Since Keir Starmer’s triumph in the general election on 4 July, political scientists and other number-crunchers in the United Kingdom have been playing spoilsport. Because while Labour’s victory, which went from 121 to 356 seats, was resounding, inflicting the Tories’ worst defeat in 200 years, it nevertheless contains worrying lessons for Labour and the future of the country.
The legendary stability of British political life (with the notable exception of the post-Brexit period 2016-2024) has a source: the single-round single-member constituency that crushes everything in its path. But this stability is a democratic illusion. If the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer broke all records by winning 63% of the seats in the House of Commons (412 of the 650 seats), it was with only 34% of the votes, hardly more than his predecessor, the Trotskyist tribune Jeremy Corbyn, who, with 32.1% in 2019, had been largely beaten by Boris Johnson (365 seats for the Conservatives, 202 for Labour). What explains Starmer’s victory is therefore more the terrible defeat of the Tories than the new popular base of Labour.
Distrust of the extreme left
Another shadow on the horizon is that the ultra-left wing of Labour that Keir Starmer thought he had crushed has resurfaced since the attacks of 7 October 2023, either inside the party or outside, attacking Labour on its left flank. Of course, the party has dissolved its far-left groups and purged its anti-Semitic elements, with Jeremy Corbyn now outside the party. In any case, the election of six independent candidates (a very rare phenomenon for a single-member, single-round election), including ex-Labour members who openly campaigned on the issue of Palestine with pro-Hamas views, is a trend that Starmer will have to monitor closely. Not to mention the fact that pro-Hamas candidates also came second in seven other constituencies with large Muslim populations. The very popular Labour candidate Jess Phillips, who is on the left wing of the party, was only re-elected in Birmingham Yardley by 693 votes over a far-left pro-Palestinian candidate.
By mid-October, Starmer had suffered from the distrust of around fifty of his MPs for not calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Figures now show that in the last election, in constituencies with at least 15% Muslims, Starmer’s Labour lost an average of 19.3% of the votes cast compared to Corbyn’s Labour in 2019. Through electoral clientelism, Jeremy Corbyn was exploiting this part of the conservative Muslim electorate, who was virulent on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a vein that was in turn amply exploited, on the other side of the Channel, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise.
Anti-Labour Muslims
For Patrick Maguire, co-author of Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbynthe arrival in the House of Commons of these dissidents who defeated Labour candidates by campaigning on Gaza “potentially heralds a very tough five years for Starmer.” In some northern English towns and former mining cities, “Muslims are now voting against Labour. Ethno-religious divisions now define votes in a city like Leicester, as they once did Belfast in Northern Ireland” during the unrest between Catholics and Protestants.
In Leicester, one of Labour’s strategists, the incumbent MP Jon Ashworth, lost his seat to independent Shockat Adam, who declared: “My victory is for the people of Gaza!” The same scenario was repeated in Birmingham and Blackburn. And of course, Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected for the eleventh time in his north London stronghold of Islington North. Patrick Maguire believes that the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is likely to be even more devastating for Labour than the Iraq war was for Tony Blair: “Labour is going to be increasingly attacked from the left, particularly in areas with large Muslim populations.”
Keir Starmer is counting on his trump card to get him out of trouble. Her name is Shabana Mahmood. Appointed Minister of Justice in the Starmer government, this practicing Muslim who spent her early years in Saudi Arabia, and a pro-Palestinian activist, is responsible for acting as a link between the party leadership and its left wing. Will this be enough to calm this new fire? And for how long?
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