Britain’s Election: The Gaza Connection – OpEd

In spite of Labour’s landslide success in the recent UK general election, analysis of the results reveals two surprising facts. First, despite appearances, there was no surge of popular support for Labour, rather a rejection of the 14-year-old Conservative administration; and secondly the results were affected fundamentally by a new political force.

Traditionally, general elections in Britain turn on domestic issues. The economy and the National Health Service are usually to the forefront of voters’ minds, together with the record of the incumbent government. This time around, though,for one bloc of votersa foreign war taking place 3000 miles away was more important than all the usual domestic concerns.

The activities of a brand new organization calling itself The Muslim Vote cost the Labour party five seats, slashed Labour majorities in a fair number of other constituencies, and has placed a caucus of rabidly anti-Israel MPs in the new House of Commons.  They have effectively become the sixth largest party in parliament, equal with Reform.

The Muslim Vote was set up in May by an activist named Abubakr Nanabawa.  It was a response to the Labour Party’s initial decision to support Israel’s right of defense against the pogrom carried out by Hamas.  An alliance of 23 activist organizations, its aim was to unseat those MPs not sufficiently hostile to Israel, particularly Labour party members.

The new body was conceived as a political outlet for those opposed to Labour’s hesitancy is advocating a ceasefire in Gaza. It announced its intentiontocreate a list of approved candidates for Muslims to vote for in the general election. They would stand in opposition to Labour candidates, and demand immediate recognition of Palestine as a state and the banning of all arms sales to Israel.

This new pro-Palestinian bloc of MPs, all of whom have beaten their Labour opponents to win their seats, is headed by Jeremy Corbyn, one-time leader of the Labour party who, in 2019, presided over their greatest electoral defeat since 1935.  He was suspended from the party by its new leader, Keir Starmer, in 2020 for antisemitic attitudes and remarks, so he stood as an independent in the constituency of Islington North, which he has represented since 1983.  He trounced his Labour opponent, winning 49% of the votes compared to Labour’s 34%. 

The other four pro-Palestine MPs were elected in areas with among the highest proportion of Muslim voters in the UK. They range from Blackburn, where 47% of voters are Muslim to Leicester South, where it is 35%. It was in Leicester South that Labour suffered one of its biggest shocks on election night, when the party’s shadow Treasury minister, Jonathan Ashworth, lost his seat by around 1,000 votes to Shockat Adam.

“This is for Gaza!” declared Adam, as he made his victory speech.

In Birmingham Ayoub Khan’s victory over Labour was by a paper-thin 507 votes.Following the October 7 massacre, Khan posted a video on TikTok claiming he had a “problem with the credibility” of some of the accounts of what took place. At the time he was a local government councilor in Birmingham. His then party, the Liberal Democrats, later announced that he had been cleared of wrongdoing, had “apologized and deleted the post” in question, and “agreed to undergo anti-Semitism training.”

But Khan subsequently said he had not approved the statement and did not intend to take the anti-Semitism training course. He went on to quit the party and run as an independent candidate in the election.

In Blackburn, Adnan Hussain overturned a previous Labour majority of over 10,000 to win the seat by a mere 132 votes Hussain posted an online statement to voters: “I promise to make your concerns against the injustice being inflicted against the people of Gaza be heard in the places where our so-called representatives failed.”

In Dewsbury independent candidate Iqbal Mohamed crushed his Labour opponent by winning 41% of the vote against her 22%. Video of Mohamed speaking at a recent rally shows him encouraging children to boycott Israel: “Go home, find every brand and every product that has been supporting Israel and Zionism from the beginning of time and throw it away, throw it away...That is the least we can do.”

This loss of five seats that Labour might reasonably have expected to win tells only a part of the story. More than a few Labour figures, including some now in ministerial positions, squeezed past the winning post only by the skin of their teeth.

For example Wes Streeting, now the minister of health, won back his seat by just 528 votes over British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamad. And Jess Phillips, a prominent member of the party, saw her previous 13,000 majority truncated to just 693. When she tried to give a victory speech after the declaration, she was booed and jeered by pro-Palestinian activists, including chants of “shame on you” and “free Palestine”. She responded by condemning the intimidation her campaign had faced, and said the election has been “the worst I have ever stood in.”

At his own count, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer saw his previous majority of nearly 23,000 cut in half. He won handsomely, but it was the pro-Gaza activist, Andrew Feinstein, who came second. Feinstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is a South African and was once an ANC member of the National Assembly under Nelson Mandela. He completed his studies in the University of Cambridge in 1990. He was a strong supporter of the UK Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn, and has described Starmer as “inauthentic”.

With 412 MPs out of a total of 650, Starmer for the next five years is theoretically in a position to win each and every issue put to a vote in the House of Commons, and to win it overwhelmingly. Yet the five Muslim Vote MPs could seriously disrupt the main thrust of the government’s intentions if they managed to gather support for anti-Israel action from the body of Labour MPs – and this is not outside the bounds of possibility.

Despite Starmer’s largely successful efforts to disempower the hard left within his party so as to make it electable after the Corbyn years, a sizeable rump of pro-Corbynites remains. Israel, Gaza, a ceasefire, the two-state solution, recognizing Palestine, international arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and minister of defense, the judgment of the International Court of Justice on the accusation against Israel of genocide – all these issues may see the government’s view challenged by the Muslim Vote five, and then supported by an unassessable number of Labour MPs. There may be trouble ahead.