By Larkers
The local elections in England on 2nd May 2024 have come and gone. The ‘election fever’ among the chattering classes masks the actual impact of local elections: nothing much can ever be drawn from them. Or so it was once.
Labour’s apparent success was loudly trumpeted by the BBC and The Guardian. Sir Keir Starmer was Prime Minster in waiting and so on. However, local elections are a really bad guide to general election results.
The Tories lost big under Margaret Thatcher in 1986 (four years after the Falklands triumph and crushing of Labour in the 1983 General Election) :
The 1986 United Kingdom local elections were held on Thursday 8 May 1986. There was a 3% reduction in the number of councillors, owing to the abolition of the Greater London Council and the Metropolitan County Councils.The national projected share of the vote was Labour 37%, Conservative 34%, Liberal-SDP Alliance 26%. The Conservatives lost 975 seats, Labour gained 13 seats and the Liberal-SDP Alliance gained 338 seats.Two parliamentary by-elections were also held on the same day in the West Derbyshire and Ryedaleconstituencies. The Conservatives held West Derbyshire, though only by 100 votes. The Alliance gained Ryedale from the Conservatives.
Thatcher went on to win a comfortable majority in 1987 regardless. (She never lost a general election and was forced from office in 1990.)
As last week’s ’show biz’ late night pseudo live dramas on the airwaves fade faster than the party spirit come morning, what remains? Picking over the entrails, one sobering and strangely unreported in depth feature of these results (on a low turn out of around 40 percent on average of registered voters) was that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lost a huge chunk of support from Muslim ‘voters’.
The reason was, obviously, Gaza.
The UK’s nearly four million Muslims seem to identify more viscerally with Palestine than anywhere in England. It took Gaza to unmask them and unfurl the flags of Islam in the inner cities and towns in the north west. True there were no great upsets or numbers of seats claimed, but this election marks a watershed.
Prior to the vote, Muslims in the Labour Party were resigning in droves and others making demands of Starmer’s Labour Party that amounted to controlling its foreign policy if and when the party is elected. Starmer (“married to a Jew and whose children attend Jewish schools” as has been repeatedly thrown at him) stood his ground on Gaza, and is for all intents and purposes supporting the present government’s policy (a government led by a Hindu it should be, and has been, noted). Useful to Labour’s enemies as ever, Jeremy Corbyn has hit out for his Palestinian ‘friends’ against his old party.
There is also the emergence of a political party helmed by the ever Gorgeous Galloway to pander to muslim concerns about the middle east, the Worker’s Party. The party is apparently socialist and more importantly, socially conservative (ie, no gays please, we are Muslims!). The Greens have also attracted some strange new bedfellows.
"We will NOT be silent. We will raise the voice of Gaza. ALLAH HU AKBAR!"
Muslim Green Party candidate for Gipton and Harehills, Mothin Ali, recorded a confident win running on a pro-Palestine, anti-Labour campaign in the Leeds local elections.
Labour maintain control of Leeds… pic.twitter.com/erPDVMvPJW
— 5Pillars (@5Pillarsuk) May 3, 2024
The pressure group, Muslim Vote, backed by the usual plethora of islamist organisations is flexing its muscles belligerently and has issued 18 demands to Starmer:
“The Muslim Vote, which aims to organise voters against MPs who did not back a ceasefire in the conflict, has called for the Labour leader to apologise for his early stance on Israel’s campaign against Hamas.
And it has urged Sir Keir to promise to cut military ties with Israel and let Muslims pray in schools and for Labour figures to return “zionist money”.”
Needless to say the Muslim Vote is backed by extremist and terror-friendly organisations like MEND and MAB.
This development has yet to solidify. Will this date mark the point at which muslims seize the opportunity given to them on how to exercise the numbers they now have to steer British politics in their direction? Apparently, they have three choices …
