics' and by shared 'sympathies with foreign regimes which are hostile to the so-called Western interests', argues Dr Rakib Ehsan, a British academic of Bangladeshi origins.
In theory, the emergence of a far-left fringe party should not concern Mr Starmer unduly. Even if this party led by Mr Corbyn and composed of Muslim dissident MPs succeeds in attracting a few other lawmakers, the current government enjoys an overall majority of 165 MPs in Parliament, so its existence is not immediately threatened.
Still, there are plenty of reasons for the British government to worry.
The first concern is that the new party may attract many new supporters at the next elections. A survey conducted by YouGov, a major pollster, on July 9 indicates that up to a third of Labour's core voters could be interested in defecting to the new party, and the figures are larger for Labour's Muslim supporters.
Secondly, the rise of a distinct and alternative Muslim vote outside the Labour party could radicalise Muslims who remain loyal to Labour. Mr Starmer is already facing pressure to introduce legislation banning criticism of the Quran or the Prophet. Such legislation will be deeply unpopular with the rest of the British electorate.
And the rise of a party that claims to speak for Britain's Muslims will make race relations in Britain far more toxic. For while Labour is losing Muslim supporters, the opposition Conservatives are gaining strong support from Jews and Hindus . It was not an accident that the only constituency the Conservatives gained in the 2024 general election was a strongly Hindu one.
Nor is it accidental that the Conservatives are now demanding that the government outlaw marriages between first cousins, a measure bound to hit Labour's Muslim vote. About 55 per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, while the practice accounts for only 3 per cent of all other British marriages.
In short, ugly sectarian politics are already appearing in Britain.