Labour’s attitude to Muslim voters seems to be that they are so politically naïve and unworldly that they can be led astray by a couple of leaflets in Urdu and Punjabi with a nice photo of a Green Party candidate wearing a keffiyeh, “the Middle Eastern scarf commonly associated with Palestine” as The Times helpfully describes it.

Murdoch’s paper ran an article headlined “Labour accuses Greens of ‘whipping up hatred’ among Muslim voters”. They are even calling for “Starmer’s party to be “punished for Gaza”.

Worse still, the paper reports that “cabinet ministers privately believe that the Greens are “hammering us” by “deliberately raising the salience of Gaza in the constituency”.

It doesn’t stop there. The Greens have made a video showing Starmer shaking hands with the Islamophobe Narendra Modi. In another punch below the belt it shows David Lammy, shaking hands with Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. No one is claiming that the images are false. They are in the public domain.

Sounding rather upset, a cabinet minister laments “They’re hammering us. They’re a totally different party to the one we thought they were. They’re just like Respect — it’s like fighting a by-election against George Galloway.” This Galloway / Hannah Spencer comparison is a new one.

However, it did encourage me to rummage through this site’s archives and I found this 2006 article Big gains for Tower Hamlets Respect which describes how Respect came from nowhere and won twelve councillors to Labour’s twenty-six. It also reminded me of some things I had forgotten, such as how Respect’s non-Bangladeshi councillors tended to poll noticeably less well than their Bangladeshi peers, but that is another story.

At the time of writing, we don’t know if the Green Party in Gorton and Denton will make an electoral breakthrough comparable to Respect’s of twenty years ago. However, some things are very similar.

The first is that Muslim voters, who in Britain are among the most oppressed sections of the working class, are always written off as a pliant bloc susceptible to any charlatan who knows how to press the right buttons. That is very much the tone of the Labour complaints. Labour assumes Muslim votes are theirs by divine right. That is at least a marginally better position than the racist view which implies that Muslims should not really be voting or living in Britain.

The second is that once again a section of the working-class vote is ditching Labour because of its support for a terrorist war against a predominantly Muslim population, a war Labour unconditionally supported. With Respect, the rupture was confined to a handful of locations and a small part of the left. The Green breakthrough is all across urban England and is drawing in people who are new to politics and others who went through the Corbyn experience and have firsthand knowledge of how duplicitous and unprincipled Starmer’s Labour Party is. New members often say this explicitly when asked why they joined the Greens.  

Two processes are converging. A section of the working class in Britain, some of which happens to be Muslim and doesn’t like seeing a Labour supported genocide against their co-religionists, has been radicalised around an international issue. French, British and American students did the same thing in the 1960s and that is now considered quite chic. The other is that British social democracy, having spent five years telling lefties to get stuffed and mimicking Nigel Farage, is haemorrhaging support. It is a bit like punching a window and being surprised you’re bleeding.

As for whipping up hatred, Padraic Pearse nailed it when he said “I hold it a Christian thing.. to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them.”

It is also a Muslim, Green and socialist thing.