The Iraq war was supposed to have poisoned Labour’s relations with British Muslims. Tony Blair’s apparently unqualified support for a bellicose Republican administration despised around the Muslim world was deeply unpalatable. Years of anti-terror legislation were judged by some to have stigmatised Muslims and fanned Islamophobic flames. The government’s attempt to outlaw religious hate speech was seem, by sceptics at least, as simply a desperate, ill-thought through peace offering with which they might woo disaffected Muslim supporters.
According to new Theos/ComRes research https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/Religious_vote_key_to_election_result_as_Labour_closes_in_on_Conservatives.aspx?ArticleID=3848&PageID=14&RefPageID=5, however, no wooing is necessary. If there were a General Election tomorrow, 35% of voting Muslims (meaning those Muslims who claim they are more likely than not to vote) would vote Labour. This compares with 22% of voting Christians and 23% of the entire voting population. By comparison, whereas 30% of the voting population would tick the Conservative box, only 13% of voting Muslims would do so.
Polling questions are liable to misinterpretation so the same question was tackled from different angles. The results concurred. Only one in twenty of those who call themselves Muslim say that they “generally” consider themselves to be Conservative compared, compared with 42% who consider themselves Labour (the national figures are 23% Conservative and 28% Labour). Similarly, 49% of Muslims claim they feel that the Labour party has been most friendly towards the Muslim faith over recent years, compared with 6% who think that the Conservatives have been.
The narrative appears to receive a dent when data show that a fifth of Muslims think Labour has been least friendly towards the Muslim faith over recent years. However, given that more Muslims (nearly a quarter) think the Conservatives have been the least friendly party, despite the fact they haven’t really been in a position to do anything, the dent appears illusory. In spite of everything, Labour appears to remain the natural home for British Muslims.
The reasons for this are not entirely clear. It is relatively easy to explain why so few Muslims intend to vote Conservative. The opposition supported the
There are good demographic and socio-economic reasons for that support. British Muslims are disproportionately younger and more urban. They come from lower income households and experience higher levels of unemployment. These factors traditionally edge voters to the left. Perhaps the Muslim vote is actually made up of cross-currents of wider and more powerful demographic and socio-economic trends.
If this were so, it would imply that much of what we think we have learnt about identity politics over the last two decades is questionable. If those Muslims who choose to vote, vote according to whether they are young, urban, poor or unemployed rather than because they are Muslim, it would mean that attempts to court the Muslim vote, or even engage with the Muslim community are misguided.
That might make psephologic sense but intuitively it seems wrong. The shift from ethnic to religious identity politics over the last two decades cannot have been one big mistake.
Another interpretation is that the data might simply be reminding us of the complexity of voting decisions. All of us are made up of multiple identities. Any one individual may be a parent, son, brother, shopper, homeowner, employee, and community activist, as well as a Christian, Muslim or atheist. Which combination of these identities decides the vote will vary from one person to another, but in the current economic climate we can be reasonably sure that shopper, homeowner and employee will be elevated at the expense of other identities.
Such an analysis would allow us to keep the idea of identity politics while also keeping it in its place. People do think and even vote as Muslims, Christians, or atheists, but they do so alongside the multitude of other identities that jostle, Legion-like, inside them. As each identity carries with it political agendas and hopes that may be in tension with others, how we vote may have something in common with how genes work: environment and circumstance turning on one identity while turning down others.
Alternatively, it may simply be a free for all, different identities competing and co-operating with one another to win the vote. Perhaps the messy compromise that is politics begins inside every one of us.
