Operation Muslim Vote

In 2002, I wrote an article entitled "British Islamophobia post the 11 September", for the Palestinian Times Monthly. As I opined in the article, Muslims cannot trust or rely on the Labour party, which despite relying more on the Muslim vote than Jewish vote to get reelected, determined, sub rosa, in 1997, to pursue a Zionist foreign policy agenda. This incidentally is rarely talked about, although it constituted a sea change in the foreign policy agenda when the Blairite regime took control of the Labour party. However since the 11 September 2001, the Blairite regime has moved from being at odds with the Muslim community over the Middle East to supporting, what is existentially an anti-Islamic foreign policy agenda or Crusade.

Notwithstanding, the events of the 11 September, New Labour were supporting this policy the Blairite regime were supporting this policy before that date and had adopted an anti-Muslim immigration and asylum policy, and effective sought to take control of Muslim politics by establishing the Muslim Council of Britain as a front organisation and shutting out the now defunct Muslim Parliament, which ceased to exist in 1998. The Muslims Council of Britain is an unelected and unrepresentative body. Despite its protestations of being non-partisan, the MCB is to all intents and purposes a subsidiary of the Labour party.

However, not only has the Labour party shown an abject hostility towards Britain's Muslim community whom it has pointedly disenfranchised. Until Hizbullah and Hamas were effectively banned in the UK as proscribed organisations, they enjoyed considerable funding and support from the British Muslim community. In fact, Hizbullah is by far the most popular Muslim political movement in Europe. Hizbullah and Hamas, despite being legitimate political parties of government in Lebanon and Palestine respectively, with considerable UK support were prevented from running in 2005 election and local elections.

The problem for Muslims is achieving proportional and political polarity, social justice and legal equality. The kernel of the issue is that the largest non-Christian minority, is also the most persecuted religious minority and the least proportionally represented and the least protected in law. As none of the main three parties have shown an iota of interest in addressing any of the issues and discrimination facing Muslims, it would be forlorn to support any of them.

This strategy forwarded in this article was incremental in the May 2005 General Election, which saw the MAB and MPAC actively encouraging tactical voting, along with numerous Mosques and local Muslim groups. The tactic was only marginally successful; Labour candidates were defeated by Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and obviously Respect but there has not yet been a true political emancipation of British Muslims. However, there is hope; notwithstanding the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the British state.