Gaza and Elections, continued

Keir Starmer and Joe Biden have a serious problem.

(A Note: An academic and I are doing a series of deep data dives. For professional reasons, that academic wishes to remain anonymous. Maybe someday we’ll live in an era when professors can work without fear of losing their jobs, but we’re not there yet. In any case, the following may be too dry for some readers; others will find it enthralling. Enjoy!

- Ayaan)

My friend and I wrote recently about how the Gaza war may end up costing Joe Biden re-election. Against this backdrop moderate Democrats should look with concern at Britain’s local elections on May 2nd, when their sister Labour Party suffered heavy losses among Muslim voters across the country. Islamist voters give left-wing parties a choice: Join us in trying to destroy Israel, or risk losing. The Labour leaders’ present priorities and those of the Islamist voters are irreconcilable.

Hundreds of local councils, mayoral positions, and police commissionerships were up for grabs, with the opposition Labour Party scoring a number of key victories at the expense of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party. This is just the latest sign that the Conservatives (or “Tories”) are heading for a heavy defeat at the next yet-to-be-announced UK General Election.

Despite these advances, Labour lost a lot of votes in areas with large Muslim populations, with the Guardian reporting that the party's vote was down 17.9% in areas where more than a fifth of people identified as Muslim. In areas that are majority Muslim, ITV’s analysis found that Labour lost fully 33% of their previous vote share. In the most heavily Muslim-populated wards of all (those with over 70% Muslim population share), Labour lost a whopping 39 percentage points. The falling Muslim support is a direct response to how Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, reacted to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. These votes are not usually going to the Tories, but to smaller parties Islamists can control.

Just like President Biden, Starmer has been widely criticized for his handling of the Israel conflict, including not calling for a full ceasefire or arms embargo sooner. A YouGov surveypublished on March 1st found that only 14% of Britons believe Starmer has handled Labour's response to the conflict well, compared to 52% who believe he has handled it badly – rising to 67% of those who sympathize primarily with the Palestinians. And while you don’t have to be a Muslim to take an interest in the Gaza war, polls show that one in four British Muslims name Palestine as the most important election issue, compared with just three per cent of the public as a whole.

Sadiq Khan’s re-election to a third term as London mayor by a comfortable 11% margin bucked the trend of Muslim voters abandoning Labour, perhaps because he was among the earliest Labour figures to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Elsewhere Muslim votes bled away to independent candidates running on Middle-East-focused platforms. While Labour secured a key victory in the West Midlands mayoral contest, it was tight, with their candidate Richard Parker beating Conservative Andy Street by only 1,500 votes. The narrowness of this victory was due in considerable part to independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, who stood partly on a Gaza ticket and came third, pulling in almost 70,000 votes.

Elsewhere Labour lost control of Oldham Council due to the election of seven new independents running on Palestine-heavy platforms. Sir Keir’s party would also have hoped to have gained control of Bolton but missed out to victorious, independent, pro-ceasefire candidates who dedicated their wins to the Palestinians. Pro-Palestine independents also did well in other Muslim wards in Blackburn and Bradford.

Meanwhile, the newly established Islamo-Gauchist Workers Party of Britain, whose leader George Galloway pulled off a coup by winning the parliamentary seat of Rochdale in a special election in February,  gained two seats on the local council. They also won another ward in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, which encompasses a heavily Muslim electorate, and sensationally ousted Luthfur Rahman, the Labour deputy leader of Manchester Council. Now, as in February, Galloway rode a tide of Muslim frustration with the British political establishment.

These voters also drifted over to the Greens, a party hitherto more focused on recyclable yogurt packaging and pronouns than on geopolitics. In the defining scene of the night, Mothin Ali, a new Green representative on Leeds City Council, throws his fist in the air, surrounded by ecstatic supporters, and cries out: “We will raise the voice of Gaza, we will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!” He described his victory as a “win for the people of Gaza.” Recycling didn’t get a mention.

It subsequently transpired that Ali, a popular gardening TikToker, took to social media after October 7th to explain that “Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces” and that viewers should “support the right of indigenous people to fight back.” He was also involved in stirring up hostility against Zacheria Deutsch, Leeds University’s Jewish chaplain, whom he attacked online for serving in the IDF. “You should be protecting students from this kind of animal,” he declared, “because if he’s willing to kill people over there, how do you know he’s not going to kill your students over here?” The Rabbi subsequently went into hiding after receiving death threats.

Seeking to capitalize on the success of these pro-Gaza candidates, a grassroots campaign group called “The Muslim Vote” emerged after the local elections and issued a set of 18 demands to Keir Starmer. Muslim Vote demands are mostly standard fare for minority lobby groups: Give us money, make it illegal to criticize us, and apologize for not doing it sooner. But they also demand that Britain cut military ties with Israel, that Labour “return the Zionist money,” and that a travel ban be put in place on some Israeli politicians. Confronted with Muslim defections, Keir Starmer has not yet acceded to these demands – but he has opposed the offensive in Rafah and called for both a ceasefire and a halt on arms shipments. Yes, the Islamists are swinging elections and dictating policy.

Overall, the picture that emerges from these local elections is as unsurprising as it is concerning: Britain now has widespread sectarian voting along ethnoreligious lines. Thanks to mass immigration, it’s here to stay. Unlike the post-Iraq alienation of Muslims from Labour, the major beneficiaries are independents like the WPB and the Islamified Greens, rather than the mainstream Liberal Democrat party. Moreover, according to official figures, Muslims are now 6.5% of the total British population (compared to 3% in 2001). As such, their impact was amplified in small districts, which can be more easily dominated by particular groups. There are a few hundred council seats where the Muslim voter group is the majority of a council ward, but that’s true of only three national constituencies – for now. In much the same way, Muslims overall represent only about 1% of the US electorate, but the electoral college makes them of outsized importance this year in a handful of swing states.

This takes us back to Joe Biden and November. He has also faced intense scrutiny from the coalition of progressives and the US Muslim population (the emerging Red/Green alliance) for his handling of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. This criticism has crescendoed in recent weeks amid clashing protests on US college campuses as Israel begins its operation against the last Hamas stronghold in Rafah.

As we noted in our previous piece, the outcry could affect the 2024 presidential election, especially if it decides who is victorious in the swing state of Michigan, which has the largest U.S.-Arab population in the nation. Biden won Michigan by 154,188 votes (or 2.78%) over Donald Trump; as of 2020 there were an estimated 278,000 Arab-Americans in the state. As of the time of writing, Donald Trump is 0.8 points ahead of Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average in the state, so the President has little room to sustain defections among them on the scale Labour has just endured.

The same goes for other swing states like Georgia and Arizona, where a group of Muslim leaders announced in December 2023 the #AbandonBiden campaign over anger at the president’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. RCP’s polling average already puts Trump ahead in both by more than the margin of error (+4.6 and +5.2), so Biden simply cannot afford to lose tens of thousands of their hitherto Democratic supporting Muslim-American populations.

If the Democratic Party’s relationship with the Muslim community breaks down on the scale just seen in the UK ahead of November, it will cement Biden’s probable defeat. Nonetheless, it is still unlikely to herald the emergence of a separate Muslim voting block: at 1% of the population US Muslims simply aren’t numerous enough for that yet, and, by comparison with their European counter-parts, they are relatively well integrated economically. In the UK, by contrast, there is now clear potential for a permanent Islamic divergence from the political mainstream. According to polling by the Henry Jackson Society, 40% of British Muslims would consider voting for an Islamic party, which would certainly be a more coherent instrument than a Green Party trying to represent both woke progressives and conservative Islamists at once. For decades, the Labour Party and self-proclaimed Muslim “community leaders” have papered over these obvious ideological tensions. Yet as the size and confidence of the Muslim population rapidly expands, and with no end in sight to the inflow of immigration from Muslim majority countries, there is an increasing sense that Muslim political candidates can now raise their own banners.

None of this is inevitable. Moderate center-left parties don’t have to make their surrender to the woke and Islamist fringe permanent. They can (indeed, must) reform. But how? This is the question I hope to address soon, here at Restoration.