Labour deploys activists to shore up vote in Muslim areas

Labour is deploying activists to shore up its vote in 24 seats with sizeable Muslim populations as it seeks to stave off challenges from pro-Palestine candidates in Thursday’s UK general election.

Although Labour is playing down the idea it will lose many seats over the conflict in Gaza, Green, independent and Workers party candidates are hoping to capture enough votes to apply pressure on Sir Keir Starmer to shift the party’s position on the Middle East.

Labour is telling activists to stay and campaign in 31 Labour-held seats that it already holds, according to a website where activists put in their postcode and are advised where to focus their efforts. In 23 of those seats, Muslims make up more than 10 per cent of the local population. 

Meanwhile, the party is deploying activists from out of town to campaign in two seats that it won in 2019 — one of which is Oldham East and Saddleworth, which is 21 per cent Muslim. 

In neighbouring Rochdale, the firebrand left-wing politician George Galloway won a by-election earlier this year and is again running on a strong pro-Palestine ticket for the Workers party of Britain that he founded five years ago. 

Walking along a bustling residential street in an area of Oldham where roughly 70 per cent of the population is Muslim, graphic posters hang from awnings and shop windows depicting scenes of desolation in Gaza. Palestinian flags flutter from lamp posts and cars. 

Feelings are running high over the conflict, where the death toll has risen above 37,000 and large swaths of the population face famine.

In the May local elections, Labour lost control of Oldham council, which it had held for more than 13 years, after ceding seats to three independent councillors who ran on a pro-Palestine platform.

Starmer has been criticised by some traditional Labour supporters for only gradually shifting the party’s position towards supporting a ceasefire in Gaza. His reluctance to change stance led to 10 frontbenchers quitting in November. 

Since its council losses in some Muslim areas the party has explicitly said it was committed to recognising Palestine as a state — though many feel it should go further by backing an end to arms sales.

In Oldham East, Workers party candidate Shanaz Saddique is threatening to take a sizeable bite out of Labour’s vote while the right-wing Reform UK is eating into support for the Conservatives. The UK Independence party — an earlier incarnation of Reform — captured nearly 20 per cent of the vote in the historically staunchly Labour seat in 2015.

Saddique, who was a life-long Labour member until she joined the Workers party in 2021, said she believed there was a credible chance she would win the seat, noting that losing control of the council was a “huge slap in the face” for Labour. “This community has historically blindly followed Labour as a working class socialist party, now they feel the party doesn’t represent them,” she said.

Shop owner Rafit Hussain said his father and he were big Labour supporters who campaigned for the party in their community for decades, but this time he was planning to vote for Saddique.

“A genocide is happening in front of us and we’re supposed to be the peacekeeper of the world,” he said, adding that the current Labour MP Debbie Abrahams had “hurt the community so badly”. 

Down the road, sitting on a large mound of grass, a group of about 15 Muslim men spoke passionately about how they felt let down by Labour and would not give the party their vote. “Gaza is the number one issue for us,” said one of the men, who declined to be named for the piece.

Many mention the fact that Abrahams did not show up to vote for a Scottish National party motion calling for a ceasefire earlier this year. Abrahams says she abstained because it was tokenistic and she had an important prior engagement.

Abrahams has been circulating leaflets defending her record on the conflict in Gaza, having been one of the first MPs to call for a ceasefire, well ahead of her party’s front bench. She said she voted for the recognition of Palestinian statehood in 2014. 

Meanwhile, 100 miles away in Birmingham Ladywood, shadow justice secretary Shabana Mahmood is fighting a threat from an independent candidate, Akhmed Yakoob, who has amassed 195,600 followers on TikTok — almost as many as the Labour party’s official account. 

Labour is nervous about Yakoob, not least because he nearly derailed the party’s campaign for West Midlands mayor in May’s local elections, coming third with 69,621 votes — many from former Labour supporters, with the vast majority in inner-city Birmingham. 

Mahmood, the most senior Muslim woman in British politics, fought behind the scenes last winter to help shift Starmer’s position towards being more critical of Israel. Yet Yakoob has jumped on her abstention in the Commons vote last year calling for a ceasefire. 

He in turn has been embroiled in controversy over comments about gender roles he made on a podcast, apologising last month for saying that “70 per cent of hell is going to be women”. 

A Labour figure said Mahmood was optimistic about winning but admitted: “The position is tighter than we would have liked, there’s no denying that he has a lot of support . . . but that could change when people find out more about him.”

Some activists calling for Britain to take a much stronger stance on the conflict in Gaza concede they are unlikely to take many seats from Labour. Indeed, there are many Labour-held seats with significant Muslim populations where the party is not actively deploying any new activists — including shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s constituency of Ilford North.

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Instead, pro-Palestinian campaigners hope to capture enough of the vote share that challengers come in second place, a vantage point from which they hope to move the national conversation — like the Eurosceptic Ukip did on EU membership a decade ago. 

Abubakr Nanabawa, co-ordinator for The Muslim Vote, a campaign group advising Muslim voters on who to back based on their position on the Gaza conflict, said his was “a long game”. 

“If you look at 2015 when [Dabid] Cameron promised a referendum, Ukip hadn’t won any seats but it shifted the dialogue,” he said. “If these people come second in many areas, the party will need to figure out how they can maintain those voters in their electoral coalition.”

Labour said the party was “a diverse and proud community” and “we are working tirelessly to win the trust of voters across the country”.