THE overwhelming religious story over the weekend was the Muslim vote. The only Anglican churchman to attract any serious attention was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that for something he didn’t do. His wife’s decision not to take a test that might have revealed foetal abnormalities — which the Archbishop spoke about at the General Synod meeting in York — made the Telegraph and the Mail, among other places.
As the story was written, the lead was that Mrs Welby had felt that the assumption of the staff had been that, if anything showed up in the test, she would want an abortion, which she did not, although she would have felt pressured to do so. Her daughter, Ellie, now in her early thirties, was indeed born with a mild disability. What is odd about the story is that the disability in question — dyspraxia — would probably not have been caught by any tests offered in pregnancy: it is not usually possible to diagnose it before the age of five.
The wider point still stands, of course: there is a widespread assumption that it is better all round if disabled children are never born, and this is shared across the NHS, and was debated in the Synod. The other point of interest is the light that this story casts on the slow disintegration of the Welfare State. The argument offered to Mrs Welby was that disabled children required expensive care; there was no suggestion that the NHS could help with this.
THE Muslim vote had strange echoes of this discontent. At first sight, nothing could be more ludicrous than voting for an independent MP on the strength of their views about the Gaza war. The idea that a British MP could have any influence in a government that itself has no influence on the region makes no sense at all. But perhaps that is not why Muslims voted against Labour in the numbers that they did. Perhaps foreign policy here works like theology: it does not matter what your beliefs say about reality, but what they say to your neighbours about you.
The Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik wrote as if this really were a vote about foreign policy: “There has been a persistent tendency to treat frustrations about Gaza as crude, separatist and confined to a small but vocal minority. Despite poll after poll indicating that the [majority] of the public supports a ceasefire, politicians — in particular the leadership of the Labour party — continued to ignore the issue. As a result, four candidates campaigning centrally on Gaza took four seats, one of them Leicester South: thereby deposing Jonathan Ashworth, the erstwhile shadow paymaster general.”
But the question is not whether a majority of the public would prefer a ceasefire in Gaza to the present slaughter (as I would myself). It’s whether this is a question that they feel a British General Election could decide.
Jake Wallis Simons, writing from the Right in the Telegraph, was just as sure as Ms Malik (and, for that matter, Jeremy Corbyn) that this was all about Gaza: “An insurgent force has entered British politics. The Muslim Vote had no rosette and advanced no meaningful manifesto beyond a set of deeply sectarian principles. It stood candidates tactically, and owed their allegiances purely to religious and ethnic interests.
“It had a single set of demands, all related to Gaza. . . Across the country, Sir Keir’s party was enjoying a famous victory, but a powerful counter-current flowed from a single cause, rooted in a single demographic group. In constituencies where in the 2021 census at least 40 per cent of people described their religion as Muslim, the Labour vote share suffered an average drop of 33.9 percentage-points.”
THAT looks clear enough. But the pollster and policy wonk Luke Tryl had a very interesting thread up on X about what focus groups reveal about the Muslim pro-Gaza vote. He thinks that the issue worked like Brexit, as a lightning rod for much wider dissatisfaction with the state of the country. “In discussions we would hear real frustration over Labour on Gaza, but very quickly it would come back to a broader point that Labour took Muslim votes for granted & that their communities had been neglected. Very similar to what you’d hear in the Red Wall post referendum.
“The participants in these focus groups would always have more to say about lack of opportunities, crime and the fact no one listened to them, than they did about Gaza. One Muslim woman put it ‘There’s no point in you tackling world peace when the area you live in is a shit hole.’”
The comparison with Brexit is both apt and chilling. The Muslim vote can’t do the damage that Brexit did. And it can’t produce the huge rise in immigration that Brexit did, and that the Brexiteers were voting against. But it will breed a horrible self-righteousness.
Wallis Simons praised “our foundational culture of freedom, tolerance and neighbourliness, law-abidingness and open contracts”. What country was he living in, I wonder, during the Boris Johnson government?