UK’s Labour faces Muslim bloc in revolt, anti-Israel challenger in special election
The party’s support for Israel in the Gaza war is causing pushback from within, and has some voters eyeing radical anti-Zionist George Galloway – but does this pose a true threat?
Robert Philpot is a writer and journalist. He is the former editor of Progress magazine and the author of “Margaret Thatcher: The Honorary Jew.”
LONDON — For Britain’s opposition Labour Party, it is shaping up to be a perfect storm.
Muslim voters — normally a loyal voting bloc for the center-left party — are in open revolt at the staunchly pro-Israel line adopted by Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer.
And now a parliamentary vacancy has arisen in Rochdale, a constituency in northwest England where Muslims make up nearly 27 percent of voters, leading to a by-election that will take place on February 29.
Add to that combustible mix the implosion this week of Labour’s campaign for the seat following leaked recordings of its candidate making antisemitic remarks about the October 7 Hamas-led massacre that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and saw 253 more abducted to the Gaza Strip, and stir in the presence of George Galloway, Britain’s most high-profile and vocal critic of the Jewish state.
A far-left populist, Galloway — who has been described as “one of the most disturbing figures in modern politics” — is now the bookmaker’s favorite to win the special election in Rochdale.
“What is going on in Rochdale? This by-election is not showcasing British politics at its best,” a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism told The Times of Israel.
Labour, which leads the governing Conservative Party by 20-plus points in the polls, appears to be heading for a landslide victory when Britons vote in a general election expected later this year. On Thursday, it overturned big Tory majorities in two special elections. One of the victors, the former mayor of the London borough of Lewisham, Damien Egan, converted to Judaism in 2018 and is married to an Israeli, Yossi Felberbaum.
But Starmer’s stance on the Gaza war has caused him a series of political headaches. In November, dozens of his MPs defied him and rebelled in a parliamentary vote calling for an immediate ceasefire. Next week, the Labour leader will come under pressure again after the Scottish National Party (SNP) announced it will force another ceasefire vote.
Nonetheless, with a majority of nearly 10,000 votes in 2019, Labour should have been able to hold Rochdale. Those hopes began to collapse on Sunday when a recording emerged of its candidate, Azhar Ali, telling a local party meeting last year that the Hamas attack was a conspiracy designed to give Israel the “green light to do whatever they bloody want” in Gaza. After Ali issued an apology, Labour initially stood by his candidacy, knowing that legally it could not replace his name on the ballot paper. But further revelations, in which Ali is alleged to have referred to “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters,” led Starmer to pull the plug on Monday evening and halt all Labour campaigning on his behalf.
There remains a chance that with the Labour Party’s red rose still next to his name when voters go to the polling station, Ali will win the election. Even if he were to win, though, Labour still wouldn’t allow him to join its parliamentary party, forcing him to sit as an independent in the House of Commons.
Labour’s refusal to concede
Labour’s initial decision to stick with Ali was largely driven by a fear that, unable to field a new replacement candidate, the party might be effectively handing the seat to Galloway. That fear was exacerbated by polls indicating a sharp drop in the party’s support among Muslim voters.
Research conducted by the polling company Survation published earlier this month showed Labour’s support among Muslim voters falling by 26 points to 60%. The Labour Muslim Network said the party’s response to the war in Gaza had been “unacceptable and deeply offensive to Muslims across Britain.” Muslim voters, the pressure group warned, “will not support any political party that does not fervently oppose the crimes committed against the people of Gaza.”
Labour’s most senior Muslim MP, shadow justice secretary Shabana Mahmoud, has conceded in a BBC interview that there had been a “loss of trust” among Muslim voters.
Within the party, too, there have been ructions. Labour councilmembers in Oxford, Burnley, Blackburn and Walsall have resigned, in some instances imperilling its control of town halls in major cities.
A new website, The Muslim Vote, has been launched. It currently lists every seat in Britain where Muslims make up at least 10% of the electorate, together with whether the incumbent MP backed an immediate ceasefire in November’s parliamentary vote. The website names the “community endorsed candidate” for the general election and warns: “We mean business.”
Labour is also reported to be worried about the potential political fallout of its stance in well-to-do, left-leaning constituencies, including seats in the cities of Bristol in the country’s southwest and Brighton on the south coast, where it is battling the pro-Palestinian Green Party. In Scotland, too, Labour’s ambition to take dozens of constituencies from the SNP, which is highly critical of Israel, are also feared to be in peril.
In the 2005 general election, former prime minister Tony Blair’s backing for the US-led invasion of Iraq caused a similar political headache for Labour with support among Muslim and left-wing voters dropping sharply. The centrist Liberal Democrat party, which had strongly opposed the Iraq war, reaped the electoral rewards. But voters currently angry at Starmer’s stance on Israel have few mainstream political outlets for their ire. The Conservatives, who are deeply unpopular after 14 years in government, are strongly pro-Israel and the Liberal Democrats have not carved out a distinctive position on the Gaza war.
Labour is, however, keeping a close eye on speculation that independent anti-Israel candidates will contest seats where its MPs failed to back a ceasefire. Already, Labour frontbencher Wes Streeting, a centrist rising star, is facing a challenge from Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad in his northeast London seat. Streeting held the district of Ilford North, where 27% of voters are Muslim, by just over 5,000 votes in 2019. Mohammad has been endorsed by The Muslim Vote website.
However, while Starmer has softened some of his rhetoric, he has not budged on his core stance: joining the UK government in refusing to back an immediate ceasefire. The Labour leader fired frontbenchers who refused to toe the line in November’s ceasefire vote. He has removed a number of left-wing MPs from the parliamentary party for comments about the war deemed to be unacceptable. And this week, Starmer also suspended former MP Graham Jones, who had been picked to fight a seat in the general election, for remarks he made at the same meeting attended by Ali.
‘Passionate hatred of Israel’
All this is music to Galloway’s ears.
“If you’d written this script, it would have been rejected as far-fetched, that here I am in a by-election and it’s Labour that is exploding in an antisemitism row,” he told The Times on Wednesday.
There is nothing subtle about Galloway’s pitch in Rochdale. Campaign literature describes him as “Gaza George Galloway” and tells voters the election is “a straight choice between George who will fight for Palestine… and Keir Starmer who will fight for Israel.” Galloway’s leaflets also claim that Starmer is “in the pocket of Israel.” Galloway has been endorsed by The Muslim Vote website.
Galloway — who served as a Labour MP before he was expelled in 2003 for saying that British troops in Iraq should “refuse to obey illegal orders” — has long been a thorn in the party’s side. In 2005, he ran for office in the east London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow — home to one of the largest number of Muslim voters in the country — for the Respect party. An alliance of Islamists and the far-left, the party opposed the Iraq war as well as adopting a fiercely anti-Israel position. Backed by the Muslim Association of Britain, Galloway succeeded in defeating the incumbent Black Jewish Labour MP, Oona King.
Nor was this the only upset Galloway inflicted on his former party. In 2012, he fought a special election in Bradford West, a constituency in the north of England where the Muslim electorate is close to 55%, defeating the Labour candidate with one of the largest swings in modern British political history.
Middle East issues — especially his opposition to Israel — have long been at the top of Galloway’s political agenda.
“George Galloway expresses relentless and passionate hatred of Israel. He sometimes aggravates the effect with the language that he employs to express it, and by the tone he employs,” says Dr. David Hirsh, the academic director and chief executive of the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. “He treats Israel as a globally significant evil and he portrays Israel as being supremely powerful in its ability to corrupt other countries.”
During the 2006 Lebanon war, Galloway backed Hezbollah against Israel’s “monstrous injustice.” “I glorify the Hezbollah national resistance movement,” he proclaimed.
Two years later, he told a demonstration against the 2008-2009 Gaza war: “Today, the Palestinian people in Gaza are the new Warsaw Ghetto, and those who are murdering them are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1943.” Shortly after the conflict ended, Galloway led an aid convoy to Gaza, where he was presented with a Palestinian passport by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Galloway caused further controversy during the 2014 Gaza war when he publicly declared the city of Bradford “an Israel-free zone.”
“We don’t want any Israeli goods, we don’t want any Israeli services, we don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college, we don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford… We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel,” he said.
Galloway’s support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is so stringent that in 2013 he stormed out of a debate at Oxford University after discovering his student opponent, Eylon Levy, was an Israeli. Galloway later explained his decision on social media: “The reason is simple: no recognition, no normalisation. Just boycott, divestment and sanctions, until the apartheid state is defeated.” Levy, who is now a spokesperson for the Israeli government, held joint British-Israeli citizenship.
Unsurprisingly, Galloway was a strong supporter of the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, strenuously defending him against charges of antisemitism, which he characterized as a “Black Op” and, referencing Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, a “Goebbellian lie.”
Although now the favorite, Galloway is no shoo-in in Rochdale. As Prof. John Curtice has noted, the Muslim community in Rochdale is not as big as in Bradford West, so he will also need to attract non-Muslim Labour supporters.
The prospect of a Galloway victory disturbs many in the Jewish community.
“His views are dangerous and he imports international conflicts into national politics,” says one senior Jewish community figure who requested not to be named. “His particular position on the Middle East conflict and the allies he’s chosen both domestically and internationally are not, to put it mildly, friends of Jews. He will be Corbyn on steroids.”
Will Muslims stick with Labour despite Gaza?
How concerned should Labour be if Galloway wins or puts in a strong performance?
“Broad national statistics don’t help much,” cautions polling expert Peter Kellner. “Seats with a significant proportion of Muslim voters are overwhelmingly safe Labour seats; and the polling recording a drop in Labour support by Muslims shows votes drifting to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, not the Conservatives.”
“However, George Galloway has twice shown that an organized constituency campaign backed by local Muslim leaders can defeat Labour,” Kellner adds. “In practical terms, the issue right now is whether there are any seats where similar local campaigns could defeat Labour today.”
Other experts share Kellner’s belief that with the party maintaining a strong national poll lead, the size of Labour’s majority in seats with a big Muslim vote may blunt the electoral impact of Starmer’s position on the Gaza war.
“Having the support of the Muslim community is important to Labour for many reasons, but given the national swing away from the Conservatives, significant Muslim disillusionment with Labour is unlikely to have a significant electoral impact at the next election,” said the More in Common think tank in an analysis last November.
That finding was reinforced by a detailed analysis published by The Times this week on the impact of the Survation survey which showed a 26-point drop in the party’s support. It concluded that while Labour would shed “thousands of votes” in seats it holds in east London, Bradford and Birmingham where the Muslim vote tops 40%, the party would still comfortably retain all of them. The fall in Muslim support would, however, cost Labour the chance to snatch eight Tory-held constituencies elsewhere in the country.
The Survation poll also revealed that while large numbers of Muslim voters consider the Israel-Palestine conflict a “very important” issue in deciding how they will cast their ballots at the next election, it ranks below other concerns — which are shared more widely by Britons as a whole — including the cost of living, the economy, and the National Health Service. Moreover, the favorability ratings of both Starmer and the Labour Party still far outrank those of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
A shift in position by Labour towards a more anti-Israel stance might please many Muslim voters, but it wouldn’t necessarily do the party good with the wider electorate.
“In 2019, millions of Brits rejected the antisemitism and pandering to terrorists of Corbyn’s Labour Party and they will welcome Keir Starmer’s principled stance in support of Israel,” one Jewish Labour source says. “The vast majority of the country recognizes the barbarism of Hamas’s terror attacks and the need to stand with our allies in their fight against those who seek to destroy everything we hold dear. Labour’s response has not just been right morally but it’s right electorally too.”
That sense will be buttressed by new polling which indicates few voters believe that, despite progress, Starmer is yet to rid the Labour Party of the antisemitism which characterized Corbyn’s five years at the helm.
As More in Common’s director, Luke Tryl, has argued, “There is little evidence the conflict is shaping domestic politics.” The top priority of most Britons, he notes, is protecting both Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives and “a long-term peaceful settlement.” Crucially, voters don’t want the conflict to become a political football and are keen for the Labour and Conservative parties to continue to “present a unified position.”
If he gets to parliament later this month, Galloway will no doubt nosily confront that frontbench consensus. But, despite the pressure which may accompany the Rochdale result, Starmer shows little appetite for shattering the united front in support of Israel.
