The Muslim Vote campaign has been criticised for engaging in sectarian politics in the election, but in reality everyone is doing it
Thing I’ve been reading / listening to
This Jewish Currents podcast, on Arab Jewish / Mizrachi identity and politics is a must listen, and happily contains some British accents, being based on a retreat which took place in the UK.
I’m reading Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family. It’s a historical book, tracing a prominent American Jewish family with ancestors who were slaves in the Caribbean.
A good piece on the recent Tel Aviv peace conference by Haggai Matar
A thoughtful and thought provoking debate between Matan Kaminer and Andreas Malm on October 7th and the war on Gaza.
Brian Cheyette’s lecture Decolonising Testimony, connecting the testimonies of Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi
I didn’t write about the election during the campaign. There was nothing for me to say, because, blissfully, there was little discussion of Jews. The only exception was Keir Starmer saying that he tries to stop work at 6pm on Friday evenings to be with his family, clearly a reference to Shabbat dinner given that his wife is Jewish. Laughably, the Tories tried to paint this as an example of the Labour leader being lazy. Otherwise, nobody was talking about Jews, and this was a huge relief. In the 2019 election, and the year or two preceding it, it seemed like almost every programme or article felt the need to say something about Jews and antisemitism, with much of it being total nonsense. The experience of being constantly talked about, and feeling compelled to rebut it when it was wrong, was exhausting and unwelcome. This time round, no Jews was good news.
The increasingly pro-Starmer Jewish News has tried to spin the election as Jews coming out for Labour, but this is exaggerated. Sure, Sarah Sackman won in Finchley and Golders Green and Theresa Villiers was dethroned in Chipping Barnet, but these were fairly close, around 3000 votes in it in both cases. Hendon was even closer, with Labour’s David Pinto-Duchinsky winning but just 15 votes (he was greatly aided by Reform receiving some 3000 votes). In other areas with a sizeable Jewish population the Conservatives held on: Oliver Dowden held Hertsmere with a comfortable 7000 majority (over a Jewish labour candidate), while Tory hardliner Bob Blackman kept his vote intact, winning a majority of around 12,000 in Harrow East (which includes the Stanmore and Canons Park areas). It’s impossible to poll but my hunch is that while more liberal and secular Jews backed Labour, there was a strong Orthodox Jewish vote for the Conservatives. Either way, this is only of interest to a small number of people. Overall, Jews were not the main story in this election.
There’s been much more discussion, in both the Jewish and wider press, of political voting by Muslims, since an unprecedented 5 independents defeated Labour candidates and became MPs: Shockat Adam in Leicester South, Adnan Hussain in Blackburn, Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury and Batley, Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr and of course Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North. All except Corbyn are Muslim, and all campaigned on a platform firmly centred on Gaza and Palestine. And these were just the ones who won; several other Muslim pro-Palestinian candidates came very close to winning: Leanne Mohamad was just 500 votes behind in Ilford North, Akhmed Yakoob took a strong second place in Birmingham Ladywood and Jody McIntyre of the Workers Party of Great Britain came within 700 votes of defeating Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley. These campaigns were supported by a new group called The Muslim Vote, who backed around 80 candidates – Independents, Greens, Workers Party and some Liberal Democrats, in constituency where the electorate was judged to be 10% or more Muslim. It’s important to say that the group quite often backed non-Muslim candidates who were standing on platforms in line with its principles – including a Jewish candidate in the shape of Andrew Feinstein in Keir Starmer’s St Pancras constituency, who scored a pretty impressive 7312 votes. The primary issues the group campaigned on were Peace in Palestine (‘Ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians’), Discrimination Ended (‘Root out Islamophobia and discrimination across our healthcare, education, political, media, employment and justice systems’) and Funding to End Iniquities (Substantial increase in funding and investment for the NHS, local businesses, home building and home ownership in the 10% poorest constituencies in the UK). The group noted how sitting MPs had voted when the issue of a ceasefire in Gaza had been debated in parliament. Most of the Muslim Vote’s demands were moderate, and capable of implementation.
The success of the campaign led to some rather hysterical commentary. Writing in the Telegraph, JC editor Jake Wallis Simons described the Muslim Vote as ‘hostile sectarianism’, saying it offered a ‘glimpse into a horrifying future’. The Critic called it a ‘triumph of electoral sectarianism’ and ex-JC editor Steven Pollard suggested that the election showed Britain was ‘ever more vulnerable to sanitised Islamism’. In these criticisms lies the suggestion that there is something inappropriate, even ‘un-British’ about a religious group mobilising in this way. They implicitly posit a democratic ideal of individual electors weighing up which candidate will be best for their constituency and voting according to their private conscience.
But this has never been how elections work in Britain. Groups and organisations have always mobilised voters – often on class grounds, such as trade unions and friendly societies, but also on ethnic grounds. There have been many instances, in many seats, where politicians have tried to mobilise Irish, Cypriot, Afro-Caribbean or Jewish voters. As the latter is the raison d’être of this blog I will put my focus there. Liberal and Labour candidates regularly sought to win over the voters of the Jewish east end. When Phil Piratin became the Communist MP for Mile End in 1945, he did so largely on Jewish votes. In 1978, Jewish Tory Keith Joseph tried to whip up a specifically Jewish anti-immigration vote in a byelection in Ilford. But there is a much more recent example of Jewish communitarian voting that these critics have conveniently forgotten.
In 2015-2017, most of the organised Jewish community was not too concerned about Jeremy Corbyn. Yes, Stephen Pollard’s JC engaged in a madcap campaign against Corbyn’s associations from the first leadership contest onwards. But he wasn’t really seen as a threat, largely because he was viewed as having no chance of winning. It was only after the shock success of the 2017 election, when Labour received 40% of the vote and deprived Theresa May’s Conservatives of a majority, that he, and Labour, became public enemy number one of the Jewish community. From then on, and particularly in 2018-2019, there was a massive Jewish communitarian campaign against Labour, to try and force out Corbyn, and if that failed, to stop him winning the next election. The campaign involved the key communal organisations: the Board of Deputies, The Jewish Leadership Council, and the Jewish Press, the latter taking out joint front pages warning of the ‘existential threat’ posed by a Corbyn-run Labour government. Even the Chief Rabbi got in on the act, penning a Times op-ed in which he wondered rhetorically ‘What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?’, later admitting that he wrote the piece after widespread consultation with the leaders of the organised Jewish community. Rabbi Mirvis and others might have claimed that they were only issuing warnings about Labour rather than supporting any other party, but in Britain’s two-party system they were in reality seeking a victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.
At this juncture some will object that it wasn’t like this at all. The Jewish community in 2019, so this objection goes, didn’t want to act but was forced to by the outbreak of antisemitism in the Labour party. It was an oppressed group seeking to prevent an oppressor coming to power. It won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t agree with this narrative at all. I don’t doubt that many ordinary Jews felt like this, such was the volume of reports of antisemitism they received in the Jewish and wider press. But for leaders like Steven Pollard, Jonathan Arkush, Jonathan Goldstein and the leaders of the CST and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, this was war. They saw a candidate become Labour leader who (despite never previously having been accused of antisemitism) represented everything they opposed; and once it became clear that he had a chance of becoming Prime Minister they did everything they could to stop it happening. It was a pugnacious fight between two tribes – the post 1968 British new left and the post-1967 Zionised Jewish community, the fight with Ken Livingstone and the GLC in the early 1980s being but a warmup. And despite Jewish communal protestations of powerlessness, the anti-Corbyn ‘anti-antisemitism campaign’ could rely on the vast majority of the press, most of the parliamentary Labour party and key organs of the British state. It’s not that those bodies had any great love for Jews, but they accurately saw in the campaign the best opportunity to bring down a Labour leader who was a genuine class enemy of the British state, its military and what remains of its empire. So yes, this was absolutely a communitarian, sectarian campaign in which whatever the organised Jewish community had was thrown into defeating Labour in the 2019 election. The way that any Jew who dared to speak against it, or to identify themselves with Corbyn in any way was treated in this period is testament to the strength and force of the Jewish anti-Corbyn campaign.
There was another sectarian campaign in the 2024 election, one that has attracted far less publicity. The victory of the aforementioned Tory Bob Blackman in Harrow East, and the single Conservative gain in Leicester East, won by Shivani Raja, were probably won by Hindu voters, a voting bloc which has become increasingly organised in support of the Conservatives in the last decade or so. Aside from supporting Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first Hindu Prime Minister, the bloc is dedicated to supporting certain political elements in India, most notably President Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist BJP party, and defending India’s right to hold on to the disputed Kashmir region. They have moved to coin and popularise the term ‘Hinduphobia’ – a clear parallel to the politicisation of antisemitism though the IHRA definition. Hindu Council UK put out a video in support of Bob Blackman in which it urged voters to remember the ‘dharmic values’ when casting their votes. An activist I know from an Indian background suggested to me that this is code for caste – upper caste Hindus in the UK wish to discriminate on caste grounds and have not forgiven Labour for attempting to criminalise such discrimination in the 2010 Equality Act. This is a relatively new development, and there are clear connections between Hindutva and Zionist groups, indeed these Hindu communitarians are closely modelling themselves on Jewish activism. If Jews were once the model minority in Britain but have now largely passed into whiteness, Hindus are the new model minority, who the state seeks to support. In both cases the groups define themselves against Muslims – the unacceptable minority of our times.
I’m not actually a huge fan of communitarian politics. I’d much rather people campaigned for Palestine on secular, human rights grounds. I’d much rather people campaigned against antisemitism as part of multi-racial coalitions that campaign against all types of racism simultaneously. I’d much rather people didn’t try to use the ballot box to defend or promote other countries with which they are affiliated. But we can’t be hypocrites about this. If our community engages in communitarian politics, then we really can’t complain when others do as well. To suggest that our sectarian politics is benign while theirs is threatening smacks of double standards and Islamophobia. Let’s give up on the pretence that some of us vote on a purely individual, personal basis. We’re all members of tribes of one kind or another, we all seek to advance the interests of our group. Let’s be honest – we’re all sectarians now.