Starmer is AGAIN caught on camera shunning Muslim voters.

Right, so it has taken Keir Starmer mere days into his governance of the country to once more remind Muslim voters that if they took their vote elsewhere from Labour this time, whether by voting for another party, or not voting at all, apathy certainly the biggest of the general election as it was, then they were right to do so. Twice in the space of a little over a minute, Keir Starmer managed to vindicate such thinking when asked about the Muslim votes Labour has lost and how he would address that, he chose instead to brag about the massive mandate he has been handed by the country. Now I’d argue he certainly has a massive majority, but the results definitely question the kind of mandate he has there, what right he has to rule, what endorsement by the country he has actually been given to do so versus a bent electoral system that favours two parties over all the others. Just because you can form a government, doesn’t mean you earned the right, though to listen to Starmer brag about it you’d think otherwise and those who didn’t vote for him, well, they don’t seem to matter very much.
Right, so that was Keir Starmer being interviewed by ITV’s political correspondent Shehab Khan and basically saying look at my big fat mandate, not once, but twice. Given Starmer was being asked about lost Muslim votes, the conclusion you draw from that is that he frankly doesn’t care. Making it worse for me, was that in light of Starmer and the hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party he presides over, the offence caused to Muslim voters over his ongoing stance regarding Israel and Gaza and notably his most recent comments whilst on the election trail complaining that people from Bangladesh were not being sent home, it didn’t escape my notice that Shehab Khan interviewing him, is himself a Muslim of Bengali heritage. Starmer was literally looking him in the eye and ignoring both times the issue of the Muslim vote and how much of he had lost, because he had this big mandate now to run the country. It’s a testament to Khan’s professionalism in my view on one hand, but Starmer’s indifference on the other. And so although he says he needs address those issues, those reasons some people didn’t vote for Labour, whilst actively campaigning he demonised and attacked many of them for the sake of winning the votes of others who agree with such sentiment. He sought the Tory hard right vote, and he didn’t get it. I don’t believe he will change tack on that either, but it’s something I’ll be happy to be proven wrong on.
On the matter of mandates, the dictionary definition of that term is:
‘The authority to carry out a policy, regarded as given by the electorate, to a party or candidate that wins an election.’
So a mandate is an assent to carry out policies you stood on a platform of, authority given by the electorate, so no arguing that Starmer has a mandate to carry out policies within his manifesto. Interestingly, if it isn’t in the manifesto, he doesn’t have a mandate to do it in which case, but all governments do stuff like that don’t they?
But the scale of the mandate is what Starmer bleated on about and that isn’t counted in number of seats, that has a bearing on how easily he can get stuff passed, but has no bearing on what he has authority by the voting public to actually carry out. Now the tricky line in that definition, is authority as regarded as given by the electorate, for that then falls on our electoral system as it currently is, but that is highly questionable as well, because if Starmer is measuring his mandate in terms of numbers of seats, then he owes that entirely to the electoral system and not any actual mandate voted for by the British public, which of course would be counted in literal number of votes, of which Starmer got nearly 540,000 fewer votes than Labour got in 2019 and over 3m fewer votes than Labour got in 2017. In fact Starmer only got 380,000 more votes than Ed Miliband got in 2015, yet where Miliband lost 26 seats, Starmer gained a supermajority. So the electoral system itself didn’t deliver Starmer a mandate. I could talk of the fact that in terms of vote share, Labour went up only 1.6%, Labour broadly speaking therefore lost votes and managed to maintain it’s vote share, not really gain, it is in power solely because other parties and their support, the Tories particularly and their mandate to rule being stripped from them so heavily that actually has given Starmer a mandate to rule, but it’s a weak one, the weakest mandate in British political history in fact. It is a large majority but a low mandate. Not my words, the words of Jeremy Corbyn speaking to the Democracy Now! YouTube channel and the reason that mandate is so low is because, yes, Starmer gained votes in areas Labour traditionally hasn’t won them, but the party stood still, the mandate is low, because of the losses they had elsewhere. Many formerly safe Labour seats, from Bradford to Bethnal Green, to Yardley, to Ilford North, to Birmingham Ladywood are now tight marginals where it wouldn’t take much of a shift, for Labour to lose them next time and as we all know, that tends to be how things go one a party is a parliamentary term into government. Even Starmer’s own majority weas cut by more than half and he still became Prime Minister!
But it is the Muslim vote particularly, where Starmer has caused such pain, such offence and resulted in such loss. But what is the scale? How can we measure it? Difficult to quantify, given Muslim communities vary in size from the very substantial to the virtually non existent around the country, but to get an idea of the losses Starmer’s Labour has experienced, that he can’t even bring himself to speak about because he's still giddy with the size of parliamentary party now, yet fortunately the analysis has been done by Hyphen, an online magazine focussing on pan European Muslim issues, as this excerpt shows:
‘There was a dramatic Labour collapse in the constituencies with the highest proportions of Muslims. My own research over the last 36 hours has found that, in the 21 seats where more than 30% of the population is Muslim, Labour’s share dropped by 29 percentage points from an average 65% in 2019 to 36% in 2024.
Turnout also fell more steeply than average (down 11.2 percentage points) in these seats, suggesting that some disaffected Muslim electors abstained while others voted for other candidates. In these seats, the total number of Labour votes fell from more than 600,000 in 2019 to just under 300,000 in 2024. That is the equivalent of more than half the total national drop in the Labour vote between the two elections (Labour has lost 537,688 votes compared with 2019).
Despite this voting slump, Labour remained the largest single party in the most Muslim parts of Britain, retaining 17 out of the 21 constituencies. The most effective electoral challenge came from locally sourced independent candidates rather than the Workers Party of Britain or the Green party, although both organisations achieved some impressive showings in individual constituencies. Independents were elected in Birmingham Perry Barr, Blackburn, Dewsbury and Batley and Leicester South.
But they failed in Bradford West, despite that seat accounting for the largest single drop in the Labour vote share (44.5 percentage points), because the remaining vote was divided. Similarly, Labour clung on in Birmingham Ladywood following a fightback by the incumbent (and new justice secretary) Shabana Mahmood, as well as some candidate controversies.
Among the defeated Labour candidates was Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr, who had been the sole English Muslim MP at the time of the Iraq war in 2003. There were heavy swings against other Labour MPs, too, though those who had quit the front bench over the party’s position on Gaza (such as Jess Phillips and Imran Hussain) tended to experience smaller vote drops than others. In London’s East End, left-wing Apsana Begum saw her vote share fall by much less (17.3 percentage points) in Poplar and Limehouse than her more leadership-friendly neighbour Rushanara Ali in Bethnal Green and Stepney (39.4 percentage points).
The loss of Muslim votes was also a problem for Labour in some seats with smaller Muslim communities. In the 43 next-most Muslim constituencies (between 15% and 30% of the population), Labour lost another 300,000 votes. That means the equivalent of the entire national drop in Labour’s vote since 2019 happened in these 64 “most Muslim” seats.’
Starmer still cannot bring himself to acknowledge Muslim vote losses, acknowledge that that is a failing he in no small part is directly responsible for and the scale of it, is a difference maker. What that analysis shows is if certain constituencies can get their acts together, many of these seats that almost fell due to the loss of the Muslim vote, though not exclusively, the rest of the article very much points this out, but in those seats with the largest Muslim communities the biggest scale of potential future upset is there and if I were an MP in one of those seats for sure, you’re safe for the next 5 years, but come the next election, if a concerted effort to fix relations with Muslim voters starting now isn’t begun, isn’t taken seriously, if Labour’s hierarchy of racism still makes this offensively apparent, then Independent candidates notably, but alternative parties certainly, have a real chance of taking those seats back and carrying forward mandates of their own.
Some Independents were of course successful in these areas as that Hyphen excerpt pointed out, a new Gaza Bloc of MPs as they’ve been nicknamed ready to give Starmer a hard time, not just over Gaza, but on Muslim issues too going forwards and I look forward to seeing what they do and what they say. Check this video recommendation out to find out a bit more about them and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.