Policy Exchange has a new report out on British Muslims’ political attitudes and vote intentions. Unsurprisingly, it’s very bad news for Sir Keir Starmer.
Back in 2019, when the party was led by Jeremy Corbyn, fully 86% of Muslims backed Labour. Now, you might say this isn’t particularly surprising as Corbyn is famously pro-Palestine — something many Muslims care about. But even in 2017, when the party was led by the somewhat less pro-Palestine Ed Miliband, about the same share of Muslims voted Labour. Which means that overwhelming Muslim support for Labour wasn’t a ‘Corbyn effect’. Muslims had already become a reliable voting bloc by the time he was elected leader.
Enter Starmer. While he managed to achieve a comfortable victory at the 2024 election — due in part to the Right-wing vote being split in many constituencies — support for his party among Muslims fell dramatically. Only around 60% are thought to have voted Labour, and support for the party fell most in heavily Muslim areas. This was widely attributed to a perception among Muslims that Labour had been insufficiently critical of Israel, as well as specific gaffes, such as when Starmer appeared to say that Israel had the “right” to cut off food and water to Gaza.
The new report from Policy Exchange confirms that the situation for Starmer has continued to deteriorate. Asked which party they would vote for today, only 33% of Muslims said Labour. By contrast, 27% said the Greens and 14% said pro-Gaza Independents. This represents an astonishing collapse in support.
It should be noted that, when asked which party they had voted for in 2024, only 41% said Labour (as opposed to 60% in some polls at the time). It is not clear what accounts for this difference. One possibility is that JL Partners (who conducted the poll on behalf of Policy Exchange) happened to get a sample that was particularly unsupportive of Labour. Another possibility is that some respondents incorrectly recalled their 2024 vote. If the difference is due to JL Partners’ sample being less representative, the 33% figure would need to be adjusted upwards. What is clear is that support for Labour among Muslims has collapsed further since 2024.
The report also found that almost half of Muslims would consider voting Green just to prevent a Labour candidate from winning in their area. This was practically identical to the percentage who said they’d do the same to prevent a Tory or Reform candidate winning, suggesting that Labour are now almost as toxic as the two Right-wing parties among Muslims.
Labour’s collapse in support among Muslims (and online Left-wing activists) mirrors the Conservatives’ collapse in support among social conservatives (and online Right-wing activists).
In both cases, you have a major party losing one of its most loyal support bases over an issue that dominates online discourse: Gaza in the case of Labour, and mass migration in the case of the Conservatives. Also, in both cases you have the party in question taking a position that’s wildly out of step with the views of influential activists on its own side.
Labour’s policy with respect to Gaza, Iran and Palestine Action is indeed more unpopular on the Left than on the Right. And the Conservatives’ immigration policy under Boris Johnson was far more unpopular on the Right than on the Left. It’s as if the two main parties (which are, of course, no longer the two main parties) decided to hand over policymaking on a key issue to their political opponents.
Exactly what explains this self-sabotage is unclear. But it’s a big reason so many council seats are expected to change hands tomorrow.
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Labour has a long history of backing particular groups (such as the working man, feminists, gays, trans) until all the political juice has been extracted. Those groups are then reduced to historical footnotes rather than active concerns. Currently Labour back the public servants and the Muslims – but who is there left when these groups become footnotes?
Working men (mainly men) were the focus of Labour Party policies for about a century. Tax payer funded employees (you call them “public servants”) have been in bed with Labour since last century, about 40 years now.
LGBT etc groups have been associated with Labour because the leaders of their pressure groups were leftists but it is fading somewhat.
There is no reason to think Laboutr will want to drop its preference for Muslims because they are a large, growing and coherent voting block. One problem for Labour is the block is abandoning Labour either for Green (temporarily) or a religious based party candidate.
It all looks dire for Labour. There are not enough teachers, local government workers, media executives and arts fund beneficiaries to get them into government again.
I think you’ll find, that the total proportion of the population attached to the public teat is more than sufficient to elect the party that promises to extract the largest sum from the relatively smaller number of wealth creators. 40 percent of the working age population alone 16 million plus are directly funded by the government. Starmer only need 11 million votes.
Sadly the Daily Sceptic appears to offer an open forum to a bunch of racists to unload their twisted bile (no doubt in their erroneous belief their muddled thinking is profound and acceptable – It is not).
Sadly this targeting of those less of less fair complexions damages the important work otherwise conducted here. More sad still; it is not just commentator’s responses that are so dismal. The published bias towards the actions of Zionist Israel and the support thereof also degrades the whole publication’s reputation, which is a loss to free-speech. I understand why this has come about – picking battles. But between times a genocide progresses supported by No10 and most other institutions of supposed good authority.
Unfortunately, whenever you give people an open invitation to speak freely, some will use that as a platform to express views that others will see as distasteful. But once you start policing what is said here on the grounds of perceived racism, sexism, ageism and so on, it becomes increasingly hard to know where to stop. Look at what’s happened to UK law in that respect. If people are on here to incite criminal activity or violence, then that clearly oversteps the line.
If you find someone’s views distasteful, then call them out; down-vote them or challenge them.
It’s up to the mods to police the comments sections, but they seem a law unto themselves and it’s anyone’s guess what the threshold is for getting posts deleted as I’ve had such a variety of mine deleted over the years. They’re very inconsistent and I think there’s a lot of 2-tier moderation goes on depending on 1) The poster, and 2) Who’s on duty.
What is sad about the Daily Sceptic offering an open forum? The alternative is censure ship, presumably only of views of which you disapprove. Who decides what is acceptable, or what views are important, presumably you? Free speech is the right of others to say things you may find muddled, or twisted bile, racist and offensive etc..
Good post! Just for information, it’s either “censure” or “censorship”.
Whether you agree with the views or not, it’s good that they can be aired. It’s up to each “side” to persuade the other with arguments. Not sure that “twisted bile” is going to persuade many, and many will regard your reference to “genocide” as “twisted bile”.
But we should keep communicating. I don’t think anything is “damaged”. We’re never going to agree on everything.
Starmer’s Labour: not extreme and Jew-hating enough.
I suppose chance dictates he must get at least one thing right.
Why are Muslims in the UK seemingly a single large block with only a few diverging from the norm? In their ancestral lands, there is no way that they would see eye to eye, whether Sunni or Shia. Iraqis and Iranians are generally not good friends, nor are Afghans and Pakistani. In some countries they hate each other enough not to worry about international hatred. I am sure Far Eastern Muslims have little if anything in common with Albanian or Moroccan Muslims. So why do they all suddenly coalesce when they arrive or are born in the UK?
Do we know if they coalesce? Is it not possible that the split we see between the voting intentions correlates to which particular race, culture, form of Islam they belong? Where I lived until recently – North London – has a large Turkish and Kurdish population. A lot of them own and run businesses so my guess is they are more likely to vote for low-tax, pro-business parties. (I’m not just talking about Turkish barbers by the way but shops of various kinds, restaurants, which all look to be thriving to me).
They coalesce as a group against non-muslims.
However when they run out of non-muslims to persecute they fight each other.
Yes I am sure there is an element of that.
Do they all coalesce?
Just because some people talk about muslims as a unit doesn’t make it so.
In any case, I suppose that the extent to which they do is for the same reason that British and more generally European expats in Asia, for example, tend to bond in a way that they would never do back home. They suddenly find more in common with each other than with the majority of other people around them.
My post, on rereading was probably clumsy and my apologies for that. I don’t actually believe that Muslims do coalesce anymore than anyone else, but you would think from reporting that they do form a homogeneous unit and it was the suggestion at the start of this article that 86% voted Labour, as well as other reports which seem to create a single sect of people called Muslim, rather than separate races, nationalities and, even subsets of the religion that I was seeking to challenge. My personal relationship with individuals is just that, they are individuals. For well known members of the faith, you could no more put the likes of Zia Yusuf, Leila Cunningham, Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan (all from widely different ethnic and cultural backgrounds) into one homogenous group than Nigel Farage, David Cameron and Keir Starmer (all from similar ethnic, education and cultural backgrounds), so why are Muslims treated as such?
Only on the surface, and by circumstance.
I’ve told this story before, so forgive me repeating myself: years ago I was at college with two Lebanese lads… great mates, one a Christian the other a Muslim. We used to play Crib together over lunch; one day I asked about ‘back home’ and what they’d do if they met on the streets. Without hesitation, they both replied, in unison: “I’d shoot him…”. These people are not like us.
Did they really mean it?
It certainly seemed so at the time…
Just look at that photo, which makes me ask this honest question:
Why are Muslims so ugly? Every man jack of them is as ugly as sin, and the women & offspring as well, and I don’t understand how that has happened. It’s a complete mystery. That is my own honest opinion.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, as they say.
But – and I’m saying this as a man – I think it would be difficult to argue with the observation that hardline Islamic dress code doesn’t exactly enhance the natural beauty of the female body.
Never mind the bodies, it’s the faces that are so reliably hideous, in my view. Even their movie-star types apply their makeup with a trowel, and it still doesn’t help.
Isn’t that the whole idea of the Islamic dress code? To protect the women against being seen as objects of desire?
I believe so.
As far as I can tell the idea behind is that as soon as we men caught sight of any part of a female body, we would immediately feel such uncontrollable desire, we just couldn’t help ourselves ravishing them.
Now I don’t know about you, but personally I, as a man have always managed to restrain myself – and I’m no Saint Thomas Aquinas, who by his own admission did not suffer much from lust) – but clearly our hot blooded Arabic friends must lack that level of self control.
I believe in Victorian times, ladies had to conceal their ankles.
I may have this wrong but, I’m pretty sure I’ve read somewhere that ye Victorians repressed their sexual inclinations so much, they even covered piano legs?
I read somewhere that it’s partly due to their fondness for adding hashish syrup and other drugs to their coffee in the coffeehouses, even in the UK, the combination of which causes an unnatural frenzy of lust directed at a whole range of life forms, like Gilgamesh of ancient legend.
It’s just more hypocrisy from them, loudly trying to ban pubs and alcohol, while secretly addicted to multiple recreational drugs themselves, and plying British children with them to facilitate rape.
The original purpose of the wedding veil was to prevent the man from seeing who he was marrying, until it was too late…
Cousins.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, JXB! A few years ago, when I was looking up information about the persecution of Christians in India by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and yes, even Buddhists, I noticed a striking physical difference in the photos of Christians there, who seem to have a warm, healthy, natural, wholesome sort of beauty, even among the poorest “Untouchable” Dalits, that shines through, despite their ragged clothing. The Indian Christian men, women and children really do seem to be more naturally beautiful than their persecutors.
Generalisations are never a good idea. Omar Sharif most definitely wasn’t ugly. Neither is Leila Cunningham.
I suspect ugliness is correlated to the practice of cousin-marriage which prevails in Pakistan and Bangladesh – the two largest Muslim communities in the UK.
People showcase their prejudices all the time on here when they resort to various generalisations, though, don’t they? You can tell a lot about a person when they do that and it just confirms what many of us already know, so…
I expressed my own personal opinion, and will continue to do so.
You are entitled to yours.