In Britain, a party of the Centre-Left has won a 170-plus majority at a time when far-Right parties in Italy, France and Germany have either replaced or are on the verge of replacing ruling centrist establishments. After fourteen years of Conservative governments, Britain has turned Left under Keir Starmer, at a time when Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old president of the neo-fascist National Rally, is the favourite to become the prime minister of France. Labour’s landslide win makes Britain seem like an outlier in European politics.
Well, yes. And no.
Britain is the most successfully multicultural society in the world. It isn’t perfect: it has its share of alienated minorities, institutionalised racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry, but in the matter of political representation, it is exemplary. Governments of Britain, Scotland and Wales have been led by ethnic minority politicians. Conservative front benches after the election of 2019 were so diverse that they could have been taught as case studies in inclusion. London has been led by a Muslim mayor for three straight terms. The next first minister of Scotland might be Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour. You can argue that this isn’t the whole picture, but from where I’m sitting, Modi’s India, visible minorities in positions of power is a good place to start.
But — and this ‘but’ has been hovering for two paragraphs — the way Starmer’s majority was won suggests that Britain’s politics might converge with the majoritarian politics of its European neighbours.
Starmer’s achievement — in his view and in the expert view of the commentariat — has been to make Labour respectable, and thus make it a political vehicle ready to receive the protest vote against Conservative misrule. For Starmer, the key to making Labour respectable was to purge it of the anti-Semitism that Jeremy Corbyn and his lieutenants had either tolerated or failed to properly address, according to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission published in 2020.
Corbyn and his colleagues on the Labour’s Left disputed the findings of the EHRC. Corbyn claimed that the scale of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party had been “dramatically overstated” for which he was suspended from the party. Starmer and his lieutenants then brought Labour back to the mainstream of political opinion in Britain on matters like NATO and Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Starmer’s repeated claim that he had changed Labour and turned it into a patriotic party of working people was based on his performative weeding out of the Corbynite — and implicitly anti-Semitic — Left.
Since the election results were announced, the defeats and narrow victories of Labour’s candidates in constituencies with substantial Muslim populations such as those in and around Birmingham and the Midlands have been remarked upon. Starmer’s assertion during a radio interview in October 2023 that Israel had the right to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians in Gaza has been described as a misstep that he took too long to correct. His subsequent refusal to commit the Labour Party to a ceasefire in the face of the mass killings of civilians in Gaza and his successful bid to persuade the Speaker of the House of Commons to not allow a vote on a Scottish National Party motion calling for an immediate ceasefire have been cited as factors behind the dip in Muslim support for Labour. It has been suggested that the Labour leadership had underestimated the extent of Muslim alienation.
This is to misunderstand Starmer’s position on Gaza. Starmer’s support for Israel and its “right to defend itself” might have been less dramatic than Joe Biden’s literal embrace of Netanyahu, but it is just as unwavering. Before Corbyn took over in 2015, Labour’s establishment was firmly pro-Israel, and Starmer has reverted to that position both as a matter of personal conviction and for Labour’s need for geopolitical respectability. That means letting the world know that Labour will march in lockstep with the United States of America on all matters Israel/Palestine. If this meant losing Muslim voters in the Midlands and elsewhere, it was a small price to pay for burnishing the party’s pro-Israel and anti-anti-Semitism credentials.
Just as the Abraham Accords were an attempt to ‘solve’ the Middle East problem by finessing the Palestinians (normalising Israel’s relations with Arab nations without conceding a Palestinian state), Starmer’s election campaign assumed that Labour’s Muslim support wasn’t crucial because there were more votes to be had elsewhere. Muslims and others agitated by Gaza could be finessed, and they were. Labour’s losses and close shaves against independents in this election are a feature not a bug.
It’s unlikely that Labour will use up political capital to win back the Muslim votes that the party has lost. With more than 400 seats, there is no political incentive to be placatory. Also, there is that question to which Indian Muslims have grown accustomed: where will they go? The Conservatives are, if anything, even more indifferent to their concerns, domestic and foreign, than Labour. The Labour Party is their natural home and they have been its most loyal voters; to leave it to support independent candidates, or to vote for a maverick like George Galloway, or to float a ‘Muslim’ party, over the long term, would be to politically orphan themselves. This is Starmer’s achievement: to demonstrate that the ‘Muslim’ vote can be taken
for granted.
There is some reason to believe that this lesson will be welcomed, not just in the smelly reaches of the far-Right but also amongst the bien pensant. To hear Jess Philips and Shabana Mahmood, two Labour MPs who won very narrow victories, complain of the treatment they suffered at the hands of their opponents and their supporters, is to realise that the passions provoked by Gaza are seen as excessive. This is of a piece with the earlier criticism of the massive ceasefire marches in London, in papers like The Guardian and New Statesman, as intimidatory and therefore a threat to democracy.
Starmer’s ‘gaffe’ on Israel’s right to blockade civilians, wasn’t a one-off. More recently, as Starmer looked for ways to criticise the Tories without committing Labour to specific promises that could be costed or critiqued, he began to claim that Labour would do better than the Conservatives on illegal immigration. Challenged on what he would do about deporting illegals during a face-to-face with an audience, organised by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, Starmer claimed that he would put illegals on planes and send them back to the countries they had come from. The Conservatives were failing to do this, he said: “At the moment, people coming from countries like Bangladesh aren’t being removed because they aren’t being processed.”
After a Labour councillor in London resigned from the party to protest what she described as the Labour leader’s dog-whistling, Starmer accepted that his comment was clumsy but argued that he hadn’t meant to offend. The problem here is not intent; it is Starmer’s tone-deafness, his indifference to the way his comments might be received.
Like other centrist leaders in Europe, Starmer is trying to defend his right flank by talking tough on issues normally ventilated by the Right. With the success of Reform in winning 14% of the votes and the imminence of Trump, it’s very likely that a Labour government will continue to be muscular about immigration and equivocal about Gaza. It’ll be an irony if this stolid social democrat takes Britain down Europe’s far-Right road where disciplining ‘disorderly’ minorities and deporting ‘dangerous’ foreigners become the currency of national politics. We shall find out.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
