12 JULY 2024 | OPINION
Shabana Mahmood has been appointed holder of what is technically the greatest office in the UK, but nearly lost her Parliamentary seat last week instead.
She has represented her Birmingham Ladywood constituency since 2010, taking over from fellow Labour Party member Clare Short. However, this year, a challenge from a newcomer, Akhmed Yakoob, nearly saw her off.
The General Election turnout in was even lower (44%) than that nationally, and well into the danger zone the late Tony Benn warned about. If the Greens had made common cause with Yakoob and had stood aside for him, as Farage’s Brexit Party did for the Tories five years ago, their combined votes could have been enough to see him win. This was not impossible, as the Greens’ co-leader Carla Denyer recently told Politico that they aimed to use Gaza as a way to split Labour’s support.
Unlike much of the rest of the country, the near-upset here was not about disaffected Conservatives; the Con/LibDem/Reform combined share of the ballots was less than 15% in a constituency that has previously been very safe for Labour, even in 2019. Instead, it was an aggressively anti-Labour move.
One of Yakoob’s posters (see the photo in this Guardian article) calls for a boycott of Labour and Starmer and was aimed squarely at a handful of sectarian groups: supporters of Gaza plus Kashmiri and Sikh separatists. He was working fertile ground: the 2021 Census says 45% of Ladywood residents were born abroad and 43% are Muslim.
The British Left needs to wake up. It tends to see people as interchangeable, united by their humanity and – especially usefully – their victimhood. The Marxist philosophy of class struggle now has to deal with religious zealotry, a universal brotherhood that scorns excessive concern with material riches and distinguishes sharply between those inside the house of peace and those who are part of the Dar-el-Harb, the ‘territory of war’. We are entering an ideological and sectarian age.
Elsewhere in Birmingham, Jess Phillips barely beat off a challenge from another newcomer, a Muslim convert called Jody McIntyre, exploiting the same identitarian approach:
A few years ago, Phillips thought she could manage her Kashmiri constituents’ international impulses within the Party’s ambit:
The naïvety is perilous. Orwell said: ‘So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot’, and ethnic/religious affiliation burns even hotter.
In Phillips’ case, the turnout was again low – about 50% – and McIntyre lost by only a few hundred votes, equivalent to less than two percent of those who abstained. This near-win will encourage people like him to redouble his efforts and even now he casts doubt on the result:
Skilful co-ordination may help these minority movements develop further. A 2022 Parliamentary study of political disengagement noted that ‘people from minority ethnic groups were less likely to be registered to vote, turn out to vote and be elected’; likewise young people, and Ladywood’s age profile is significantly younger than England’s average:
Now, The Muslim Vote notes they have five independents in the Commons, and there could easily have been more with a higher turnout of Muslim supporters and fewer splits.
Like the Conservatives, the Labour Party also have cause to worry about their future and to consider how to engage more closely with their voters.
In the end, only time will tell.
