How the Left’s love-in with Islam will change Britain
"The classic models of minority rule concern asymmetries of interest and involvement: groups with strong ties to a region might vote based on foreign policy others care little about, or small, networked communities may be able to self-organise in defence of their collective interests while the majority remains fractured.
In Britain, however, what appears to be playing out is the first rumbling of a major demographic shift. As Britain becomes a more Muslim country, British politics becomes more concerned with Muslim issues.
The signs were visible well in advance. Starmer swept into office in 2024, but did so with a structurally weak vote. As Conservative havens fell across the country, safe Labour seats were run unexpectedly close. Some were lost entirely, with constituencies the party had held for decades voting for independent candidates standing on a single-issue pro-Palestine platform.
For decades, the assumption in Labour circles was that the Muslim vote was a Labour vote. Previous wobbles – Bradford West in 2012, and George Galloway’s various other successes – had resulted in a brief burst of introspection, and then a slow decline into business as usual. Muslim voters might be unhappy with the party, just as the white working classes were, but neither had a realistic alternative to coalesce around.
If Brexit was the wedge that finally broke open the divide between Labour’s traditional working-class base and the party, Gaza appears to have played that role for Labour’s newer Muslim voters. The Greens have ruthlessly exploited this, delivering a 27-point swing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, with Reform pushing Labour into third place.
This is a model for many seats across the country: Muslim voters agitated over Gaza or perceived hostility in Britain will now have no need to opt for the compromise of a vote for Labour rather than a specific vote for their preferences. In turn, the concerns of these Muslim voters will become more relevant on a national level.
At first glance, it seems surprising that British Muslims should be the focus of so much political angst. Roughly 6.5 per cent of the population of England and Wales gave their religion as “Muslim” at the last census and, as demographer Paul Morland notes, “many are too young to vote, or may lack citizenship”.
Electorally, however, the raw numbers matter less than the distribution. Across the 411 seats won by Labour at the last general election, it’s plausible that in 112 the number of eligible Muslim voters could exceed the size of Labour’s majority. In 29 of these, the Greens, Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, or an independent candidate finished in second place. As the by-election in Gorton and Denton showed, these are far from the only seats where the party is at risk...
The 6.5 per cent figure is misleading when we think about a general election in 2029. Britain’s Muslim population is growing rapidly, having risen from 4.9 per cent in 2011. And in the aftermath of the census, Boris Johnson triggered the “Boriswave” – an unprecedented surge in low-skilled migration, generally from non-EU nations.
As a result, Morland believes, “the Muslim share of the population is almost certainly higher than that 6.5 per cent – maybe somewhere around 7-8 per cent today”. Moreover, the community has “demographic momentum” on its side. As Morland says: “The [Muslim] birth rate is higher – much higher – than in other groups simply because the population is younger, so there are more young women to have children. So the community has built-in growth even without further migration.”
Between leverage and growth, in other words, the incentives on the Left to sway towards the priorities of Muslim voters are going nowhere...
As recently as the 2019 election, 80 per cent of Muslim votes in Britain went to the Labour Party.
Yet even then, Fiyaz Mughal – founder of the pro-integration foundation Faith Matters – argues, cracks had long been growing. “The primary breaking point was the Iraq war [of 2003]. It set the scene for a fracture in the relationship with Labour which has been exacerbated not just recently. It started with Iraq, but carried on with Palestine. It faded when Corbyn came in, but the breaking point I can pinpoint exactly.”
In 2023, four days after October 7, Starmer appeared on LBC Radio with Nick Ferrari. Asked about withholding power and water from Palestinian civilians, the Labour leader told the world that “Israel has the right” to do so. “He was caught off guard,” Mughal says. “That comment reverberated across Labour Muslim bases across the country.”
British Muslims are far from the only group to cast their vote based on foreign affairs, as the pandering to Hindu votes in particular constituencies illustrates. But they are perhaps unique in their strength of feeling, and the degree to which they are animated by one particular issue regardless of national origin.
This was not always the case. As Mughal notes, Gaza retains a hold on the British Muslim imagination “partly because Islamist groups have done a great job of promoting Palestine since the 1980s”.
As various writers have pointed out, British intelligence took a unique approach to the challenges of that period, and for an extended period afterwards. In 2005, the US Jamestown Foundation argued that London was “for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East”, with “lenient asylum laws” allowing “the largest and most overt concentration of Islamist political activists since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan” to the great displeasure of foreign intelligence services, and in particular Paris, which had had repeated requests for information on Algerians in exile in London denied.
In 2007, the Royal United Services Institute think tank noted that “it suits British interests to host foreign opposition groups”, gaining “leverage over their governments” and the ability to “learn a great deal about Islamic networks and groups by simply monitoring the communications and activities of these organisations”.
For Mughal, this approach was stunningly naive. “[In the 1980s] the French recognised, given their colonial background and their engagement in North Africa, that political Islam was on the rise. We were caught asleep at the wheel. I believe – although I will never be able to prove it – that our intelligence services and our government thought: ‘Well, better in than out.’ That we could influence it. And that there would be no significant problem in Britain. That strategy blew up in our faces.”
The result, he says, was that “Islamist groups, led by Islamist activists running from persecution in North Africa, the Middle East, devoted to the cause”, set up shop in England. “They grabbed on to Palestine, recognised that it could be a rallying call for Muslims as co-religionists. You can see it starting with the migration of these individuals.”
Before their arrival, Mughal argues: “Mosques were just places to pray, not places of activism. But they became places of activism with the arrival of these highly dedicated individuals. Penetration was so easy. They just volunteered and got in. And after the [Palestinian uprising against Israel], mosques began to segregate, leaflets became predominantly about Gaza, then about Chechnya.”
The result was to make Gaza central to British Muslim politics, and to introduce a wedge with the party that had been the political home for the faith for decades.
Since post-war migration, Britain and its resident Muslim communities have changed a great deal, but their working-class roots are still relevant today. Households of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin remain among the poorest in the country. That poverty also affected the nature of incoming migration in the 80 years after the war, as new workers joined family and spouses.
The Muslim community is not a monolith, but it is still composed in the largest part of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi ethnic backgrounds, who were introduced to politics through this route. As Mughal notes, the Left-wing vote is “a class phenomenon rather than anything else”. The Conservative resistance to migration “was an added factor – the Labour unions are helping us, the Conservatives want to stop our relatives coming – which entrenched the Muslim vote for Labour”.
You can see these twin tracks – Gaza and Left-wing economics – fusing in the attempts of community organisers and organisations to rally the Muslim vote as a single bloc. Before the 2024 election, the Muslim Council of Britain launched its “10 Political Commandments”. The first two items on the list involved adopting a definition of Islamophobia and recognising Palestine, but the next four could have been taken from the Labour manifesto, calling for tackling child poverty, year-round free school meals for low-income families, action on the “cost of living crisis”, and more social housing and government healthcare.
On a national level, then, the implications of greater competition for the Muslim vote in the short-term look much as we’d expect: more attention to Gaza, greater splits with Israel and the United States in the Middle East, more government spending on public services and redistribution. But what will the effects be later on?
Movements which start out small have proved highly successful in using groups of strongly aligned activists to put pressure on the Government or the public to change course. The successes of trans activists in persuading people to ignore the evidence of their own eyes didn’t come through fringe chants to kill Terfs, but through lobbying, legal argument, appeals to emotion and helpful friends at technology companies who banned those making counter-arguments.
Already, we have the Government responding to the preferences of the Muslim population in a fashion that sometimes crosses the line into appeasing hardliners. The impact of the Gaza protests and the sudden loss of previously relied-on votes has dragged the Prime Minister and his country into a formal recognition of Palestine, and delayed US use of British airbases in its conflict with Iran.
Of course, not all British Muslims share the same degree of ideological orientation as devoted campaigners. At the same time, the members of the community who do want to push for change are now in a far better position than other campaigners – like trans activists – who go on to be successful despite starting with no natural constituency.
The proportion of British Muslims willing to state their sympathy with suicide bombers to an interviewer has historically been around 4 per cent or so; the numbers who refuse to condemn violence against those who mock Mohammed are higher, around a third. Between the threat of violence and disorder on one part, and devoted political activism on another, the effect has been to introduce a sort of de facto censorship of the public domain.
The Crown Prosecution Service, for instance, has been doing its level best to maintain the peace by attempting effectively to enforce an Islamic blasphemy law, prosecuting Hamit Coskun for harassing the “religious institution of Islam” after he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate, then attempting to overturn his acquittal.
In areas with large Muslim populations and fewer moderating influences from the national mainstream, the effects on a local level are starting to show. Councils in the North of England are advising teachers that children’s drawings can be “idolatrous”, and informing schools to avoid reproducing images of Jesus.
One of the authorities issuing the advice covers Batley Grammar School, where a teacher who showed a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed received death threats in 2021. By the time the Khan review of social cohesion was published in 2024, he remained in hiding. No arrests were made of those threatening violence...
“The conservative religious element is around 20-25 per cent of the Muslim community. Then you have people who are religious, not so conservatively religious, which is another 25-30 per cent. Less recognised, and increasingly less vocal [are] secular Muslims who are marginalised. This is going in the wrong direction. I speak as a secular Muslim. Those voices are less and less audible in the public sphere.”...
Historically, the best way to integrate a group has been through work and education, meeting people of different backgrounds, obtaining the freedom of income and financial stability, being able to make choices in an environment away from the home.
But the segregation we can see on a street level is showing up in schools, too; Pakistani and Bangladeshi children make up 5 per cent and 2 per cent of all students in state-funded primary and secondary schools, but attend schools where Pakistani and Bangladeshi students make up 31 per cent and 26 per cent of the pupils on average.
Britain is not yet locked into the path France finds itself on, with the Left adopting a borderline sectarian approach to politics. At the same time, we are following the same broad trajectory towards an explicitly Islamo-Leftist politics for part of the nation, with no sign that the Government recognises the errors that led us to this point or has any idea how to turn the ship around."
