An ex-Gitmo hostage writes

[Haji 2003]

Some of the contradictions that he sees

the Tweet following it is pretty good too

[Northwest]

@Haji 2003 On the other hand, why have Muslim immigrants—at least in the U.K.—as a bloc voted for the (liberal-leftist) parties that have played a role in the things Begg decries? Obviously many of the trends above began before postwar mass migration commenced, but new arrivals often had a stake in voting for the interests that helped bring about a relaxation of social mores earlier on. More recently Labour et al. have been involved in social liberalism, including pro-feminist, -abortion, -euthanasia, and -LBGTQ+I activism. Despite this, many British Muslims have proven reliable electorally. Also, wouldn’t some Islamists be happy that secularism has over time eliminated their Christian rivals?

[Haji 2003]

 

8 hours ago, Northwest said:

On the other hand, why have Muslim immigrants—at least in the U.K.—as a bloc voted for the (liberal-leftist) parties that have played a role in the things Begg decries?

Many of the issues that you refer to e.g. abortion were never on the Muslim radar, there was no direct impact.

Even with LGBTQ+ it's only recently that they have broadened their scope to include proselytising in schools in a manner that has a direct impact on Muslims. And even then, you can tell your kid to ignore those messages while appreciating the inclusiveness of Labour towards Muslims

In contrast, Muslims cannot avoid the anti-immigration policies of the Conservatives and their lack of support for working-class interests - many Muslims specially in the Midlands are in that demographic.

At a time when the West needed Muslim support I remember reading (as a teenager) articles in the Reader's Digest (UK edition) about how Muslims had a natural affinity for right wing parties (Conservatives in the UK). That may well be true in theory - but as I point out above it ignored direct vs. indirect impacts.

 

8 hours ago, Northwest said:

Also, wouldn’t some Islamists be happy that secularism has over time eliminated their Christian rivals?

I've never heard this opinion voiced by a Muslim.

 

 

[Northwest]

1 hour ago, Haji 2003 said:

Many of the issues that you refer to e.g. abortion were never on the Muslim radar, there was no direct impact.

Even with LGBTQ+ it's only recently that they have broadened their scope to include proselytising in schools in a manner that has a direct impact on Muslims. And even then, you can tell your kid to ignore those messages while appreciating the inclusiveness of Labour towards Muslims.

@Haji 2003 In what sense has there been ‘no direct impact’, given that these policies strongly influence society over time? Even if there were no immediate implications, wouldn’t problems metastasise over time?

1 hour ago, Haji 2003 said:

In contrast, Muslims cannot avoid the anti-immigration policies of the Conservatives and their lack of support for working-class interests - many Muslims specially in the Midlands are in that demographic.

At a time when the West needed Muslim support I remember reading (as a teenager) articles in the Reader's Digest (UK edition) about how Muslims had a natural affinity for right wing parties (Conservatives in the UK). That may well be true in theory - but as I point out above it ignored direct vs. indirect impacts.

I've never heard this opinion voiced by a Muslim.

^ Can you name specific ways in which the Tories failed to address working-class Muslim interests, besides immigration? Also, wouldn’t the better-educated ‘bourgeois’ Muslim elements be more sympathetic to the British right?

[Haji 2003]

7 minutes ago, Northwest said:

In what sense has there been ‘no direct impact’, given that these policies strongly influence society over time? Even if there were no immediate implications, wouldn’t problems metastasise over time?

Precisely. When people vote they consider the impact on them right now, in a year, two years etc. They don't consider what might happen in 10 years.

 

8 minutes ago, Northwest said:

^ Can you name specific ways in which the Tories failed to address working-class Muslim interests, besides immigration? Also, wouldn’t the better-educated ‘bourgeois’ Muslim elements be more sympathetic to the British right?

Had to rope in ChatGPT for a full answer.

 

Below are the main policy areas that scholars identify as having systematically pulled British-Muslim voters toward the Labour Party. Each point is backed by peer-reviewed research published in leading Routledge, Taylor & Francis or Elsevier journals (as requested).

Policy domain	What Labour actually did	Why it mattered to Muslim voters	Key academic sources
1. Equality & anti-discrimination law (1997-2010)	• Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 raised a public-sector duty to promote race equality. • Employment Equality (Religion/Belief) Regs 2003 made anti-Muslim bias at work justiciable. • Racial & Religious Hatred Act 2006 criminalised incitement of religious hatred. • Equality Act 2010 unified protections and named religion as a “protected characteristic.”	Put Islamophobia on the same legal footing as racism, giving Muslim organisations clear enforcement routes and signalling that Labour took their security seriously.	tandfonline.comtandfonline.com
2. State funding for Muslim faith schools (from 1998)	Labour opened the voluntary-aided route to non-Christian schools and approved the first state-funded Muslim schools.	Powerful “recognition” effect: Islam was acknowledged as part of Britain’s educational mainstream, boosting identification with Labour.	tandfonline.comtandfonline.com
3. Redistributive welfare & urban-regeneration programmes	• National Minimum Wage (1998) • Working/Child Tax Credits (2003) • Sure Start & Neighbourhood Renewal funding concentrated in deprived inner-city wards	British Muslims are disproportionately young, urban and low-to-middle income; they directlygained from these cash-transfer and early-years schemes and therefore rewarded the party that created them.	tandfonline.comen.wikipedia.org
4. Proactive candidate-selection rules	Ethnic-minority and all-women shortlists (late-1990s reforms) sharply increased Muslim candidacies; by 2024, 18 of the 24 Muslim MPs were Labour.	Visible descriptive representation fosters trust (“people like me can get elected”) and strengthens partisan attachment.	tandfonline.com
5. Foreign-policy framing around justice in the Muslim world	Consistent manifesto language supporting a Palestinian state; high-profile MPs leading anti-war and anti-Islamophobia caucuses.	Surveys show solidarity with Palestine and opposition to the war on terror are independent predictors of a Labour vote among Muslims.	sciencedirect.com
— Evidence of payoff —	BES, Ethnic Minority British Election Studies and constituency returns show 70-85 % Muslim support for Labour through 2001-2019, tapering only when foreign-policy credibility wavered (Iraq 2003; Gaza 2024).		tandfonline.comtandfonline.comelectionanalysis.uk

How the pieces fit together

• Material incentives (welfare & wages) reduce economic precarity.

• Relational incentives (equality law, faith-school funding) confer civic respect.

• Expressive incentives (Muslim MPs, pro-Palestine stance) let voters see their values voiced.

Political scientists describe the result as a “linked-fate heuristic”: many British Muslims came to feel that when Labour advances, they advance. The 2024 Gaza backlash—when the party lost five Muslim-plurality seats to independents—does not negate this pattern; it underscores that the same policy levers (especially foreign policy credibility and anti-Islamophobia enforcement) remain decisive for retaining Muslim support.

 

Thought for 1m 52s

Below is a concise “mirror-image” of the earlier Labour table, listing the main Conservative-era measures that political scientists treat as deliberate bids for British-Muslim goodwill. The academic evidence comes largely from Routledge/Taylor & Francis titles (with a few Elsevier and OUP pieces where relevant).

Policy domain (year first launched)	What Conservative-led governments actually did	Why strategists thought it would resonate with Muslim voters	Key peer-reviewed sources
1. Faith-school pathway extended (from 2010)	The Free Schools legislation let Islamic trusts open state-funded schools outside local-authority control; by 2025 the number of state-funded Muslim schools had risen from 12 to 30, two-thirds of them Free Schools.	Signalled parity of esteem with Anglican/Catholic providers and answered pent-up Muslim parental demand for religious ethos schooling.	Breen, Race Ethnicity & Education 19(4): “Critical Race Theory, policy rhetoric and outcomes: the case of Muslim schools in Britain” open-access.bcu.ac.uk
2. “Action Against Hate” package + mosque-security grants (2016 →)	a) Cross-government Hate-Crime Action Plan promising disaggregated data, tougher prosecutions and youth-education work; b) Places of Worship Protective Security Fund (from 2016, expanded 2023) covering CCTV, alarms and guards for mosques.	Aimed to demonstrate the party was tackling Islamophobic violence—an issue repeatedly ranked a top-three concern in EM&BES Muslim subsamples.	Mason et al., Policing & Society26(6) on policing hate crime researchgate.net; Home Office, Action Against Hate White Paper assets.publishing.service.gov.uk; scheme details gov.uk
3. Cross-government Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group (2012 →)	Standing advisory body of Muslim academics/NGOs that feeds directly into Home Office policy and media responses; commissioned Tell MAMA start-up funding and annual Islamophobia statistics.	Sought to open a formal channel of influence and reassure opinion leaders inside the ummah that the party was “listening”.	Alizai, Journal of Hate Studies19(1) 2023 on the AMHWG model researchgate.net
4. Race Disparity Audit & “explain-or-change” pledge (2017)	Theresa May ordered every department to publish outcomes by ethnicity and faith on the Ethnicity-Facts-and-Figures website, promising reforms where gaps persisted.	Offered reputational credit for transparency and framed the party as evidence--led on discrimination.	Smith, “The doublespeak discourse of the Race Disparity Audit,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education44(1) 2023 tandfonline.com
5. Candidate-diversity drives (2005 →)	David Cameron’s “A-list” and open primaries boosted the number of Muslim Conservative candidates; by 2024 five Muslim Tory MPs and the first Muslim cabinet minister (Baroness Warsi) had been appointed.	Descriptive representation intended to soften the party’s image and prove that upward mobility inside the Conservatives was possible for Muslims.	Dancygier & Ismail, “High rejection, low selection: how ‘punitive parties’ shape ethnic representation,” Party Politics27(3) 2021 journals.sagepub.com

How much electoral traction did these moves generate?

British Election Study data show that Muslim Conservative vote-share crept from ~9 % in 2001 to around 15 % in both the 2015 and 2019 contests, before sliding again amid the Gaza-2024 backlash. Scholars argue that:

• Material incentives (faith-school access, security grants) improved everyday welfare for mosque-going families.

• Relational incentives (AMHWG, Race Audit) offered symbolic recognition that Islamophobia is real.

• Expressive incentives (visible Muslim Tory elites) tried to re-brand the party as pluralist.

But two head-winds repeatedly blunt the impact:

1. Prevent/counter-extremism framing—widely perceived by Muslim civil-society actors as securitising rather than supporting communities, offsetting goodwill generated elsewhere. journals.sagepub.com

2. Foreign-policy credibility gaps—especially over Gaza and Islamophobia rows inside the party, which Muslim poll respondents rank ahead of school or welfare issues when deciding between Labour, smaller parties and independents.

Bottom line

Yes—there is a coherent (if thinner than Labour’s) Conservative policy bundle aimed at Muslim voters. The peer-reviewed literature finds small but measurable voting gains when these outreach efforts are salient, and equally sharp reversals when they are overshadowed by security or foreign-policy controversies.

[Northwest]

4 hours ago, Haji 2003 said:

Precisely. When people vote they consider the impact on them right now, in a year, two years etc. They don't consider what might happen in 10 years.

@Haji 2003 In the U.S. the number of single-parent families increased significantly in less than a decade following the Great Society, so social policy arguably can reconfigure social structures in shorter order than you suggest. In your view, how, if at all, have welfare measures such as the minimum wage and Sure Start impacted the cohesion or structure of Muslim families, fertility rates, and so on? (I will further add that Islamic law provides for market-based rather than state-set wages and does not seem to endorse the kinds of far-ranging welfare programmes that the modern state has implemented; zakat seems to be more narrowly targeted.)

4 hours ago, Haji 2003 said:

Bottom line

Yes—there is a coherent (if thinner than Labour’s) Conservative policy bundle aimed at Muslim voters. The peer-reviewed literature finds small but measurable voting gains when these outreach efforts are salient, and equally sharp reversals when they are overshadowed by security or foreign-policy controversies.

Would you concede that Muslim ethnicities, by siding with ‘progressive’ secularist parties, might be engaging in some of the same tactics—for better or worse—as other minorities (i.e., Jews) over the years, using multiculturalism as a cover for ethnic nationalism, as the conflation of faith and race implies? (In the past British Jews undermined the old Tory order by siding with the forces of liberalism, allowing upward mobility that had been barred Jewish communities in Britain for centuries.) Would supporting a more expansive and inclusive welfare-state help Muslims integrate more than it might introduce complications that could undermine their communities?

Edited June 15 by Northwest

[Haji 2003]

16 minutes ago, Northwest said:

In the U.S. the number of single-parent families increased significantly in less than a decade following the Great Society, so social policy arguably can reconfigure social structures in shorter order than you suggest. In your view, how, if at all, have welfare measures such as the minimum wage and Sure Start impacted the cohesion or structure of Muslim families, fertility rates, and so on?

 

The discussion has been about the motivations of ordinary Muslims to vote the way that they do. The answer is that they focus on short-term economic interests (like most people) and in their specific instance policies designed to address the disadvantages they face.

Unlike, say the Hindu minority in the UK, many Muslims have come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Someone who is in a low-skill job will be motivated by the minimum wage.

 

To be honest, no Muslim that I know will, consider this:

20 minutes ago, Northwest said:

(I will further add that Islamic law provides for market-based rather than state-set wages and does not seem to endorse the kinds of far-ranging welfare programmes that the modern state has implemented; zakat seems to be more narrowly targeted.)

 

21 minutes ago, Northwest said:

Would you concede that Muslim ethnicities, by siding with ‘progressive’ secularist parties, might be engaging in some of the same tactics—for better or worse—as other minorities (i.e., Jews) over the years, using multiculturalism as a cover for ethnic nationalism, as the conflation of faith and race implies?

Again I think you are projecting a level of analysis on the part of the average person, that may not really exist. I think the ordinary Muslim's voting behaviour is more likely to be driven by the last Islamophobic comment made by a Tory. This is not something that Hindus, Jews or any other religious group need to worry about.

[Haji 2003]

13 minutes ago, Haji 2003 said:

Unlike, say the Hindu minority in the UK, many Muslims have come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This blog post examines one aspect of the economic background of predominantly Hindu Gujarati people migrating from East Africa: