International

The British Election, the War on Terror and the ‘Muslim vote’

For the first time, imperialism has been a key determining factor in a British election. Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’ and in particular the invasion of Iraq attracted massive opposition in Britain and was the major factor in reducing New Labour’s majority to a mere 67 seats, with many openly pro-war Blairite MPs losing previously secure seats.

The fact that Blair still returned to power - albeit with only 36% of the vote, an unprecedentedly low figure for a British party forming a government  – patently reflects the lack of an alternative. But the growing potential for a left alternative was indicated by the dramatic victory of the Respect Coalition’s candidate George Galloway in Bethnal Green and Bow defeating the vocally pro-war Blairite sitting MP, Oona King (see Box).

Left Victory in East London

In a dramatic result George Galloway (representing Respect, an anti-war coalition initiated by the Socialist Worker’s Party) was elected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow in London’s East End with a 26% swing against Labour. Respect also came second in two other East London constituencies and a close second in Birmingham Sparkbrook. Galloway called the Bethnal Green and Bow result “one of the most historic victories in British politics”. In a statement immediately after the election he noted:
“Not since 1945 has a party to the left of Labour in England won a seat in parliament. Then it was Phil Piratin, Communist hero of the Jewish East End. Today it is Respect standing in his old constituency. Sixty years ago Piratin’s victory came as Labour was cementing its hegemony over the British working class. Today it comes as New Labour is shredding those bonds, leaving in its wake the bitter tears of those it has taken for granted for far too long. The meaning of our victory is that those people can no longer be taken for granted.”

Clearly, New Labour is going to do its best to overturn the result, and, its own campaign of smears and dirty tricks (including ‘ghost voters’ and postal votes cast without the knowledge of their owners) having failed, is now itself alleging irregularities in the electoral register. The government has also predictably stepped up its vendetta against George Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 for his anti-war position, with Bush lending a helping hand.

The US Senate Investigations Committee headed by Norm Coleman, a Republican best known for his speech welcoming George Bush,  “God Bless America is a prayer, and I believe that George Bush is God’s answer to that prayer”, has been seeking to indict Kofi Annan as part of Bush’s ‘crusade’ against the UN, but almost as soon as the British election results were declared, announced its intention of reviving already thoroughly discredited allegations that Galloway profited from Iraq’s ‘oil for food’ programme.
But this too appears to have backfired, with Galloway flying to Washington to confront his accusers and deliver a public broadside against the war.

And on a national level, the potential and need for such an alternative was reflected in the fall in votes for all the mainstream parties and the low turnout – at 61% the second lowest since 1918, (the lowest was in 2001) despite the introduction of postal votes and the attendant opportunities for electoral fraud.

This also highlights the fact that the essentially two party system of British politics has now fully collapsed – since the mid 1990s, New Labour has systematically moved into the ideological ground previously occupied by the Conservatives – extending the Thatcherite project of liberalisation and privatisation in the economic arena, whipping up racism, especially against refugees, through the media, and, particularly since 9/11, clamping down on basic civil liberties. This has pushed the Conservatives to the outer fringes of right wing hate politics and much depleted their support from so-called ‘Middle England’ while a large section Labour’s traditional working-class base remains with the party, having to date nowhere else to go.

This also meant that the key issues on which the major parties campaigned were those of the right – competing to be the ‘toughest’ on immigration control and asylum, promising more police powers, stigmatising poverty through the criminalisation of ‘anti-social behaviour’ and ‘bad parenting’, and debating the rolling back of women’s rights to abortion.

The Myth of the ‘Muslim Vote’

In its eight years in power New Labour has systematically built the notion of ‘faith communities’, encouraging South Asian groups in particular to organise along religious lines, in the latest manifestation of the British divide-and-rule strategy of multicultualism. For Muslims this has meant that on the one hand funds have been directed towards religious functionaries who in turn have been promoted by the government as ‘community leaders’; on the other, all Muslims and all Muslim organisations, whatever their politics, are being branded as ‘fundamentalists’ and potential terrorists.

This contradiction was reflected during the elections too. Any organisation which encouraged Muslims to vote against pro-war candidates, from Respect to the tiny, resolutely non-political Muslim Parliamentary Affairs Committee, was demonised by New Labour politicians and the media as ‘sinister’, ‘externally funded’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ and anyone heeding this advice as ‘communal’. At the same time, mainstream parties and the media could be heard referring for the first time to the ‘Muslim vote’, assuming that Muslims would vote homogenously along faith lines.
The reality is of course more complex. While most South Asian Muslim communities are predominantly working class they have different histories in Britain and the extent of class organisation and resistance to racism has differed. For example in Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s constituency, Blackburn in the north of England , there is a large Gujarati Muslim community. Here the Mosques are heavily integrated into the corrupt Labour party machinery. A generation of leaders who have benefited from this remain dominant within the community and have regularly ‘delivered’ votes to the Labour Party. Despite this Jack Straw’s seat was far from secure in the wake of the attack on Iraq . Clearly, the last minute cancellation of Narendra Modi’s visit to the UK had as much to do with safeguarding the Foreign Secretary’s support from his Gujarati Muslim constituents as with any ‘security threat’ to the Butcher of Gujarat. (Though it also conveniently allowed the spectre of ‘Islamic terrorism’ to be raised once again).

In contrast to Blackburn where Straw retained his seat, in East London there is a large working class Bangladeshi community with a history, from the 1970s onwards, of organising against racist state policies and fascist violence. Politics here is shaped by new generations who have grown up in Britain . It was their experiences of unemployment, police harassment, and the surge of anti-Muslim racism since 9/11 as well as the community’s history of class struggle which provided the backdrop to the rejection of New Labour in favour of a left alternative.

The significance of voting patterns in South Asian communities during this election lies not in the emergence of a ‘Muslim vote’ (or for that matter a ‘Hindu vote’). It reflects rather that in this new era of imperialism, representatives of the oppressed and colonised are right here in the imperial heartland too, and are making their voices heard.

Much was made of the rise of the Liberal Democrat party which has long tried and failed to emerge as a genuine third force in British politics. Their gains this time around were largely due to the fact that they were the one mainstream party to have opposed the war in Iraq . Yet as a centrist party, they were, by definition, unable to provide a critique of New Labour which linked imperialism to the party’s neo-liberal domestic economic policies.  Instead the question of Iraq was reduced to a ‘moral’ rather than a political one in the mainstream debate, restricted to the question of Tony Blair’s lies to the British public over WMD and over the ‘illegality’ or otherwise of the war itself – a far cry from the unambiguous opposition reflected in slogans like ‘No Blood for Oil’ under which 2 million had marched in London on the eve of the war.
In fact the exclusive focus on Blair’s personal ‘honesty’ or lack of it (and the sincerity or otherwise of his belated ‘apology’ over WMDs) was symptomatic of the depoliticisation of public debate associated with globalisation, where all mainstream parties share a neo-liberal consensus and there is little to choose between actual policies. This went a step further – from honesty to ‘politeness’ as the criteria - as political pundits argued that voters might choose the Lib Dems because they hadn’t criticised rival parties as much as the other two parties! The voters were consumers in the market for a government and according to the commentators, it was all about ‘product placement’. On BBCs current affairs programme Newsnight, a panel of ex-advisers to the three main parties agreed that the success of any advertising campaign was ‘not how it makes you feel about the product but how it makes you feel about yourself’ and, apparently in all seriousness, drew a parallel with L’Oreal shampoo’s slogan, ‘Because I’m worth it…’. Meanwhile Tony Blair in pursuit of a ‘historic’ third term took election campaigning to a historic new low (in the process revealing much about 21st century British patriarchy) when in a joint interview with wife Cherie for Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun, he boasted of being a ‘five times a night man’.

Yet despite the ‘depoliticised’ and trivialised construction of the election in the media, the results show that people voted on the real questions which affect their lives. New Labour’s attempts to brand the 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq as an isolated ethical dilemma  which only the elite ‘chattering classes’ had time for,  as working class people were too busy enjoying the ‘strong’ economy and worrying about  a return to the economic ravages of Conservative rule, was both racist and deeply patronising. It also clearly failed, as many in working class constituencies  made the connections between Blair’s  imperialist warmongering and his extension of Thatcherite policies at home during the last eight years: the dismantling of public services via Chancellor Gordon Brown’s Private Finance Initiative,  massive job losses (such as those from the closure of car manufacturer Rover’s Longbridge plant on the eve of the elections), the erosion of fundamental civil liberties and of the right to asylum. They voted in large numbers against Blairite sitting MPs, resulting in a swing to the Lib Dems and independent, often anti-war candidates.

As Blair begins his third term he is already pushing through promised authoritarian legislation on compulsory ID cards, while preparing the ground for a possible attack on Iran later this year (observers have suggested that the planned timing of this latest Bush-Blair offensive was a key reason for getting the British elections ‘out of the way’ early).  But Blair’s majority has been weakened not only numerically but because it is now composed of a greater proportion of left-wing Labour MPs, since many loyal Blairites were electoral casualties. It remains to be seen whether this time around, these ‘rebel’ MPs will be able to resist Blair’s warmongering effectively and, on a broader level, whether the British left’s disastrously prolonged illusions about transforming the Labour Party from within will finally be permanently abandoned to build a genuine and united left alternative.

– Kalpana Wilson