Labour Needs the Muslim Vote to Stabilise its ‘Sandcastle Majority’

This article is an abridged summary of a longer piece published in Byline Supplement

The 2024 General Election brought the Labour Party to power for the first time in in over a decade. Yet even a cursory look at the numbers of votes accrued by Labour and the other parties is enough to make one thing obvious: Keir Starmer is sitting on top of a very precarious house of cards.

Despite his majority of 170 seats, it is possible that Labour will face a steep uphill struggle to hang onto the gains made when they next go to the polls in a by-election or General Election.

To avoid being forced up against the ropes, especially by an increasingly pugnacious Nigel Farage, Labour will needs to consider ways to broaden its voter base.   Let’s look at some simple facts:

• Labour captured just 34% of the electorate which is less than Tony Blair achieved in every one of his election victories and barely 2% above Corbyn’s 2019 result.  The election itself also had around 60% turnout, making it amongst the lowest in history.

• Reform played a huge role in damaging an already feeble Tory election machine.  Reform came in second place in about 98 seats and within 5,000 votes of winning roughly 10 of those.  Moreover, in over 170 of the Conservative seats lost, the Reform vote was greater than the margin of the Conservatives’ defeat.  Labour benefited hugely this time from Reform’s presence, but next time, a Reform/Tory pact or even a unified right-wing party could hugely damage Labour’s prospects.  In fact, longtime Labour MPs have presciently warned that in many of the areas where Labour did secure victory, it was with narrow margins of victory.    

• A key factor in Labour’s success was the unprecedented collapse of the Tory vote, a groundbreaking 20 points nationally.  So this election could well have been more about a Tory defeat than a Labour victory.    

• Voters are becoming increasingly ‘mobile’ and gravitating toward smaller parties. In the 2019 General Election, over 75% of the popular vote went to Labour and the Tories, whereas in 2024 they secured around 60% of the vote, and smaller parties took home around 30.4%, with Reform (14.3%) and Liberal Democrats (12.1%) leading among them.

• The collapse of the ‘Muslim Vote’ by 30% in some key areas led to the loss of Labour seats to Independents.
  

All of this has led some Labour MPs to warn Starmer that he has a “sandcastle majority that will have a fair number of big tides coming its way.”

However, Labour can, and should, turn its house-of-cards majority into a solid foundation for electoral success by tapping into the potentially millions of British Muslim voters who are looking for a Government that listens to their concerns.

This constituency, whose support Labour has traditionally been able to largely count upon, was more conflicted in 2024 about giving Labour its vote. Labour can, and in fact should, as a matter of at least maintaining if not expanding its parliamentary majority, consider how it can go about reestablishing itself as the party of choice among British Muslims.

There is little doubt that this will be a difficult task. In the eight months leading up to the election, the party’s moral equivocation on the genocide in Gaza caused some significant damage to Muslims’ trust in Labour.

Muslim voters punished Labour for this in the General Election, with some research showing that in the 21 seats where more than 30% of the population is Muslim, Labour’s vote share dropped by 29% from an average of 65% in 2019 to 36% in 2024, driven by the Gaza issue.

Labour should of course care about this as a matter of principle, but they should also take winning back the hearts and minds of Muslims as a matter of realpolitik and electoral strategy, considering the threats that it faces going into future elections. So how can Labour do this? There are four key policy areas that it should embrace to make this happen.

---

Civil Society Groups

First, Labour should not continue the strategically shortsighted Conservative policy of refusing to engage with mainstream Muslim civil society groups.

Groups like Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) have decades of experience working with community leaders and public authorities to tackle Islamophobia and strengthen community cohesion, and as a result have widespread support among and across British Muslim communities.

These bodies have organically grown out of British Muslim life and are authentic representations of what is a very diverse community. This is not something that can be artificially created, which is why the Government should avoid a policy of cherry-picking preferred leaders to work with, or creating its own bodies that command no recognition or legitimacy among British Muslims. Labour must take the requests of such groups seriously, such as the widespread calls for increased and legislated mosque protection funding.

---

Racial and Religious Hatred Law

Labour should resolve the deeply problematic legislative imbalance between the protections given on the grounds of race versus those afforded to religious groups under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006.

Currently, a person is rightly protected against abusive, insulting or threatening words or behaviour that target race. On the other hand, a religious person is only protected from threatening words or behaviour. This gives a free pass to bigots to use abusive or insulting words or behaviour toward someone because of their religious identity.

The urgency to address this legislative gap is now even more pressing following the recent far-right riots, which were characterised by the very practices of abusing and insulting Muslims. When it comes to racial hatred, prosecutors need to establish that there was a likelihood that the offence would whip up hatred, but when it comes to religious hatred, there is the added condition that it must be proven that the perpetrator had the intention to do so.

---

Defining ‘Extremism’

Labour must rescind the highly politicised definition of extremism introduced by the Conservative Government and remove mainstream Muslim civil society groups from being judged against it. This process was known to be the brainchild of former Secretary of State for Levelling Up and Communities, Michael Gove, who has a well-documented past of working for right-wing think tanks that have been accused of espousing Islamophobia, including by their own founders in the case of the Henry Jackson Society. Gove claimed that the Muslim groups were added because of their “Islamist orientation and views.”

Yet, all those groups added are apolitical and do not promote or advance any such ideology. Groups like MEND were founded with one overarching goal: to fight Islamophobia in Britain. It was not created to champion any ideology or political group, and there is no evidence that it ever has. The work of groups like MEND should be understood as fitting within the long and honourable tradition of protecting and advancing the citizenship of minority groups. Far from undermining our institutions, their work strengthens them by ensuring that rights and freedoms are applied equally to all, and not on the basis of race or religious affiliation. This should be celebrated, not demonised.

---

A Coherent Policy on Gaza

Finally, and in what will perhaps be Labour’s greatest test, the party must adopt a coherent policy toward the genocide in Gaza, which places human rights at its core.

• The Prime Minister must publicly call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
• Labour must urgently implement its manifesto pledge to recognise the state of Palestine, and not delay this over concerns about international optics as some reports have suggested it is doing.
• Although Labour has repeatedly called for the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza to be returned home safely, it should do the same for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held illegally in Israeli jails.
• Labour should uphold international law by calling for the removal of all illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
• The party should commit to not reintroducing the last Government’s highly controversial anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Bill, which campaigners across the country recognised as an acute threat to freedom of expression and assembly.
• Finally, the UK should follow the lead of nations like Belgium and the Netherlands in suspending arms sales to Israel.

Through this suite of policies, the Labour leadership can show British Muslims that it is taking a different position toward them compared to Governments of the past. It can show them that it takes their right to be properly represented and heard seriously, and through doing so, it may well fortify its electoral foundations and turn its sandcastle majority into a castle of stone.