What has the bloody war in Gaza to do with a ward election in Redbridge? A great deal – if a plurality of its voters is to be believed.
Last week, Noor Jahan Begum, an independent, won Mayfield in the Ilford South constituency. Labour saw its vote plummet by 45 per cent. Begum took 42.5 per cent from a standing start. The top of her election leaflet boasted the words “I stand with Palestine”.
A protest vote of the kind that local elections often throw up – here today, gone tomorrow? Perhaps. But Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and main electoral strategist, is unlikely to think so. He will read the result as part of a bigger story – one that is potentially terminal for the political project he has helped to shape.
To understand it, one must first get a sense of Mayfield and of Ilford South, the constituency of which it’s a part – and the political neighbourhood.
Not so long ago, the most visible minority population in Redbridge, the London borough of which Ilford is a part, was Jewish. The ward, during those years, was often Conservative: David Amess, later a Conservative MP, was one of the Tory councillors elected for Mayfield in 1982.
One wonders what Amess – murdered in his constituency surgery by an Islamist maniac, who cited the MP’s support for Israel in justification – would have made of last week’s result. He would certainly have clocked the demographic changes in his former ward. Jews and Muslims constituted about five per cent of the electorate each in 1982. Since then, the percentage of the former has dropped to almost zero, and that of the latter has risen to some 50 per cent.
Begum is surely preparing for another tilt at Ilford South itself: after all, she had a go at it in last year’s general election, coming second.
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring seat of Ilford North, the mighty Wes Streeting – Labour’s Health Secretary, the leading light of the party’s moderate wing and a possible future leader – scraped home by just over 500 votes.
Again, an independent was second. And again, Gaza was at the front and centre of the campaign.
Labour was not so fortunate in Blackburn, Dewsbury and Batley, Birmingham Perry Bar and Leicester South – all of them bar the second formerly safe for Labour, all with a Muslim vote of over a third, and all of which fell to pro-Palestine independents.
You can argue that the number of Labour seats vulnerable to such independents at the next election will be limited: in only 19 constituencies did the latter win more than a fifth of the vote in 2024, though some famous names are potentially vulnerable, including Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, in Birmingham Ladywood and, just about, Sir Keir himself (almost 20 per cent of his voters are Muslims).
But 19 constituencies lost would leave Labour 38 worse off – since every seat the party loses another party must gain. And the pro-Palestine independents are only a part of McSweeney’s problem on the Left.
The other half is the Greens, who were second in only three seats in the 2019 general election. In 2024, they were the runner-up in 40. All but one of these seats was won by Labour. Eighteen of them are in London.
A Green-Gaza pact at the next election would see the two forces divide up the spoils, with the Greens targeting such London seats as Hackney North and Stoke Newington and Hackney South and Shoreditch – plus Bristol – while the pro-Palestine independents concentrate on the Ilford constituencies, parts of Birmingham and Bradford.
On paper, the traction of the Gaza war is limited, and most of these seats still look very safe for Labour. Practice is more complicated. In Mayfield, Begum also campaigned on sustainable housing, lower council tax and cutting crime – and invoked the record of the local Labour MP, who rented out flats with black mould and ant infestations. The Greens are also converging on some of this electoral territory.
So as Sir Keir moves rightwards – partly from necessity, partly through choice – he is opening up space on his left for the independents and Greens to move into. Cuts in disability benefits, a role for the private sector in the NHS, positive relations with Donald Trump, an unwillingness to abandon Israel completely: all this is anathema to a coalition of younger women, Muslims, public sector workers and poorer urban voters.
Here is McSweeney’s nightmare. Labour’s core vote among the white working class has already crumbled. Now its remaining base – among this inchoate alliance – risks hollowing out, in this age of exceptional electoral volatility.
If Labour moves further right (moving off its net zero targets, for example) it loses at one end. But if it goes left, it loses at the other – even bigger. For of the 98 seats in which Reform is second, Labour hold 89. Nigel Farage is coming to eat Sir Keir’s future.
Mayfield, along with the rise of the independents and the growth of the Greens, matters – to Britain’s voters as a whole, not just to Downing Street’s election planners.
We cast our votes as we will. Muslims have as much of a right to do so as voters of any other faith or none. If many of them – and left-wing secularists, in even bigger numbers – want to support the Palestinian cause, then so be it.
But fragmentation comes at a price – arguably, to our national interest; certainly, to peace, civil order and stability. The last election saw a rise in intimidation, threats and harassment. Amess had been slaughtered.
So, too, two years earlier, was Jo Cox. The rise of the independents mirrors a rise in communalism. If Labour and the Greens become parties of Pakistan and Palestine, and the Conservatives and Reform those of India and Israel, how can we hold together? How will we cohere?
Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange
What has the bloody war in Gaza to do with a ward election in Redbridge? A great deal – if a plurality of its voters is to be believed.
Last week, Noor Jahan Begum, an independent, won Mayfield in the Ilford South constituency. Labour saw its vote plummet by 45 per cent. Begum took 42.5 per cent from a standing start. The top of her election leaflet boasted the words “I stand with Palestine”.
A protest vote of the kind that local elections often throw up – here today, gone tomorrow? Perhaps. But Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and main electoral strategist, is unlikely to think so. He will read the result as part of a bigger story – one that is potentially terminal for the political project he has helped to shape.
To understand it, one must first get a sense of Mayfield and of Ilford South, the constituency of which it’s a part – and the political neighbourhood.
Not so long ago, the most visible minority population in Redbridge, the London borough of which Ilford is a part, was Jewish. The ward, during those years, was often Conservative: David Amess, later a Conservative MP, was one of the Tory councillors elected for Mayfield in 1982.
One wonders what Amess – murdered in his constituency surgery by an Islamist maniac, who cited the MP’s support for Israel in justification – would have made of last week’s result. He would certainly have clocked the demographic changes in his former ward. Jews and Muslims constituted about five per cent of the electorate each in 1982. Since then, the percentage of the former has dropped to almost zero, and that of the latter has risen to some 50 per cent.
Begum is surely preparing for another tilt at Ilford South itself: after all, she had a go at it in last year’s general election, coming second.
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring seat of Ilford North, the mighty Wes Streeting – Labour’s Health Secretary, the leading light of the party’s moderate wing and a possible future leader – scraped home by just over 500 votes.
Again, an independent was second. And again, Gaza was at the front and centre of the campaign.
Labour was not so fortunate in Blackburn, Dewsbury and Batley, Birmingham Perry Bar and Leicester South – all of them bar the second formerly safe for Labour, all with a Muslim vote of over a third, and all of which fell to pro-Palestine independents.
You can argue that the number of Labour seats vulnerable to such independents at the next election will be limited: in only 19 constituencies did the latter win more than a fifth of the vote in 2024, though some famous names are potentially vulnerable, including Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, in Birmingham Ladywood and, just about, Sir Keir himself (almost 20 per cent of his voters are Muslims).
But 19 constituencies lost would leave Labour 38 worse off – since every seat the party loses another party must gain. And the pro-Palestine independents are only a part of McSweeney’s problem on the Left.
The other half is the Greens, who were second in only three seats in the 2019 general election. In 2024, they were the runner-up in 40. All but one of these seats was won by Labour. Eighteen of them are in London.
A Green-Gaza pact at the next election would see the two forces divide up the spoils, with the Greens targeting such London seats as Hackney North and Stoke Newington and Hackney South and Shoreditch – plus Bristol – while the pro-Palestine independents concentrate on the Ilford constituencies, parts of Birmingham and Bradford.
On paper, the traction of the Gaza war is limited, and most of these seats still look very safe for Labour. Practice is more complicated. In Mayfield, Begum also campaigned on sustainable housing, lower council tax and cutting crime – and invoked the record of the local Labour MP, who rented out flats with black mould and ant infestations. The Greens are also converging on some of this electoral territory.
So as Sir Keir moves rightwards – partly from necessity, partly through choice – he is opening up space on his left for the independents and Greens to move into. Cuts in disability benefits, a role for the private sector in the NHS, positive relations with Donald Trump, an unwillingness to abandon Israel completely: all this is anathema to a coalition of younger women, Muslims, public sector workers and poorer urban voters.
Here is McSweeney’s nightmare. Labour’s core vote among the white working class has already crumbled. Now its remaining base – among this inchoate alliance – risks hollowing out, in this age of exceptional electoral volatility.
If Labour moves further right (moving off its net zero targets, for example) it loses at one end. But if it goes left, it loses at the other – even bigger. For of the 98 seats in which Reform is second, Labour hold 89. Nigel Farage is coming to eat Sir Keir’s future.
Mayfield, along with the rise of the independents and the growth of the Greens, matters – to Britain’s voters as a whole, not just to Downing Street’s election planners.
We cast our votes as we will. Muslims have as much of a right to do so as voters of any other faith or none. If many of them – and left-wing secularists, in even bigger numbers – want to support the Palestinian cause, then so be it.
But fragmentation comes at a price – arguably, to our national interest; certainly, to peace, civil order and stability. The last election saw a rise in intimidation, threats and harassment. Amess had been slaughtered.
So, too, two years earlier, was Jo Cox. The rise of the independents mirrors a rise in communalism. If Labour and the Greens become parties of Pakistan and Palestine, and the Conservatives and Reform those of India and Israel, how can we hold together? How will we cohere?
Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange