As Gaza crisis festers, British Muslims unhappy with govt could align with far left

Britain faces spectre of race politics with potential rise of new political movement

- Jonathan Eyal

LONDON - British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is barely one year in office and his popularity is sinking fast.

But what Mr Starmer and his ruling centre-left Labour Party now fear most is the emergence of race politics in the shape of the potential rise of a new far-left political movement which will attract the support of Britain's sizeable Muslim community.

The proposed new party is unlikely to be formally Muslim, let alone overtly Islamic in its ideology. But opinion polls indicate that it will count on strong backing from British Muslims, and this factor alone may herald the rise of dangerous sectarian arguments in the country.

There are currently around four million Muslims in the United Kingdom. Due to the mass migration Britain experienced over the past few decades, the number of Muslims is rising fast. They accounted for less than 2 per cent of Britain's population in 1990, but now make up 6 per cent of the nation.

This unusually rapid rise — numbers are up by around 40 per cent since 2011 — means that a good part of Britain's Muslim community are first-generation migrants and therefore both less likely to be fully integrated and statistically more prone to consider their faith as their defining characteristic.

But the more significant factor is that the overwhelming majority of the country's Muslims live in urban areas, so their impact on elections is often magnified because Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system — as it is in Singapore — rewards those who can concentrate their support in key areas.

According to the latest electoral surveys, British Muslims account for a large share of the electorate in at least 50 out of the country's 650 constituencies, and probably can determine the elections in a further 20.