The opening paragraphs from Sir Keir Starmer’s piece for the Sunday Times on Sunday October 6th, marking one year since Hamas terrorists smashed through the Israeli border, killing, torturing and kidnapping innocent civilians in their path, provide a masterclass in what discourse analysts sometimes refer to as passivation: changing a sentence from active to passive voice.
Passivation is a linguistic technique that omits or ‘hides’ the actor performing a certain action or actions in a sentence. In political or media discourse, it’s typically used to obscure agency or responsibility.
(To give you an idea of its rhetorical effects, it’s worth noting that children tend very quickly to become artful proponents of the passive style: “Did you bite your sister?” asks the furious father; “She was bitten,” responds the son.)
Here are some examples of that style as it features in Starmer’s opening remarks. Note that in each case, the material action described (murder, massacre, abduction) has no discernible perpetrator:
- “Jews murdered while protecting their families.” [By whom?]
- “Young people massacred at a music festival.” [By whom?]
- “People abducted from their homes.” [By whom?]
Later on, Starmer’s obfuscatory style intensifies. In the parlance of transitivity analysis, material actions – in which a person is shown causing certain actions to take place – are transformed into existential processes in which there is no actor, and certain actions simply occur, as if of their own volition.
(“Did you bite your sister?” asks the furious father; “There was a nip,” responds the son, who, in this version of the scenario, represents a particularly up-and-coming young rhetorician, well-prepared for his first job as a senior political advisor to a serving cabinet minister.)
“As the hours passed, more and more agonising reports emerged. Rape. Torture. Brutality beyond comprehension.” [Yes, but perpetrated by whom?]
In fact, “Hamas” doesn’t feature once in this, an article ostensibly written to (at least in part) honour the victims of October 7th 2023.
This can’t simply be explained away as a stylistic tic, since later on Starmer is happy to position Israel as a grammatical actor/subject, when it “launches a ground invasion in response [to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks]”.
Oddly enough, when Charles Moore emailed the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) earlier this year to check its official position on the October 7th massacre, he received a similarly passivated response: “The Muslim Council of Britain condemns the killing of innocent people on October 7th.” (Eliding, of course, whether the MCB considers the Israelis killed to be “innocent”.)
But did the MCB agree that the murders of October 7th “were carried out chiefly by Hamas”, Lord Moore asked in a follow-up email that he says didn’t receive a response. “Apparently,” he concluded, “the biggest British Muslim umbrella organisation cannot bring itself to say a bad word against Hamas.”
Curiously, much later on Sunday October 6th, a separate piece appeared under Starmer’s name on the Government’s website. Far fewer people will read it, of course, but here, thankfully, the Prime Minister dispenses with the passive style, stating:
October 7th 2023 was the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. One year on, we stand together to remember the lives so cruelly taken.
Over a thousand people were brutally murdered. Men, women, children and babies killed, mutilated, and tortured by the terrorists of Hamas. Jewish people murdered whilst protecting their families. [emphasis added]
It’s almost as if, in writing for the Sunday Times, the Prime Minister was attempting to triangulate his message about the slaughter, rape and mutilation of Jewish civilians to avoid antagonising a certain section of the electorate.
A certain section of the electorate? According to the 2021 census, there are now 3.9 million Muslims in the U.K. Together, they make up around 6% of the population.
Traditionally, Muslims have been electorally loyal to Labour, but amid rising anger at Starmer’s reluctance to more strongly condemn Israeli actions in Gaza since October 7th, that support has been fraying around the edges.
During the 2024 local elections, for example, Labour’s vote share in wards with over 70% Muslim voters declined by 39 percentage points. At the national level, while 80% of Muslims voted for Labour at the 2019 General Election, analysis of the 2024 general election results by thinktank More in Common suggests that Labour’s vote share fell sharply in seats with large Muslim populations.
Muslim independent candidate Shockat Adam caused a huge upset by beating Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, then the Shadow Paymaster General, to become the new MP for Leicester South. According to Jewish News, Adam’s brother is Ismail Patel, the founder of hardline Islamist group Friends of Al Aqsa, who previously said that he “salutes Hamas”, and has even met with senior figures from the terrorist group while visiting Gaza.
The seat of Dewsbury and Batley – a formerly safe Labour seat – was won by another ‘Gaza independent’, Iqbal Mohamed, who delivered a speech during the election in which he told a crowd to search their homes for “Zionist” items and thrown them out. “Tell your kids too – even candy shops can be dangerous,” he added, to gleeful chants from the crowd of “from the river to the sea”.
Another Labour stronghold, Birmingham Perry Bar, was won by independent Ayoub Khan. Previously a Liberal Democrat councillor, Khan was investigated by the party last year after he questioned the extent of Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack, posting several clips on TikTok stating he had yet to see evidence that any of the terror group’s members had beheaded babies or committed rape.
Other Labour MPs only just fought off Muslim independents to hold on to their seats: Health Secretary Wes Streeting won 528 more votes than British-Palestinian activist Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North, while Naz Shah held her Bradford with a narrow majority of 707 votes over Muhammed Ali Islam.
No doubt it might seem a little far-fetched to suggest Starmer’s passivated rhetoric in the Sunday Times is part of some wider positioning strategy in relation to the Muslim vote and the rise of a dangerous sectarianism in British politics.
And yet it’s interesting to reflect that, of the 220 most marginal seats in the recent General Election, Islam was the largest minority religion in 129 of them (58.6%).
Allied to this is the fact that polling undertaken earlier this year, and described as “the largest of its kind” since October 7th, revealed that just one in four British Muslims believe Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel, while 46% say they sympathise with the group.
The figures, which were provided by polling company J.L. Partners for the Henry Jackson Society, a counter-extremism think tank, also suggested that younger Muslims described as more “well-educated” – who are, of course, part of an age demographic that is more likely to support Labour –were the most likely to think Hamas did not commit atrocities on October 7th.
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Free Speech Union’s Senior Communications Officer. You can find him on Substack here.
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