The election year in the UK is making everyone hectic. The governing Conservatives, who are far behind in opinion polls, and the Labour opposition, which has been around 20 percentage points higher than the government for months. But things have become increasingly tight for the Social Democrats since last fall, caused by the party itself.
Its chairman, Keir Starmer, is under pressure: on the one hand, because he repeatedly abandons positions from the party program before they are reflected in the election manifesto, but also because he occasionally holds positions that large parts of his party no longer want to follow. The latest course correction concerns the issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Shortly after the terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel’s south and the start of the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza, there was an increasing number of voices in the Labour Party calling for an immediate ceasefire. On the sidelines of Labour’s autumn conference, trade unions and Labour „Friends for Palestine and the Middle East“ organized half a dozen solidarity debates and rallies.
This circle of friends includes 92 Labor MPs, which is almost half of the group. The Labour group “Friends of Israel” only has 55 parliamentary members, Starmer himself belongs to both groups. However, despite protests from parts of his party, he maintained his stance that Israel had the right to take offensive action in Gaza to defend itself. A permanent ceasefire would currently primarily benefit the terrorist Hamas, but humanitarian ceasefires would be desirable.
In the first few weeks, several dozen Muslim local Labour MPs resigned from their seats and offices in protest, and the Scottish Nationalist Party put the demand for a ceasefire to a vote in the House of Commons. 56 MPs, more than a quarter of the Labour group, voted in favor of the resolution, including eight members of Starmer’s shadow cabinet.
They included MPs Shah, Qureshi and Khan, whose constituencies are in northern English industrial cities where the Muslim population is particularly large. Khan once led the Labour Muslim Network, which includes many Muslim Labour members and more than 500 of their local MPs. The current leader has now publicly sounded the alarm: Labour is losing the solid support of Muslims. A survey commissioned by his association found approval had halved. While in 2019 86 percent of those surveyed said they would have voted for Labour, now only 43 percent of Muslims would vote for the British Social Democrats. The Party leadership’s assessment of the war in Gaza created “anger, rejection and a feeling of betrayal” towards Labour.
Across the country, independent general election candidates are now emerging in constituencies with large Muslim populations, seeking to provide a home for disaffected Labour voters. They are mostly linked to a political initiative called “The Muslim Vote”, which aims to call on the four million Muslims in Britain to refuse to vote in the general election for Labour MPs who do not support the pro-ceasefire resolution in November put in. Instead, candidates who proved to be friends of Palestine would be recommended.
The party’s leadership may lose votes by turning away Muslim voters not just in the House of Commons elections, probably this autumn, but in the local elections to be held in two months in May already, in which the London City Council and the London Mayor Sadiq Khan is up for re-election. Khan has already clearly taken the Friends of Palestine route and supported calls for a ceasefire. The leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar, also soon abandoned Starmer’s determinations on the Gaza issue: He now accuses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of using the offensive in Gaza “as a weapon in his own political struggle.” Sarwar is in political competition in Scotland with the Scottish Nationalist party leader Humza Yousaf, who is also Muslim and whose in-laws were stuck in the Gaza Strip at the start of the Israeli attack.
So it’s not the Tories, who hardly hold any Scottish lower house constituencies anyway, but the Scottish nationalists who are Labour’s main opponents.
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