Starmer’s position on Gaza alienated me from Labour, says Muslim election candidate

Listening to UK Labor leader Keir Starmer talk about Gaza was when Sophia Naqvi realized it was time to leave the party after more than a decade as a member.

In an interview that strained Labour’s relations with many British Muslims to breaking point, Mr Starmer suggested it was acceptable for Israel to withhold power and water from the territory.

That happened in October, just three days after Hamas attacked Israel, and now Ms Naqvi is preparing to run in the general election against the party her family has supported for three generations.

“Keir Starmer is supposed to be a human rights lawyer, but his comments that Israel could cut off the water and things like that – where’s the humanity?” she asked National.

“The comments he made were a real eye opener. Then I realized that his policies were basically the same as those of the Conservatives.”

Mrs Naqvi, a mother-of-four who works as a teaching assistant, is running for Newham Independents in the West Ham and Beckton constituency, which will be contested for the first time at the July 4 election.

It is an area that has been solidly Labor for years, located in the east London borough of Newham, where around a third of the population describe themselves as Muslim.

Also running as an independent is British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamed, in a nearby constituency, where she faces shadow health secretary Wes Streeting.

She is the granddaughter of survivors of the 1948 Nakba who spoke at weekly protests in central London against Israeli attacks on Gaza. She criticized the UK “doing deals with Israeli tech companies”. She says she wants to break the “corrupt duopoly of two parties to create an independent path for Britain. She tweeted her support for former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to stand as an independent, calling him a “principled politician who fought for justice for the Palestinians”.

From the councilor to the Municipality?

After leaving the Labor Party, Ms Naqvi won the local council by-election as an independent. She defeated a Labor candidate and won 46% of the vote, taking a seat on the council for the first time.

A number of former Labor members are now councilors after leaving the party in anger over its stance on Gaza.

The Labor leadership’s stance on Gaza has been partly shaped by a desire to repair the damage done to its image when Mr Corbyn was party leader.

The party has been embroiled in allegations of anti-Semitism that are widely seen as contributing to its disastrous defeat in the 2019 general election.

Labor is now moving in step with the Conservative government, which in turn has taken its lead from the United States, more or less supporting Israel, although there has been criticism of the humanitarian effort.

Ms Naqvi accuses the Labor leader of “not listening” and ignoring “many people in central London who protest every weekend”.

“People will no longer be fooled. They take our votes for granted,” said Ms Naqvi, whose grandfather migrated from Azad Kashmir in Pakistan to the UK.

Loss of votes

Evidence of the effect of Starmer’s words on Israel came in the results of local elections earlier this year. In the Greater Manchester town of Oldham, which is 22% Muslim, Labor unexpectedly lost control of the local council.

Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a non-partisan think tank, said National that the “unknown question” is the extent to which Muslim voters will prioritize Gaza over other issues such as the National Health Service or the economy.

While Gaza will “change some votes”, the final decision for Muslim voters would be whether they want to change the government or not, he said.

“A third of Muslim voters are likely to feel conflicted between what they would do in a general election if Gaza were not there and how to balance the international and the domestic.”

As an example of how this could happen, he used the recent mayoral race in the West Midlands, when a high-profile independent running on a platform in Gaza, an area with a large Muslim population, took votes from Labour.

But in the Police and Crime Commissioner election on the same day, where there was no independent candidate, the Labor vote held up.

For political analyst Chris Hopkins, whether or not Labor could lose seats to Muslim independents comes down to a simple matter of electoral geography.

He said while there was “concern” in the Labor leadership after the local elections, the battleground for the general election is different.

“You have to remember that local elections are wildly different,” said Mr. Hopkins, the policy director at polling and market research company Savanta. National.

“There are no Muslim-majority parliamentary constituencies in the same way that there are Muslim-majority wards in local councils,” he said.

“It is much easier to run as an independent candidate in local elections and only the very politically involved vote in them.

“I think the other thing that is ultimately good news for Labor is that areas that have higher proportions of Muslim voters tend to be much safer seats for Labour, so they can afford to lose votes.

“All of these things lead me to believe that the Israel-Palestine issue probably won’t have a big impact on the next election.

“But having said that, it’s still going to be talked about and it’s still going to give Labor politicians a headache.”

Ms Naqvi is confident she can defeat Labour, which has yet to choose a candidate, on a platform that takes up traditional Labor policies such as the fight against poverty, more health funding and infrastructure spending.

“I’m sure I can win. Absolutely,” she said.

“When this situation in Gaza happened, there is a path that we can take, which is right or wrong, and as a mother of four, I want to be an example to my children.”

Updated: May 24, 2024, 1:33 p.m