Who’s afraid of the ‘Muslim vote’?

Blog post by Nasar Meer, University of Glasgow and co-Editor of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power

One of the subplots emerging from the 2024 General Election is to be found in talk of the ‘Muslim vote’. This is said to have been mobilised against the Labour Party, in protest at its position on Gaza, in constituencies with a sizable Muslim electorate.  

The success of Independent candidates such as Shockat Adam, a local resident in Leicester South who overturned a 22,000 majority of the incumbent shadow cabinet member Jonathan Ashworth, certainly came as a surprise. While prevailing MRP  (multi-level regression and post stratification) models generally proved accurate in translating polling data into seat predictions, with some exceptions, they also reproduced a longstanding problem about the under polling of minority groups, which elsewhere missed that 23-year-old first time campaigner Leane Mohamed would in Ilford North come within 528 votes of unseating the new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. 

As we learned of the election of four Independent Muslim candidates who had each foregrounded the Labour Party’s response to Gaza, a narrative has unfolded that these candidates had ‘seized Labour seats thanks to [the] Muslim vote.’  This is not a banal description. Long established racialised tropes are doing a great deal of work interpreting the ‘Muslim-vote’ as the starting pistol for ‘the rise of sectarian voting’, or in seeing not a spectrum of Muslim voices, but rather a sinister cabal which offers a ‘glimpse into a horrifying future’.
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In contrast, we might instead consider, firstly, how accurate it is to claim that we have something like an ethno-religious caucus within the broader electorate and, secondly, if so, whether it could be mobilised straightforwardly during a UK election on specific policy questions?

For some commentators, the answer to the first question is self-evident and might be traced to Oona King’s loss of Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 General Election.  The foreign policy issue then, Britain’s role in the Iraq war, gave the former Labour MP George Galloway his first by-election victory against is old party, in a constituency where the Muslim population then made up 40% (today – with a slightly adjusted boundary – 50%).

Yet it is typically overlooked that the eligible and registered Muslim electorate would have been much lower, perhaps less than half the number of the actual Muslim population, and that Independents typically require a coalition of social groups, often including students and perhaps disaffected voters, to build the requisite anti-incumbent voter coalition. This point was again missed when Galloway repeated his feat on a further two occasions, in a 2012 by-election in Bradford West, then most recently only a few months ago in the Rochdale by-election. 

It is worth reiterating that the demographic distribution of a little over four million Muslims in England, Wales and Scotland means that around only half this number is of voting age. Add to this that Muslim groups are less likely to be registered (notwithstanding the new voter identification required to cast a ballot), and we find that some of the assumptions require important qualifiers.

In any electoral ward, we should treat with enormous caution the percentage of a given Muslim population as equivalent to the size of its Muslim electorate. Hence in Leicester South, a university town of course, while it is true that 30% of the ward is Muslim, it’s implausible to argue that Jonathan Ashworth’s loss is down purely to a ‘Muslim vote’, given less would be able to vote and even within that share, there would be enormous diversity in values and opinion. For example, we know that Muslim voters also rank domestic issues such as the NHS, inflation, the cost of living and the economy as being of no less importance than international issues, and are in this respect unremarkable in being aligned with other voters drawn to Labour or indeed any other political party.

So while it is certainly true that Labour saw significant swings against it in seats with the largest concentrations of Muslim voters, to conceive of a ‘Muslim vote’ in terms of a stable and sizable electoral caucus that can be activated on cue is mistaken. This does not of course preclude Muslim groups from organising as if they can, but they do so while being caught on the horns of a dilemma. 

In our previous research with Muslim campaigning organisations, we found that highly democratically engaged Muslim activists, were constantly navigating the risk of being repudiated as extremists if they raised matters of international relations and Britain’s foreign policy. The profound Islamophobia buttressing the double standards on which the assessment of Muslim political engagement rests, has long been plain to see.

One route out of this dilemma was to find alternative sites of Muslim civil society—in terms of media production and consumption, community and religious activism, and arenas for political dissent. If organisations like The Muslim Vote are steering a different course it speaks to an ambition for political pluralisation rather than withdrawal, and so is consistent with what has prevailed for other minorities under the terms of a peculiarly British multiculturalism, rather than being driven by, or reducible to, grievances.

Opposition to Labour’s position on Gaza then might even be akin to a valence issue, a point indicated by Iqbal Mohamed, the Independent candidate elected to Dewsbury and Batley, who campaigned on ‘fighting for a ceasefire and two-state peace agreement in Gaza, tackling the cost of living crisis, fighting to save the NHS and Dewsbury hospital, funding for all essential services, town regeneration, safer streets and environmental and consumer safety and protection’. It is notable, moreover, that he and other Independent candidates such as Shockat Adam and Leane Mohamed were not entirely inconsistent, in their position on Gaza, with Andy Burnham (Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester), Sadiq Khan (Labour Mayor of London) or Anas Sarwar (Leader of the Scottish Labour Party). In calling for an immediate ceasefire, each of these Labour stalwarts established early on a very different position to that of Keir Starmer.

As we continue to pick over and make sense of these election results, therefore, we should be a great deal less hasty in concluding that where Independent stood ‘it was the Muslim-vote wot won it’. The truth is likely different in being one part of an evolving story of British Muslim democratic engagement, rather than in being apart from it.

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Image credit: Getty Images

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Nasar Meer is Professor of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow and co-Editor of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.