Britain’s Parliament Will Soon Have an Islamist Party

Gaza independents to join with Corbyn’s socialist breakaway from Labour

Zarah Sultana has proudly proclaimed, “We are all Palestine Action” — something that could now get her imprisoned if stated outside the chamber of the Commons. She was elected last year as a member of the Labour Party. Photo: Jessica Taylor/House of Commons.

Is Britain about to be the first Western country to see an Islamist party have sizable parliamentary representation? It is looking increasingly likely.

What makes it more depressing for the UK to be the frontrunner for this particular stomach-churning phenomenon is that British elections, like those in the United States, are first-past-the-post. The proportional systems found in much of Europe and indeed Israel are much more conducive for small parties.

In the British general election a year ago, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a parliamentary landslide, albeit on a fairly low share of the vote (33.7 percent of those who voted, 20.2 percent of those eligible to vote). But it did not all go Labour’s way. Four independent Islamic MPs running on “Gaza solidarity” platforms were elected for heavily Muslim, and previously safely Labour, constituencies. In addition Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left previous leader of Labour who had led the party to electoral disaster in 2019, won as an independent running against his old party in his genuinely multi-racial north London seat.

In terms of foreign policy, Corbyn ticks all the far-left boxes. He is virulently anti-American, has a soft spot for Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia (as anti-Imperialist, ie anti-U.S., powers) and thinks Iran is misunderstood. But he reserves his real passion for all things Palestinian. He is virulently anti-Zionist, and the best that can be said for him is that he has a tin ear when it comes to antisemitism. Before becoming Labour leader in 2015, Corbyn spoke of “our friends in Hezbollah… our friends in Hamas” and in Tunis took part in a wreath laying near the graves of the Black September terrorists. Inevitably, he would later claim both events were misinterpreted.

For the last year Corbyn has been toying with the idea of launching a new socialist party to the left of Labour, including himself and the four Gaza independents. The various factions of the British far left have long fantasized of breaking out of their sectarian grouplets and forging a mass socialist party. They have seen Britain’s burgeoning Muslim community, now making up around 6 percent of the UK’s population, as a route to turbocharging this aspiration. It is a marriage of convenience, but what unites them is anti-Zionism and hatred of the United States.

Over the last few weeks, events have speeded up. Here’s what’s happening:

Palestine Action are an Antifa-type group, made up both of white leftists and Muslim activists, which specialize in direct action stunts. They have broken into and did their best to smash up the UK facilities of Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense company. Other spectacles they have staged are the slashing of a portrait of Arthur Balfour at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and the kidnapping and beheading of a bust of Chaim Weizmann from the University of Manchester. (Weizmann taught at that university before becoming Israel’s president. The Palestine Action geniuses thought they had stolen two busts of Weizmann, but one of them turned out to be of Harold Dixon, a Manchester chemist who had nothing to do with Israel).

Last month Palestine Action activists broke into a Royal Air Force base and daubed two military planes with red paint. This does not say much for the security of UK military facilities, but it did stir Starmer’s government to action. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced that she would seek the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. This means that membership becomes a criminal offense, with a theoretical maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. Showing support by wearing a proscribed group’s insignia or waving their flag is also imprisonable.

Those organizations previously banned include the very worst: Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. They also include a smattering of Nazi cyber networks who largely seem to be there to prove that it is not Muslims who are being singled out. Whether the undoubtedly noxious activists of Palestine Action really deserve the same designation as the bona fide genocidal Islamist terrorists and murderers of Hamas or Islamic State is an open question. Successive UK governments have rejected requests to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

Some think that Starmer has come out so strongly against Palestine Action to give him cover for his government’s increasingly hostile attitude towards Israel. Next time he is criticized for, say, legitimizing the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Netanyahu or further tightening restrictions on arms exports to Israel, he can expound on his evenhandedness by highlighting the ban on Palestine Action.

On July 2, the House of Commons voted to proscribe Palestine Action. To make the vote more palatable for Labour’s vocal anti-Israel lobby, two hitherto beyond obscure groups — the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Legion — were bracketed in with them. Voting not to ban Palestine Action would also mean having to say the Maniac Murderers could continue about their business unmolested. 28 MPs, out of a total of 650, actively opposed the ban (others abstained). The 28 included the Islamists, Corbyn, nine Labour MPs and three — including Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum — elected as Labour last year but who had been suspended from the parliamentary party for consistently rebelling.

Zarah Sultana has proudly proclaimed, “We are all Palestine Action” — something that could now get her imprisoned if stated outside the chamber of the Commons. Sultana has repeatedly accused Starmer of complicity in genocide for his (in truth ever so hedged and limited) support for Israel. She announced not long after the vote that she was leaving Labour permanently to set up a new party with Corbyn.

When the party launches soon it will have Corbyn, Sultana, and almost certainly all four of the Gaza independents as members of Parliament. Few doubt the headscarf-wearing Begum, representing a very Muslim east London seat, will join. With seven MPs at the start, it could well win up to around 30 MPs from heavily Muslim constituencies at the next election. With Britain’s current demographics, that would be the roof of what it could hope to achieve.

The question is, will it recruit more than those seven MPs initially? Will it manage to lure non-Muslim MPs from the far-left of Labour? This will determine the character of the party. If it is only those seven who join, the whole appeal of the group will be to Muslim voters, not the wider left.

To me it seems unlikely that it will have much luck outside of those MPs representing heavily Muslim areas. The Gaza four have shown that independents can win in those areas. There is zero evidence that a far-left white MP representing, say, a constituency in Liverpool would have any chance of retaining their seat running against Labour.

If I am correct, the new party will soon much more heavily emphasize its Islamic roots than its socialist ones. The politics of political Islam will then have become a permanent feature of life in a European democracy.

Michael Mosbacher is Associate Comment Editor at London’s Daily Telegraph. He is a past editor of Standpoint and The Critic, having co-founded both British magazines.

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