‘There were other issues. Gaza being one, but there is a risk of pigeon holing the Islamic vote as being monofocussed, which plays into the hands of anti-Muslims’
Having spoken to a fair number of Muslim people in the neighbourhood, and even more at a recent Islamic culture event I took part in, I can assure you Gaza was the predominant factor. This is fact. I couldn’t care less what anti-Muslims are saying tbh, it’s pointless. People have protest voted for decades. That’s all it is and nothing wrong with it if that’s how people feel. Of course it’s not the only reason why a portion of Muslims voted that way, but I can only tell you what I heard and saw on the ground, beyond the work of social media, press and media.
Should also point out that this charge of ‘sectarian voting’ has come from both Labour and Reform. I wouldn’t expect anything less from Reform but it’s very poor from Labour, trying to demonise legitimate election campaigning tactics. They’re both just making lame excuses.
That may be the case; I was trying to be optimistic. The subject at hand has been highly polarised, is divisive, used as a means to attack communities on either side* and many Greens have leant into it, as seen with recent party motions and a deputy leader who was justifying Oct 7th straight away. Though, Labour have previously pitched campaigns to community concerns, so any criticism of that aspect is hypocritical. And now we have Reform leaning into “the Muslims rigged it” narratives. I am fairly despondent about the state of our politics and most parties (maybe not the Lib Dems so much, though I may be wrong) have played their part.
*Typically represented by Bill Maher and Mehdi Hasan this week. Maher calling a more left Democrat a ‘minister for Palestine’, which was called out as racism by Mehdi. Which was correct of him, but many were pointing out that Mehdi had done the same to others by calling them ministers for Israel. Both no doubt think accusations against them are ‘smears’, but the similar accusation against the other is true.
It’s disputed by council presiding officers who witnessed no instances of family voting. They’re not going to risk their jobs by not intervening if they witnessed those antics. Perhaps the volunteers were a bit card happy like some refs get?
I think it’s too early to say definitively and I don’t like the idea of volunteers who want to safeguard elections having motives unfairly questioned. I don’t think we can say the result of the by-election should be questioned, but we absolutely should take accusations of malpractice, like observed family voting, seriously and without ascribing motivations to them when there us no evidence of such. It was bad enough when the Tories hurled accusations of lefty lawyers with agendas, it would be bad here to do so against election observers, with no known ties to any party. It would be one way to sow discord and distrust in a system. And if we let standards slip, it opens doors to more accusations and them getting traction.
If anything went wrong with officials on the day, it wouldn’t necessarily be because of anything malign.
.
