If you were asked which was the sixth largest political party within the UK, greater and more successful than the Green Party or Plaid Cymru, equal to the DUP and Reform, wherein direction would your guess take you?
Plaid Cymru want greater representation for the Welsh in our shared Parliament, the Green Party want these islands cleaner and greener. The DUP are pursuing a specific political balancing act in Northern Ireland and Reform need to mend Conservatism throughout these islands.
But the five independent pro-Gaza MPs who were elected stood on a platform which demanded support for a genocidal struggle to remove the Jewish people from their historic homeland, and make sure the victory of the Palestinians basically and the terrorist group Hamas particularly.
What has this aim got to do with British domestic politics? Nothing. What has it got to do with the body politic in these islands? Very little. Instead it’s the importing of a 1,500-year feud between the followers of Muhammad and the Jewish community who refused to just accept his claims to be a legitimate prophet speaking on behalf of their God.
The dominant perspective behind an immigration policy that has driven the large increase within the practice of Islam in these islands has been a dogmatic multiculturalism driven hard by the Left.
The assumption was all the time that Islam would integrate with Western secular society – an exercise in wishful considering produced by a certain mixture of hubris, ignorance and myopia that each underestimates and misunderstands what Islam is, and what it asks of its followers.
There was all the time going to be a moment when Islam broke the surface of the political pond and emerged in its own right. Until this election, it largely hid behind Labour as a component in its support base.
The most up-to-date catalyst that produced the signs that Islam was going to emerge as a political entity in its own right was in fact the slaughter by Hamas of over a thousand Israeli civilians on October 7, 2024. Muslims reacted with fury when Israel defended herself by pursuing Hamas in Gaza.
A regional conflict rooted within the Middle East found itself replicated and inserted into every community within the West where Muslims were to be present in significant numbers.
Initially what was described as sectarian violence spilled out onto the streets in the shape of enormous demonstrations for Palestine and against Israel in a way that was fuelled by a highly sophisticated campaign of Palestinian propaganda which presented Muslims because the wounded, vulnerable victims of firstly Jews, after which secondly anyone who refused to hitch within the campaign to crush Israel particularly and Jews basically wherever they is perhaps found.
There were grotesque moments akin to when Muslim mobs in Russia’s mostly Muslim region of Dagestan stormed the airport in Makhachkala seeking Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.
The outbreak of toxic antisemitism inside the Labour party presented the Labour Party with a problem it couldn’t find an answer to. The Labor movement found itself caught between two victim narratives and would inevitably fall short within the face of Islamic calls for Jewish genocide.
Frustrated with what from an Islamic viewpoint was the inadequacy of the Labour leadership’s response, the fury against Israel broke through formally into political sectarianism on the General Election this month when Islamic independents stood against Labour candidates in a trial of strength.
Labour lost 4 seats outright to pro-Palestinian independent candidates in constituencies with a big Muslim presence. In Blackburn, the constituency once held by former home secretary Jack Straw, Labour’s Kate Hollern lost by 132 votes to the independent Adnan Hussain.
In Dewsbury and Batley, Heather Iqbal, a former adviser to the brand new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, lost by nearly 7,000 votes to Iqbal Mohamed.
In Birmingham Perry Barr, the previous Labour MP Khalid Mahmood lost to the independent Ayoub Khan.
In Birmingham Hodge Hill, the previous cabinet minister Liam Byrne won by just over 1,500 votes over James Giles, the candidate for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Shadow cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth was one in all the 4 to lose his seat for Leicester South, an area where 35% of the population discover as Muslim. His seat was captured by an independent candidate Shockat Adam, running on a pro-Palestinian ticket, who won by 979 votes.
Celebrating his win, he claimed that his victory was a sign to those that had been in power so long that they’d forgotten the people they were serving.
“This is for the people of Gaza,” he claimed. This represented a radical recent reconfiguration of British politics. Suddenly the people to be served were a conflation of local Muslims and the very much non-local people of Gaza.
It is obvious now that the 4 seats that Labour lost to pro-Palestinian independents are only the newest, and most dramatic, expression of Muslim political power, growing in proportion with the general Muslim population.
The realisation that the mayors of London, Oldham, Luton, Oxford, and Blackburn are all Muslims provides a stark reminder of the spread of the influence of Islam on local politics in addition to the national platform that has been secured.
Muslims are actually able in those areas where they constitute greater than a 3rd of the population — they needn’t be a majority, for Muslims vote as a bloc — to elect those that will demand that the federal government adopt anti-Israel policies.
Shaista Aziz, a former Labour councillor commented in an article she wrote for Al Jazeera: “The pro-Palestine left made a big impact on this election. But the fight is removed from over. Now that the Tories are out, and Labour is in power, this non-homogenous group must unite further, and develop recent strategies to pressure the brand new government to take meaningful motion on issues that matter to them, starting with the war in Gaza.”
This is a rallying cry to the brand new Islamic MPs at Westminster to make use of the democratic machinery of the UK government to pursue Islamic agendas.
I remember the profound shock and surprise I felt when a highly respected academic colleague told me that the overt aim of the Muslim community within the UK was to make the most of the combined aspects of mass immigration, the next birth rate, and an Islamic block vote in elections to make sure that the mix of demography and democracy would reshape British politics to reflect Islamic political, religious and cultural ambitions over the approaching a long time of this century.
The next most vital threat that we face in our society is the federal government adopting a harsh and restrictive definition of Islamophobia, which it intends to legislate against. This will make it effectively unimaginable to debate Islam in public.
It’s just possible that Jess Phillips – having nearly lost her seat in Birmingham and experienced aggressive heckling at her acceptance speech after suffering profoundly disturbing levels of intimidation and aggression during her campaign – may change her mind about Labour policy on Islamophobia.
We face two problems. Firstly, the growing power and influence of Islamic sectarianism, but making it a lot worse, the shortcoming to make use of the ‘I-‘ word in any public discussion.
Murders are described as ‘terror’ with no mention that they were done within the name of Islam. The importation of Palestinian rage against Israel is roofed up with ‘sectarian politics’ as an alternative of Islamic antisemitism. And, if the Government’s plans to criminalise Islamophobia are carried through, self-censorship will grow to be state censorship.
Knowing the way to reply to this alteration in our political, social and non secular landscape goes to be hard enough because it is. Being fined or sent to prison for talking about it is going to make things infinitely worse. Jess Phillips, over to you.
