Labour's new Red Wall? Can the party recover from a decline in trust from Muslim voters?

By Deputy Political Editor Anushka Asthana and Westminster Producer Elisa Menendez

Jess Phillips was sitting with her team in the Labour Party office on Yardley Road in Birmingham discussing the new shape of her constituency, including the proportion of Muslim voters increasing from 25 to almost 40%.

In theory the boundary changes had doubled her ‘notional’ Labour majority from 10,000 to 20,000. But Phillips, like many other Labour candidates in seats with similar demographics, is facing another challenge.

While Labour majorities are looking likely to increase dramatically in many constituencies across the country, in some of the party’s safest seats, there is a worry that they will be squeezed to a sliver (or even overturned).

Labour has taken a serious hit when it comes to the trust of Muslim voters, in a story that is far more complicated and nuanced than often reported.

While it is true that Keir Starmer’s early response to the war in Gaza has turbo-boosted the disillusionment many Muslim voters feel about Labour, this is a shift in sentiment that far long pre-dates October 7, 2023 and in which we found the cost of living as likely to be raised as the Middle East.

There are some who see this as a new ‘Red Wall’ for Labour.

After all, while trend is unlikely to sway the overall outcome of next week’s national vote, it once again represents a loss of trust among a group of voters long considered part of Labour’s base - like white working class voters in the north and Midlands before them, and Scottish voters before that.

Sources say that alongside the group of seats marked down as ‘core battleground’ in this election, Labour HQ has identified around a dozen where the party is worrying about the result because of the backlash to the messaging around it's Gaza policy, which is now to call for an immediate ceasefire.

There is no question that for many of these voters foreign policy plays a big part in how they feel about Labour. But Phillips is clear - and we see plenty of evidence of this - that there are plenty of other domestic issues just as pressing.

'Like everybody else, most people's most pressing concern is the things they can see out of their window'

"The absolute truth is that the Muslim community, just like every other part of my constituency, every other community that I represent, they care about the country that they live in," says Phillips.

"They care about the NHS and they care about their streets and their neighbourhoods... Just like everybody else, most people's most pressing concern is the things they can see out of their window."

She's worried about the way Muslim communities have been depicted this election and previously.

"I have seen their genuine upset and grievance be exploited by actors to make out like all Muslims are the same, that all Muslims feel the same way about things, that they're angry and aggressive," she said. "And I've found it horrendous actually - to make out like they only care about one thing or that they are all the same."

Phillips argued that these hard working, lower income voters in urban areas had been some of the worst hit by austerity. She said that although the party could argue that it was down to Tory policies, the communities saw that they had voted Labour nationally and locally for years without enough improvement.

'It's understandable when people say I vote Labour and it hasn't done anything to serve me - regardless of the fact we've had a Conservative government - that is bound to set in'

She said rebuilding trust is the "single most important thing" the party needs to work on after the election and if Labour win - as many polls suggest they could - they mustn't "just rest on the laurels".

She said she was suspicious of opinion polls suggesting a huge Labour majority, but said that if the party does go into government next week it "is going to have to rule with consensus and make sure that in heartland places like this one that we don't ignore what happened because, do you know what, we ignored it when it happened in Scotland.

"I'm not sure we quite understood what was happening in the Red Wall and there are many, many frontiers. It isn't about pandering to particular views - it is about serving the people of our country and making sure they feel served by you. So that is going to be vitally important.

"And I think that there were a few canaries in the mine that potentially have been missed over the years."

Phillips is not the only one facing a tough fight from independents focused on Labour’s Middle East policy. Next door, the shadow justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is being challenged by Akhmed Wakoob - whose almost 70,000 votes in the West Midlands mayoralty almost stopped Labour from beating the Tory, Andy Street.

The same trend features in other Birmingham seats, in Tower Hamlets in London, Oldham, Burnley and in Rochdale, where George Galloway won a recent by-election for the Worker’s Party of Britain.

We travelled to other Birmingham seats to speak to voters and found a more complicated story where there was a backlash over Gaza, but where questions about policies to tackle poverty were as likely to be raised.

These are seats where the party leaders’ tour will not stop, because Starmer’s presence is unlikely to help. The Labour leader infuriated Muslim voters (and many others on the left) with an LBC interview in the weeks after the horrific October 7 Hamas attack, in which he appeared to back Israel’s right to withhold water and food from families in Gaza. Despite a massive shift in Labour’s position to support an immediate ceasefire and recognise a Palestinian state (as part of a peace process), those initial comments continue to haunt the party.

Nila Iqbal, who will be voting in a different constituency to Phillips but where there is a similar trend, told us she was so excited to vote for Labour that she would volunteer to help the party.

"Labour has done a lot for the economy in the past," she says. "They made a lot of positive changes such as launching Universal Credit and in a lot of areas in terms of regeneration in the past. There have been changes."

But Iqbal admitted that for friends there had been a loss of trust, over Gaza but also domestic issues like anti-poverty policies.

'Labour need to look at the crux of the issue being the cost of living crisis'

Then she took her phone out of her pocket and showed us two viral videos she had just received. One was a clip of Starmer from a recent Sun Newspaper debate in which he spoke about his determination to return people who arrived illegally by boat to their country of origin. Starmer then gives the example of Bangladesh.

The original clip in itself has caused offence in the Bangladeshi community. But the one Iqbal had been sent had been edited to imply that Starmer was going further and suggesting British Bangladeshis should be deported. Moreover, she had been sent a second video of an independent candidate standing against Labour in London claiming Starmer had suggested Bangladeshis had largely come illegally.

Labour say the editing distorts the clip and is misleading. There are claims it was created by political opponents. But watching it played back to us on this Birmingham street it was immediately clear how much cut-through it had quickly achieved.

This dissemination of media (including at times fake news) via WhatsApp, or over TikTok, is being used in a powerful way against Labour. And at a time when senior sources in the party admitted to us that trust is rock bottom.

In this case, Starmer’s initial comments were controversial in themselves, but not nearly as bad as later presented. (Following the backlash, Starmer said he "wasn't intending to cause any concern or offence" and "values the incredible contribution" of British Bangladeshis.)

As for the domestic issues, Iqbal talked about people’s struggles to pay for childcare or get enough via universal credit. She also said there was a desire among Muslim friends (many politically on the left) to see the two child benefit cap lifted.

That policy was also raised by Parwez Hussain, who works to support Muslim charities. He told us that he had previously voted for Labour, the Conservative Party, Greens, Independents, had once been a ‘card-carrying Lib Dem’ but had voted for UKIP because he wanted to leave the EU.

He argued that his time round he would back the Greens or an Independent because he felt that Starmer’s past as a human rights lawyer should have led him to a different conclusion about Gaza.

'Keir is knighted because of his legal background, the CPS and his human rights knowledge... he is somebody I'd expect to say this is my stance on issues like this'

"It goes down to competence," Hussain says. "If he's unable to articulate whether something is a war crime or something is genocide, and if he's shy about getting in those conversations - when I really can't think of who has more knowledge in that area than anybody else - he is somebody I'd expect to say this is my stance, this is my standard... on issues like this."

He questions: "At his core what are his values? You are there not just as a prime minister, you have a background and your background's in human rights. Your background is what is right and wrong."

But he also argued that for many Muslims it was about other issues too, suggesting that the party had moved away from some of the leftwing policies he wanted to support.

Hussain adds: "It's not just about Gaza, it's about domestic issues - but Gaza is like a trigger."

Full list of candidates standing in Birmingham Yardley in alphabetical order:

• Yvonne Beverley Clements, Conservative Party

• Roxanne Green, Green Party

• Roger Harmer, Liberal Democrats

• Nora Kamberi, Reform UK

• Jody McIntyre, Workers Party of Britain

• Jess Phillips, Labour Party

Full list of candidates standing in Birmingham Ladywood in alphabetical order:

• Zoe Challenor, Green Party

• Lee Dargue, Liberal Democrats

• Shabana Mahmood, Labour Party

• Shazna Muzammil, Conservative Party

• Akhmed Yakoob, Independent

• Irene Yoong-Henery, Reform UK

Have you heard our new podcast Talking Politics? Every day in the run-up to the election Tom, Robert and Anushka dig into the biggest issues dominating the political agenda…