Is a hung parliament our only opportunity for change and reforming an unfair voting system or will it mean a further crisis? The well renowned panel of speakers provided an in depth analysis of the election results and what they mean for our politics in the future. Anthony Barnett, Ahmed Versi and Catherine Heseltine added an insight into what election outcome will mean for the Muslim community.
Anthony Barnett*
Ahmed J Versi**
Catherine Heseltine***
Anthony Barnett: I don’t even know who is the Prime Minister yet. When I left it looked as if there was going to be an agreement between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives for a coalition I don’t know whether that has been confirmed. So I think we should leave it open for a free discussion about what this means rather than me trying to talk to you about it. I think there are certain key aspects to what has happened which we could discuss.
One of them is that there is a very profound transformation in the British state from what I call the empire state inherited from the structures that were built before the Second World War and were preserved by the domestic victory. There has been a very long decomposition of the empire state in trying to become a relatively modern constutional democracy of a European kind.
And this process is now coming to a point. The most striking aspect has been the question of the hung parliament and proportional representation which is now being debated. Compared to the election of 2005 there has been a huge shift of public opinion about the way in which we vote in this country.
I have been a long time supporter of having a proportional representation system. As you know we have a first past the post system which produces very peculiar and very unfair results. It used to be celebrated as producing strong and effective government.
The last Labour government in 2005 was elected on 22.5% of the total electorate and about 33% of those who voted. It gained power which is was not exercising with a high degree of competence. A high degree of centralisation was experienced by people and considered neither legitimate nor effective. It was neither legitimate as they did not have the right to govern in that way nor effective in the way that they did govern.
A critical example of this was the unabated enthusiasm for the financial sector and for de-regulated banking which came from a highly concentrated treasury team and if it had been in any way forced into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats than the scare of the cuts, the financial catastrophe which we are about to experience would at least have been diminished.
The moment at which this became a public issue was over the parliamentary expenses crisis which you will recall from the summer of last year. My view of the expenses crisis is that this is what lies behind this hung parliament out come. It was what I call a ‘gotcha you’ moment. It wasn’t the fact that the public was suddenly shocked by the fact that MP’s were cheating and stealing from us as tax payers.
Traditionally the British political class has stolen from foreigners but it hasn’t stolen from tax payers and when they were caught for stealing from tax payers they were punished. This was not honourable political behaviour. Here were people cheating on us and getting away with it. When you don’t have a written constitution, a written codified political system, the question of trust and behaving honorably in public life is particuarly important. This is one of the checks that the system remains honest as it dosen’t have a constitution or a codified set of rules.
Because of Iraq there was a feeling among large numbers of people who had voted for Labour that the government had betrayed them, had lied and cheated. Because of what had happened with the banking system and bailing out that banks it was felt that his was not a proper way to behave.
So the expenses crisis became a moment when the public as a whole – 80 percent of public opinion – realised we have an electoral system which permits people to sit in safe seats and get away with things. This gives them permission to cheat. The way the political system works is that it has created a political class that is stealing our money.
There was a sense of revulsion at the system as a whole. Some of you are looking very puzzled but I can tell you something from my own experience. I have argued for twenty years that we had a political system that didn’t work, which wasn’t democratic, which was elitist. It was not the sort of thing a grown-up normal democracy would not have.
I felt for the first time that I wasn’t a stranger in my own country. When I talked to people they used to say it is not so bad, it would be better if we had a human rights act but it is not as bad as France, we do things well here. There was a sense that things could be better but there was no big problem. The politicians believed that the voters didn’t care, they didn’t really mind.
But all that changed. There was a very big and profound shift which cut away the legitimacy of the system. It was this feeling which was there before the election. Everybody expected an election with a very high rate of abstentions, the conservatives would win, the media had already expected a Cameroon Government. Brown was very unpopular and would be pushed out and the Liberal Democrats would be squeezed and their presence would go down. That was the expectation.
In the first Leader’s debate the important thing was not so much that Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats said anything particularly innovative or dramatic. There was a certain principled way in which he stood up for giving illegal immigrants proper status. He said one of two things and brought Trident into the discussion which was unusual. But the point is that he spoke. He was there, he was fresh, he was new. People talked about him. He was like the sails of a ship that caught the wind and the important thing was the wind.
So he was an attractive set of sails. He caught the wind. That was what was taking place. If that hadn’t happened the Liberal Democats would be down to 17 or 18% and we would have had a triumphant conservative government. So Labour could have become the third party in terms of the number of votes. There was a tremendous campaign in the Daily Mail which was frightened of a hung parliament and a Cameron government.
About a quarter of the people said a day before voting that they had not made up their minds. In the atmosphere of fear people voted for those they knew and that brought down the Liberal Democratic vote. We saw a situation where they got 22% of the vote and they get 8% of the seats. So there was still an extraordinarily unfair and undemocratic electoral outcome. But it was still sufficient to hang the parliament. And this hanging of the parliament was a genuine expression of people’s anger with the system as it was. And if that doesn’t change with the new government, if the political system does not start to reform, then we will see a further breakdown.
What I particuarly welcome about this outcome is that when I talk about the wind that wind was looking for something to catch it. It could have been right wing popularism. If the Liberal Democrats had been very hostile on migration they would have done much better. Relatively speaking they are progressive as far as this country’s political system is concerned. That had a negative effect on the voting.
But this wind is working for leadership and it could well have taken quite a different political direction or political form. There could be quite a dangerous situation we face if the new conservative-liberal democrat coalition we are now expecting doesn’t set about reforming and democratising the political system, protecting our liberties in a very clear way and ensuring that the people’s vote and capacity to participate are defended and enhanced.
Ahmed Versi: What I have been asked to do is to talk about the Muslim angle to the general elections. We had the most fascinating elections ever since I have been reporting on this since 1992. One of the reasons why the Conservative Party did not have a large number of seats is that they were not able to win the seats with a high ethnic minority and Muslim constituents. They won a few but in the majority of the cases they lost that opportunity.
They started to campaign for the ethnic minority vote quite late in the day because they thought, like the media, and other analysts that the Conservative Party are going to win and that Labour could even become the third party. They did not focus on the ethnic minority and they made a huge mistake. Even the Liberal Party were not to much concerned with the ethnic vote because they thought that they will not vote for us anyway, so why should we focus on them.
I can give an interesting incident. There was a hustings held by Operation Black Vote which focuses mainly on the black community just about a week before the elections where we had three party representatives there. So we had Harriet Harmond who came and spoke on behalf of the Labour Party and when she came she got a huge amount of applause. During the question time she got a lot of boos from the black community who normally support the Labour Party because of the issues of concern.
She spoke about the amount of support the Labour Party has given to the black and ethnic communities. The issue of DNA came up. As you know the DNA of a large number of members of the black community is kept by the police even though they might not be convinced of an offence the police still keep the DNA information. And they were asking why this was the case and they should have removed this. Harriet Harmond refused to budge on this issue.
The second issue she refused to budge on was stop and search. Again the black and ethnic communities are targetted by the police but she was not budging on this. There were other issues as well. When she left she had a negative response from the black community.
Then we had George Osborne. Poor guy when he came they started booing against him: “We don’t like you, you are Tory”. But as he spoke he got applause becaue the issues that he was talking about were of interest to the black community. During the question and answer session they asked similar questions. The Tory policy on human rights is much, much better than the Labour Party’s. However what happened when they asked about the DNA it was very clear that the Conservatives would not keep DNA information of people who are not convicted. The other issue was stop and search and Section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The Tory Party are going to remove that because it hasn’t achieved anything.
It is very difficult for the black and ethnic communities to get a loan from the banks. The other thing which he said which was very positive for the black and ethnic community was that he was going to change that. When he left he got a huge amount of applause. So you can see the contrast. The Tory Party did not cash in on the positive aspects of their poplicies concerning the ethnic communities.
Harriet Harmond in her speech did not mention one Muslim candidate. She talked about black candidates. She never mentioned the Muslim minister. George Osborne spoke both about the black and the Muslim candidates and the only Muslim who is in the shadow cabinet is unelected. You can see the different ways in which they presented the Muslim issue.
About ten days before the elections the Labour Party launched their BNA manifesto. And even at the launch there was not even one Muslim candidate and no Muslim MP. So you can see the way they treated the Muslims. I was really surprised that they neglected the Muslim community. The Tory Party came out for me more positive towards the Muslims than the Labour Party but things could change.
Eighty nine Muslim candidates stood for the elections: in the three main parties there were 52 candidates, the rest were from the minority parties like Respect and independents. Twenty-two Muslim women stood in the elections, sixteen from the three main parties. Six Labour, five each from Lib Dems and the Conservative. Eight Muslims were elected three of them Muslim women. All the three were elected from the Labour Party. No Muslims from the Lib Dems were elected. This is unfortunate.
It was for the fist time in the history of Britain that we have Muslim women in parliament.And also for the first time we are going to have Conservative Muslim MP’s. Two of the winners from this eight were incumbent MP’s Sadiq Khan and Khalid Mahmoud. Saeed Malik unfortunately lost in Dewsbury. We had another one Mohammed Sareer who retired and his son took over and he won.
Yasmin Quereshi was the first Muslim woman to be elected.
One of the interesting things that people don’t realise is that Muslims do not necessarily vote for Muslim candidates. They may in some instances but it is not necessarily so. They vote for a candidate who would support issues of concern to them, domestic or international, like any other constituents.
An important example is Bradford, Bradford North-West, all these Bradford’s. We have never had a Muslim candidate winning even though we have had Muslim candidates there. In the early 1990’s we even had an Islamic Party of Britain which only got a few hundred votes. They lost their deposit.
So if you take Bradford West to give you one example. We have Marsha Singh who was elected in 1997 and became very popular with the Muslim community because he has supported all the issues – immigration, health, education and so on. He was very supportive on the Kashmir issue because there are a large number of Kashmiris there and on Palestine. He was against the Iraq war. Every year he was re-elected. The Lib-Dems and the Tories tried to put Muslim candidates but they could not effect him at all.
This year the Lib Dems gave up but the Tories tried. They put someone called Zahid Malik but Singh increased his majority. Shahid Malik was in Dewsbury. Here the Muslims wanted to punish Shahid Malik because like Sadiq Khan he voted for many issues that affected us against us. He supported the Iraq war, he supported the counter terrorism measures and so on and he wasn’t good for the local constituents. So what happened an independent Muslim candidate stood up. Normally independent candidates don’t get a lot of votes. They get a few hundred maybe. But this person got 3,800 votes and they were mainly Muslim votes and Shahid Malik lost 1500 votes to the Tories. If he had not stood Shaeed Malik would have come back but it shows that just because he was a Muslim it does not necessarily mean that the Muslims will vote for him.
Unfortunately for Muslims, those who are against the Tory Party, they won and the swing was 5.85% Conservatives. . The national swing was 5% and the swings are quite different this time round. They are up to 9% for the Tories and then zero percent.
Khalid Mahmoud the other candidate came with a huge majority. He was elected in the 2001 elections. This time round we had this IMPAC who tried their best to get him out. They did a huge campaign against him and he got a bigger majority then he did in the 2005 elections.
It was from Lib Dem to Labour they had a 4.5% swing. By the way Khalid Mahmoud got the support of the Muslim voters, which was not much, but he also got the support of the white voters which is very important. It means that a Muslim candidate in a white area can still win because the non-Muslim communities, like the Muslims, vote for the person and not his ethnicity or faith.
In the neighbouring Birmingham Ladywood they had Shabana Mahmoud the second Muslim woman to be elected who replaced Claire Short. In the last election she had a huge decline in her majority whereas Shabana Mahmoud, even though she was new, her majority increased. Claire Short retired as the International Development Secretary.
Yasmin Quereshi was the first Muslim woman to be elected, she was the first one whose result came out at 3am. Her majority was reduced by the traditional Muslim community. Unfortunately here the swing went to the Conservaties because of the reduction in her majority. It went from Labour to Conservative 5.61% even though she won in a Labour stronghold. But the swing was more than the national average. There was a Labour Party win but the swing can go to the Conservative Party as well.
Then we had Mohammed Sarwar’s son, Anas. He stood in the Glasgow Central constituency and he won that. He got an increased majority. People expected him to reduce his majority because the person who stood against him was the Scottish National Party candidate SNP Osama Saeed. He was a very popular person in the area, very active. He was a member of the Islamic Foundation. He was very close to the SNP leadership but we saw in Scotland that the SNP did not gain much against the Labour Party. He only got a few thousand votes. He could not do much.
Then you come to Sadiq Khan in South London, Tooting. The Tooting area has become very pro Conservative because if you look at the mayoral election when the Conservatives won, there was Boris Johnson. People thought this would influence the general election and Sadiq Khan would be wiped out. So the Tories made it one of their target seats but he won. He is quite a strange character. When he won in 2005 the Labour majority reduced by 50 % because of him. When he won this time round the majority reduced by 50% so he has a majority of 2,500. The reason he managed to succeed here was because of the Muslim vote. Iqbal Sacranie the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain resides in that area. They have a mosque and a Muslim centre there. They campaigned heavily for him to get in. We had the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Justice Secretary there – everybody went there to give him support and he won. Here the swing was only 3.6% towards the Tories. It wasn’t the 5% they expected. If it was 5% he would have been out.
In Burry In Burry Maureen Convey was expected to win because it was a Labour seat but she lost to the Conservatives because the person she was succeeding was barred from standing as he was being prosecuted for the expenses scandal. So because of that she lost. Otherwise she would have been the fourth Muslim woman to win in the elections for the Labour Party.
The most exciting one as in Bethnal Green in Bow. As we saw in 2005 because of the war we had the new Respect Party which unfortunately was there because of one main issue, the war on Iraq. At that time Oona King made a huge mistake when she was asked by the Muslims about the war on Iraq she said if you don’t like the way I vote on Iraq just vote me out. And they did that in 2005. There was a big headline in the paper and I am sure it helped. Muslim News is the largest circulating paper in the area.
This time we had six Muslims who stood. Six from the main parties and they were all of Bengali origin. Galloway said that he would step down and allow other Muslims to stand. Oona King’s private secretary stood and the way the voters changed completely this time round. It was divisive because there were so many Muslims standing. Mansour stood. He is quite popular locally and nationally. He is heavily involved in inter-faith issues and he is broadcasting, the Islam channel and elsewhere. He is the one who took 10,000 votes away from the Respect Party. There was a 14 percent swing from Respect to Labour. There were also the Somalis who normally vote for Labour.
Galloway stood in Limehouse and Poplar. He came third. He did not have much support. Another member of the Respect Party Selma Yacoob another very popular person. Unfortunately for her second time round she lost even though she got 12,000 votes because of the boundary change she lost a section called Small Heath, 60% Muslim. There was very huge support for her. That area went and they had a kind of white area which is called Birmingham Hall Green. Because of that she lost those votes.
The Tories placed the Muslim candidates in traditional Conservative seats – white areas with hardly any ethnic minorities and they still won with an increased majority. I think this is very interesting to see. One was in central England Sajid Javid and the other one was Rahman Chisti. Sajid Javid got a four percent swing. Rahman Chisti got one of the highest swings: 9.2% from Labour to Conservative.
The votes for the Respect Party went down by 50% compared with 2005. It shows they have lost support. They only had 33,251 votes nationally. BNP got almost half a million votes.
One thing that Abdul Miyad managed to do before he lost the votes (he is still an councillor) is that in East London he voted to have an elected mayor. They had a referendum and the Respect Party got 39,000 votes out of 60,000. The Labour Party campaigned against an elected major but this got through. So that is a legacy that he left.
Two areas are very important in terms of lobbying: one is Harrow West and one is Butney and Stanley in West Yorkshire. In Harrow West which is where I come from we have an incumbent from the Labour Party. For the last two elections he has done almost nothing for us. Whatever we asked for on local or international issues he has not supported us. So Muslims got very angry. One of the unique things about Harrow West is the Muslim Forum of Middlesex founded in the year 2,000 to do hustings and lobbying in the area.
We interviewed both the MPs and candidates and in the hustings he came out very negatively. The person who came out very positive was the new Tory candidate called Rachael Joyce. One of the things the Tories did was to make this into a target seat. There was a boundary change and there was a 7 to 8thousand majority for Labour.
One of the mistakes that the Conservative Party made was that about a week before the elections
By the way Rachael has also Sri Lankans and Tamils in her constituency. The Tamils almost all vote 100 percent and they are Labour supporters. This time round they had negotiations with the Conservatives. The Sri Lankans said if you get the Muslim support that is fine as long as you don’t forget the Muslim Sri Lankans. The Tamils persecuted Muslims.
A week before the elections she put out a statement that the Sri Lankan government committed genocide against Tamils which was not the case. This is what the Tamils wanted her to support. The Sri Lankan Muslims were very upset. They said the Tamils ethnically cleansed north-east Sri Lanka of Muslims when they took over that area. Until today we have thousands of refugees from that area. They said we told her, we had a special meeting with her. This is what the Tamils did to Muslims. The Tamil government in the last attack did not cleanse them. They allowed tens of thousands of Tamils to leave the area as they were fighting against the Tamil Tigers. She did not budge. We told her you have 2500 votes from the Tamils. The Muslim votes are more than that. Because of that she lost. There was going to be a kind of encouragement for the Muslims to vote for her. People from the Muslim community voted for her and Gareth Thomas won with almost 50 percent of the majority cut down to just over 3,000 and the swing was 5.1% from labour to conservative. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown came to the area.
In West Yorkshire the Muslims tended to vote for the Conservatives and then they moved to Labour. This is a Gurajati community from India. It is important to see how Muslims lobby and Muslim News was involved in this. In 1992 the Tory Party refused to give Muslim schools funding. And in that area the Tories refused to fund the oldest Muslim women’s secondary school Zakaira School. The Conservative candidate Elizabeth Peacock said we will support you this time round.
It was a marginal seat so Labour wanted to target it. They sent Glenis Kinnock to Zakaria School and she took pictures with the young Muslim girls. So we gave them almost half a page. And Elizabeth she panicked. She went to almost every Muslim home. She got in. However nothing transpired. In 1997 a similar thing happened. She took the governors of that school to the Department of Education and said you will be funded, don’t worry.
We were following what the Tory Party was doing and in March they gave three Jewish schools funding and they refused two Muslim schools, Islamia and Zakaria funding. We reported that. The Tory party sent the Secretary of State, Gillian Shepherd at that time to Zakaria School to get support. And then Mike Wood of the Labour Party took these governors and some of the Muslim leaders to the then Shadow Education Secretary David Blunket and this time round Muslims voted for Mike Wood. He has been winning because he has been anti-war. This time round he had a reduced majority because of the new boundary changes.
Catherine Heseltine: MPACUK have worked relentlessly for 10 years to push politics to the top of the Muslim agenda – for the simple reason that we believe it is suicidal for our community to remain de-politicised and disempowered.
Muslims bear the brunt of an unjust foreign policy; in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the government’s support for Israel, and the policy of propping up tyrannical regimes in the Muslim world. Here in Britain we are on the receiving end of draconian anti-terror laws and the rise of Islamophobia and far-right politics. The fundamental freedom to practice our faith depends on politics – from the right to build mosques, the right to wear hijab or the right to buy halal meat. MPACUK understands the urgent priority of politicisation and our aim is to empower British Muslims through mainstream politics – to transform our community’s status, from a political football to a political force.
MPACUK’s strategy is to activate Muslim voters to become politically savvy floating voters who back those candidates who best represent their interest, and hold to account MPs who ignore their concerns. This may sound simple and obvious but it is light years away from the status quo – decades of unquestioning Muslim loyalty to the Labour party repaid with wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and shocking attacks on our civil liberties.
MPACUK are non-partisan on the national level – we oppose or support local candidates based on their views and track records. If you actually look at what individual MPs have done, it’s obvious there are huge differences between different candidates from the same party. For instance there are some Labour MPs like Jeremy Corbyn who voted against the Iraq war and who campaigns tirelessly for Palestine. And there were other Labour MPs like Andrew Dismore who backed the Iraq war, supported Israel and used every opportunity to attack Muslims.
We believe it is vital to look at the individual candidates rather than go with a blanket endorsement of any national party because we understand that it’s essential for Muslims to engage with all 3 main political parties. If we continue to put all our eggs in one basket as we have done for decades with traditional Muslim loyalty to the Labour party we are destined for disaster.
The parties have all pretty much ignored what Muslims think because Muslims always just blindly voted Labour – so Labour took our votes for granted and the other parties knew the Muslims were Labour voters, so they ignored us too and focused on people who might actually consider voting for them.
Contrast the Muslim community with the Zionists. Zionists have engaged with all 3 main parties – not only as voters but through joining and funding the parties. All 3 main parties therefore have strong Friends of Israel groups within them and Israel is the top foreign destination for MPs with Zionist groups funding and organising the tours. While Zionists work intelligently to ensure that whichever party is in power it will serve the interests of Israel, Muslims have worked loyally to serve the interests of the Labour party, demanding nothing in return for their support. While the Zionists’ strategy produces a ‘win-win’ situation, Muslims have fallen into a ‘lose-lose’ scenario.
However if Muslims ditch their blind loyalty to Labour and become intelligent floating voters, all the parties will start competing for the Muslim vote by aligning their policies more toward the concerns of Muslim voters. They will try to out bid each other with positive policies that can attract Muslim votes. The proof is not only the political success of the Zionists, or for example Cuban Americans – MPACUK also proved that this strategy works with the ground-breaking campaign that mobilised Muslim voters to kick out the pro-war, pro-Israel Labour MP in Rochdale last election. 5 years on in this election both the Labour and Lib Dem candidates in Rochdale were competing to show the Muslim voters how pro-Palestinian they are!
Our analysis would be worthless without the extraordinary efforts of the local MPACUK teams who transform this strategic understanding from theory into Action. This is serious work delivered by some amazingly dedicated volunteers – I was with the team in Watford when polls closed and our legs ached, our feet were sore and we were losing our voices – but we knew that insh’Allah we had left no stone unturned in getting the message to the Muslims.
Our first task was to research and identify our targets in this election – Zionist and Islamophobic MPs with a large number of Muslim voters and ideally a marginal seat. For example Andrew Dismore in Hendon, Terry Rooney in Bradford East, Clare Ward in Watford and Phil Woolas in Oldham East and Saddleworth. All these MPs voted for the Iraq war and the anti-terror laws, all are members of Labour Friends of Israel. They had used their influence to fuel Islamophobia, with Dismore using Parliamentary privilege to attack Muslim groups, Woolas making comments that led to headlines about ‘inbred Muslims’ and Ward backing Jack Straw’s notorious comments about niqab.
We also picked two campaigns in safe seats, designed to send out an unequivocal message to the political establishment. By targeting Mike Gapes MP (another leading Zionist and pro-war MP) we showed that we have the ability to follow through on previous campaigns – there is no respite for those who ignore their Muslim constituents. And by targeting Khalid Mahmood MP we sent out the message that we will not fall for the tokenistic politics that expects us to support any candidate with a brown face and a Muslim name, even when their track-record on the issues closest to us is as appalling as Mahmood’s.
Our local teams then campaigned to mobilise Muslim voters in these constituencies, to empower them to hold these MPs to account and back candidates who would better support their interests. We used every avenue available to reach as many Muslim voters as possible with our message:
– Working with Mosques to politicize their community – encouraging khutbahs and talks on the importance of voting intelligently, voter registration drives and hustings. We believe it is key that the mosques as the grass-roots institutions of our community fulfil the role which they played in the time of the prophet (pbuh); the role of educating the community and being a forum to discuss issues facing the Ummah and coordinate action to safeguard Muslims.
– Leafleting: distributing thousands of leaflets outside the mosques, and in shopping areas and community events
– Door to door canvassing
– Telephone canvassing
– Direct mail (where we could afford it)
– Media, including an Islam Channel advert
– Online – the MPACUK.org website (Britain’s biggest Muslim website), you tube, facebook, twitter, texts etc.
We faced many obstacles:
– Lack of resources (both volunteers and funding)
– Many mosques hostile to politics
– Die-hard blind loyalty to Labour, particularly in some mosque committees and the Pakistani ‘baradewi’ clan system.
– Fear of the Conservatives.
– Lack of political understanding leading to splitting the vote with Muslims wasting their votes on candidates who have no prospect of winning.
– ‘Visas and mosque parking places’: voting because of perceived favours from the MP or council.
– Postal vote fraud
– The ‘voting is haram’ brigade.
– Smear campaigns by the MPs we targeted
Despite all these obstacles Alhamdulillah MPACUK’s efforts decisively swung the vote to defeat 3 pro-war pro-Israel MPs, including a rising government minister. Terry Rooney was defeated by 365 votes, Claire Ward was pushed into 3rd place in Watford and in Hendon the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel was kicked out, losing by 106 votes. In Oldham our team decimated the majority of Immigration minister Phil Woolas leaving him surviving on a knife-edge with a margin of only 103 votes. These close fought battles leave no doubt that the efforts of MPACUK tipped the balance and for these anti-Muslim MPs made the difference between power and the dole-queue.
We directly mobilised voters to kick out 3 MPs – but the message this sends goes loud and clear to all 600 MPs and the entire political establishment. If someone wants a job and they know that a previous employee was sacked for ignoring the boss, they’d want to make sure they didn’t make the same mistake… And we’re the boss of our MPs – they work for us and we can sack them if we’re not happy with what they do. Once you’ve got rid of one MP the next one will know that their job depends on actually representing you well and supporting your causes.
Our victories this election against Zionist Islamophobic MPs also send out a powerful message to Muslims – Don’t let anyone tell us that Muslims have to be victims! We’ve proved for all the world to see that when Muslims get active then by the grace of Allah we can win successes. We have the beginning of a ripple effect that can deliver our community the transformation from a political football to a political force to be reckoned with.
Some commentators, including some Muslim intellectuals, throw up their hands in horror at this idea of a ‘Muslim vote’. My response is that our prophet (pbuh) was sent as ‘a mercy to humanity’. If Muslims vote intelligently on an ethical basis then that is not only good for the Ummah but also good for British democracy and for the cause of universal justice.
*Anthony Barnett Founder of OpenDemocracy and now edits its UK section, Our Kingdom. He has long campaigned for democratic reform. He was the first Director of Charter 88 from 1988 to 1995 and Co-Director of the convention on Modern Liberty in 2009. He has argued strongly for a hung parliament in the New Statesman and the Guardian.
**Ahmed J Versi is the publisher and editor of The Muslim News. Reaching over 140,000 people in the UK alone, it has the largest circulation of newspapers for Muslims in Britain. The Muslim News is the only minority publication to transcend conventional ‘ethnic’ boundaries. In March 2000, Ahmed took a proactive lead in raising the profile of Muslims with the launch of the first ever The Muslim News Awards for Excellence – an annual celebration of unsung Muslim achievement attended in recent years by eminent guests such as the Prince of Wales and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
*** Catherine Heseltine is a spokesperson for Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPAC UK) aiming to empower Muslims through mainstream politics and media, to fulfil their Islamic duty to strive for justice. MPACUK campaigns to mobilise Muslims to vote intelligently and their 2005 campaign, which helped unseat a pro-war pro-Israel MP, was shown in a ground-breaking Channel 4 documentary ‘Operation Muslim Vote’National Campaigns manager, MPAC UK
