New PM Keir Starmer, a centrist, is the best bet for Britain and UK-India ties against rising Islamist radicalism

Keir Starmer has become the new British prime minister after Labour won in a historic landslide as voters inflicted a devastating defeat on Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives after 14 turbulent years in power. Yet it was an election in United Kingdom that concealed more than it revealed. While on the surface it seemed as if Britain has walked to the Left even as Europe is shifting to the right, a granular inspection reveals that just like neighbours France, the British centre is caving in, and a hostile sectarianism is on the rise with radical Islamism on one side and a reactionary nativism on the other.

In some ways, therefore, the commanding win that Labour has achieved and the screaming headlines are a tad misleading. Ironically, it has come under a technocratic leader who has vowed to shun ideology in favour of pragmatism and has dragged the social democrats back to the centre from the leftist pit where Jeremy Corbyn had left the party in 2019 when Labour had suffered its worst electoral setback in 84 years.

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And yet it is no less significant that Corbyn, who suffered an ignominious exit from the party in 2020 owing to antisemitism, fought as an independent, ran with a single-point Islamist agenda and managed to secure a win in his constituency of Islington North, an area of London, by beating the party he once led. His win, along with a clutch of independent candidates who won on pro-Gaza platforms, and even those who didn’t win but reduced Labour’s victories on several seats to wafer-thin margins by monopolizing the Muslim vote, point to rampant Islamization taking root in Britain and its social cohesion coming apart. These are developments with deep ramifications for a society grappling with an explosion of immigration, legal and illegal.

From discontentment with immigration explosion to internecine friction among communities (think 2022 Leicester riots, or antisemitic hatred that touched new highs in 2023) owing to a Muslim minority that resists assimilation and integration with the dominant culture, from cost-of-living, housing crisis to failing public services, this was an election with many subtexts that lay beneath the façade of stability.

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That is not to undermine the importance of Labour’s victory that has now achieved super majority in the House of Commons with some 412 seats in the 650-seat Parliament, an increase of 212, while the Conservatives at 121 were reduced to a rump. A record number of Tory senior ministers, including pro-Brexit lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, leadership contender Penny Mordaunt and even former prime minister Liz Truss bit the dust, while Rishi Sunak and his finance minister Jeremy Hunt scraped through in a night of horror for the clueless Conservatives.

The Tories were crushed to a blathering pulp, suffering a massive 20-point fall in support as some of their safest seats were flipped, resulting in the worst Conservative result in history in terms of seats. Voters were seemingly furious with their never-ending game of thrones, institutional decay, corruption and rank incompetence. Sunak tried to turn things around, but was given a bad script, faced internal rift and complete erosion of voter confidence.

For all the bashing that he has received, Sunak managed to bring down the interest rates, tamed inflation from historic highs and fired up the cylinders of British economy. Starmer is poised to reap some of the rewards due to Sunak for his arduous, thankless work. The new prime minister will need all the luck he can get.

One suspects history will be kinder to Sunak even though his name will forever be associated with Tory humiliation and the largest British landslide victory for Labours in the modern era. In the end, the Tories paid for Boris Johnson’s antics, hubris and arrogance, Truss’s incompetence and the folly of the combined West over Ukraine war whose impact is being felt across Europe.

And here we need a reality check. Labour’s impressive win is shallower than it appears, even if markedly efficient that tapped into the peculiarities of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system to get a bigger share of the seat for every ballot cast. The final tally, however, not only fell short of Tony Blair-led Labour’s haul of 419 in 2017, in terms of vote share Starmer’s 400-plus seats were achieved with fewer numbers than the party received both in 2017 and 2019, when it was handed one of its worst electoral drubbings against Johnson’s Tories.

Interestingly, as the BBC points out, Labour’s “vote share is up by just under two points across the country. This is primarily as a result of a 17-point increase in support in Scotland. In Wales, the party’s vote has actually fallen back by four points, while in England the party’s vote is up half a point from 2019. Labour secured their landslide on a lower share of the vote (35% in Great Britain) than won by Blair in each of his three victories, as well as the 40% won by Corbyn in 2017. Indeed, the party’s share of the vote is the lowest won by a post-war single party government.”

There are two ways of looking at this peculiarity. One, Starmer oversaw a ruthless election-winning machine that placed itself favourably to benefit from the public rage against Tories, but at 34 per cent of popular votes it would seem that voters are doubtful that any replacement can tackle the laundry list of challenges facing Britain.

The second interpretation is more disturbing, and one suspects is closer to the truth. Beneath the apparent democratic routine of power changing hands between two dominant political parties in British polity, a minute reading of the results betrays the emergence of trenchant religious indoctrination and an equally powerful counter-current that may leave a profound impact on British domestic politics, and even dictate the key tenets of foreign policy.

This, however, wasn’t reflected accurately in the results due to the gap between the share of total votes won by the winning party and the share of seats won, that was, according to the BBC, the largest on record. Due to this oddity, while Labour’s 34 per cent of popular votes translated into 64 per cent of the 650 Parliamentary seats, Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party, Reform UK, that secured a massive four million popular votes (14 per cent of the ballots cast) ended up with only 1 per cent of the seats (4).

According to the BBC, “a purely proportional system – where national vote share translated exactly into the number of seats – in 2024 would have given Labour about 195 seats and no majority. The Tories would have had 156 seats, Reform UK 91, the Liberal Democrats 78 and the Greens 45.”

This disproportionate distribution of votes and seats masks crucial shifts under way in British polity. The reality is that Labour has suffered a massive erosion in its Muslim voter base that has almost overnight shifted to dissident candidates who stood up as independents and spewed venom against Jews. The magnitude of this erosion and the portends such a shift brings are the biggest takeaways from the 2024 UK general elections.

In countless former strongholds, Labour either suffered a shocking reversal at the hands of ‘independents’ who ran on a purely Islamist agenda, or the party’s vote share has dramatically caved in, leading to candidates scraping through by razor-thin margins. The only necessary metric is a sizeable Muslim presence.

Starmer’s party lost five seats in constituencies with large Muslim population – four to independents, and one more to Conservatives where the independent, again running on a pro-Gaza platform, made a decisive intervention. For instance, in Leicester East, Conservative candidate Shivani Raja defeated her closest rival and Labour candidate Rajesh Agrawal by 4,426 votes, but that number was lesser than the 5,532 votes garnered by independent candidate Claudia Webbe, the former MP who had been ousted from Labour, charged and convicted of harassment and ran a pro-Palestine campaign.

Do remember that the Labour party has always counted strong support among the Muslim community. This time, however, an online Islamist activist group called ‘The Muslim Vote’ – a conglomeration of 23 Islamist organizations that encouraged Muslim voters to cast their ballots tactically – put Labour through the Gaza ‘purity test’ and triggered a radical, sectarian insurgency that pulled the rug from under Labour’s feet.

If the minority Muslim population of a particular constituency touched the critical 10 per cent mark, Labour’s vote went down by an average of 11 points. That went down further by 23 points if the Muslim population went over the 20 per cent mark. In terms of vote share, that translated to around 7 percentage point decline. And where the Muslim population was in the region of 40 per cent, the Labour suffered a stunning 33.9 percentage point reversal in vote share.

This equation saw Labour bigwigs such as shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth lose in Leicester South, a constituency that he has been holding for 13 years and where over 30 per cent of the population are Muslims. Elsewhere, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting scraped through by 528 votes, secretary of state for justice Shabana Mahmood nearly lost to independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob who had recently suggested in a podcast that “70 per cent of hell will be women,” in a discussion about female empowerment, and both Streeting, Mahmood and Jess Phillips, another Labour MP to survive by the skin of her teeth, revealed the kind of rampant bullying, intimidation and abuse faced by them during campaigning from the ‘pro-Gaza’ elements.

‘The Muslim Vote’ took credit for the result. In a lost post on X (formerly Twitter), it wrote: “The goal from the very start has been to empower the Muslim vote and send the main political parties a message: Muslims are united, in Muslim-heavy areas your majorities will be under threat, and there may even be an upset. Tonight we did that in spades…”

In an ominous message that underscores the depth and scale of the Islamist radicalism growing in Britain, the group said “Today, as predicted, Labour have secured a landslide. But in Muslim-heavy seats the seeds of our community’s future have been sown. It will not be a landslide in the coming elections - and that is when the message sent today will really resonate…”

This religious fanaticism that seeks to marshal British Muslim votes around developments in West Asia, has predictably given rise to and fed a counter movement against insurgency and immigration – as has been the case across Europe. In Britain’s case it is Farage’s Reform UK that pooled in over four million votes and put Farage, for the first time in eight attempts, into the Parliament. Unlike the Labour, however, almost the entire growth of Reform has come at the cost of Tories.

As the BBC points out, “in over 170 of the Conservative seats they lost, the Reform vote was greater than the margin of the Conservatives’ defeat. Of course, not everybody who voted Reform would have otherwise voted Conservative, but most of them certainly voted Conservative in 2019. These statistics underline the extent to which the heavy loss of Conservative votes to Reform has cost Rishi Sunak’s party dear.”

As the chief of Brexit Party, Farage had an understanding with Johnson in 2019 not to split the Tory vote but this time his outfit, as Bloomberg notes in a report, fielded candidates in roughly twice the number of seats as its predecessor, contesting in over 600 out of the 650 total seats — and delivered a stunning blow to the Tories.

As sectarianism corrodes the middle of British politics, it has fallen upon a centrist leader in Starmer to keep up the fragile balance. In many ways, the phlegmatic former lawyer is best suited for the job, but his challenges are manifold. Not an orator or rabble rouser, Starmer, a working-class leader, brings a technocrat’s quiet efficiency to the table and one of his first moves as the chief of Labour was to purge the party of the intensely doctrinal approach of the Corbyn years and make Labour more electable. He is animated more by pragmatism than political philosophy.

Washington Post in its profile on the new British PM quotes billionaire businessman John Caudwell, as saying, “What Keir has done is taken all the left out of the Labour Party… He’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”

Naturally, Starmer’s approach fits well within the paradigm of UK-India relations as envisaged by the Tories, away from the toxicity of the Corbyn-era Labour that under the influence of the sizeable British-Pakistani diaspora, had passed a resolution in 2019 for ‘Kashmir Referendum’ and encouraged the Khalistani elements.

Starmer has sought to rid the party of its ‘anti-Hindu’, ‘anti-India’ image – perhaps eyeing the support of British Indian community that votes firmly Tory – but he would know that building a close strategic relationship with the fastest-growing large economy and sealing the much-delayed and much-anticipated free-trade agreement with India could just be what the doctor ordered for Britain.

The 2024 Labour election manifesto sought to build “a new strategic partnership with India, including a free trade agreement, as well as deepening co-operation in areas like security, education, technology and climate change.”

Starmer has declared that “there is no place for Hinduphobia in Britain” and in a major pre-poll speech at the India Global Forum, Starmer had said: “I have a clear message for you all today: this is a changed Labour Party. What my Labour government will seek with India is a relationship based on our shared values of democracy and aspiration.” His words, that

“Any constitutional issues in India are a matter for the Indian Parliament and Kashmir is a bilateral issue for India and Pakistan to resolve peacefully” would be welcome in New Delhi.

Veteran journalist KP Nayar writes in Deccan Herald that “India anticipated Starmer’s assumption of the high office in 10, Downing Street and built timely bridges with the Labour Party…” and that “It had become quite known in London’s strategic community since the middle of last year that Starmer assured the go-betweens that he would rein in the anti-India radicals in the House of Commons once he came to power.”

Be that as it may, a lot will depend on the kind of control that Starmer wields over his party. Labour will be under a lot of pressure from within to accommodate the concerns of the Muslim votebank that seems to have deserted the party. His foreign secretary David Lammy has told the BBC that Labour would “work with partners to seek Palestinian recognition” while Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana holds that her party’s position on Gaza is “a stain”.

It won’t be long before radical fringes shape Labour’s policies domestic and foreign policies and Starmer is forced into a balancing act. As a man of method, the new British PM knows that there is no substitute for centrist pragmatism when dealing with cultural wars. Political dysfunction awaits Britain if he fails.

The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets @sreemoytalukdar. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.