Is there a Muslim vote?

Page 30
Q-News, Issue 362
April 2005

Politicians have been climbing over themselves to endear themselves to the Muslim community. Has the Muslim vote really become so important? Dal Nun Strong investigates.

The sense of panic was palpable. It was the launch in mid-2004 of a rather low-key initiative by the Learning & Skills Council to create a Faith Leaders Management Training programme at the new London Muslim Centre. Suddenly, at the last minute, not just one Minister, but three different Ministers decided to show up, all of them wanting to speak about how important faith communities are, and how much the Government wanted to work in partnership with the Muslims.

It wasn’t hard to spot the spectre of the Leicester South by-election defeat hovering over the three worried Labour men. They knew that seats with a strong Muslim vote could no longer be regarded as safe. According to MORI, 78% of those Muslims who voted in the 2001 general election backed their local Labour candidate. But since Iraq, will Muslim voters now ever forgive their long-time political partner’s apparent infidelity?

Tony Blair also recognises that Labour’s Muslim core vote is in trouble. He contritely told Labour’s conference that: ‘before you know it, you raise your voice. I raise my mine. Some of you throw a bit of crockery… And now you, the British people, have to sit down and decide whether you want the relationship to continue.”

Definitions of “crockery” are somewhat different. British Muslims certainly have raised their voices consistently since 2003 - in the streets and at the ballot boxes. But Tony Blair ordered UK troops to throw not crockery but explosives and tank shells on Iraq.

And it certainly looks like the Muslim community is sitting down and deciding whether it wants the relationship to continue. The latest opinion polls make grim reading for the Labour Party. ICM reported in November 2004 that only 32% of Muslim voters still intended to vote for Labour, with 41% intending to support the Liberal Democrats.

Such a shift in opinion is almost seismic. Irrespective of changes in electoral preference among other groups in Britain, many senior Labour figures are directly threatened. Welcome to the era of the Muslim “floating voter”.


Growing community, growing importance

It’s obvious why Muslim votes are becoming more valuable. A quick check of the 2001 census reveals that almost a million of the 1.5 million Muslims were of voting age. Of these, approximately 200,000 were under 22 (i.e. first time voters). Assuming an even distribution of the 14 - 18 age group, we might expect that there will be another 200,000 Muslim votes available across the country since the last election in June 2001 - in other words almost half a million new or relatively new voters this time around. Furthermore, every general election for the foreseeable future will see another 200-250,000 potential Muslim voters.

As the rest of society ages, the relatively young profile of the Muslim population will become more and more important. The financial consequences of a greying society are well known. Figures tell us that 34% of the population is already over 50, rising to 50% by 2020. There are currently 9 million people aged 65, rising to 12.5 million by 2020, peaking at over 16 million during the 2030s. Who will be paying for the pensions of these increased numbers of older people?

Longer career-lengths may mean that over-65s will pay some of their own way. But a substantial burden will still fall on the younger generations. It is in this context that Muslims will become increasingly important. The 2001 census suggested that only 120,000 Muslims were aged between 50-65 and would be retired by 2020. In sharp contrast, the census recorded 523,000 Muslims under the age of 16. By 2020, all of these half million Muslims will be full taxpayers. They will have a great responsibility in helping to keep the British economy on track - and their influence will be even greater if obstacles to economic participation by Muslim women are lifted.

Clearly, young British Muslims alone cannot pay for the pensions of the future. But the electorate seems uneasy about some of the alternatives - in particular the continued need for imported skills. The Labour government has boosted the work permit programme, to make it possible to fill vacant technical jobs. But the continued concern about immigration - whether or not this is just code for racism against black and brown people - severely restricts any Government’s freedom to manoeuvre. Reforms to the pensions system to extend the length of the working career are inevitable, but the electorate’s confidence has already been shaken over the last few years by poor stock market performance and major financial scandals (remember Equitable Life).


Courting the Muslim vote

Young Muslims will wield measurable economic influence. Most have grown up fully acculturated into British society, and nobody would dare deny them the right to participate fully in public life (in contrast to popular resentment against new immigrants). Muslims must now be courted. The humiliations handed out by Muslim voters at the Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill by-elections last year show what happens if they’re not.

For those of us who took part in previous elections, the change in party attitudes is palpable. Where in the 1992, 1997 or 2001 election campaigns did we find party leaders attending mosques to drum up votes? Yet all three of Blair, Howard and Kennedy are doing so in 2005.

When in previous elections did the rival parties set out genuine national policies specifically in order to court the Muslim vote? Yet now we see a law being debated to prohibit incitement to religious hatred. And, of course, subsidised Faith Leaders Management Training to make the Muslim community more managerially effective.

The Times on 27 February made the point in a different way. Gay rights campaigners, in the past an important Labour constituency, it reported, “have been snubbed by the government for fear of upsetting Muslim voters who are regarded as more important to Labour’s election campaign. At the time of going to press, the government is toying with a new bill giving Muslims protection against religious discrimination, but there will be no equivalent right for gays, as had been planned by ministers. Downing Street fears that Muslims, whose votes could be the key to saving the seats of many Labour MPs, might feel offended if they were “lumped together with homosexuals.”


Turnout

But before Muslims can really expect to exert electoral influence, the community needs to sort out its turnout numbers. Political commentators of all colours have been wringing their hands at the decline in political participation. We don’t have to look far for the results of apathy. In 2002, a man who campaigned in a monkey suit managed to get himself elected mayor in Hartlepool.

A graver lesson for Muslims should come from the election of BNP candidates to councils in Burnley (2002), Halifax (2003) and Bradford (2004). If just a few hundred more people had turned up to vote, the BNP would not have won.

There are plenty of other Islamophobes out there, propelled to electoral success of the basis of tiny turnouts. One thinks of Robert Kilroy-Silk, who a few months after being correctly taken off the air for incitement to hatred, reappeared as an elected official. There are plenty of others like him both in his current party and among his former colleagues in UKIP.


So what is to be done?

Muslims must ensure that they have got themselves onto the electoral register. In 1997, only 90.2% of people of Pakistani heritage and 91.3% of those of Bangladeshi heritage were even registered to vote, despite this being a legal obligation on every UK citizen. Broadly similar findings also held true at the 2001 election. In both cases, the Muslim community was much less likely to be registered than the White community (97%) or non-Muslim Asians.

Then, they have to act on polling day. Past surveys suggest that even where Muslims are registered, they still come out to vote much less than other groups. Evidence from 1997 suggested that 75.6% of registered Pakistanis and 73.9% of registered Bangladeshis turned out in 1997 - substantially down on the national average of 78.7%. The figures for 2001 were even more dismal, with only 59.9% voting - approximately in line with the shameful levels of turnout for the country as a whole. If the Muslim vote is to count, this must change.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said: “The English nation thinks it is free, but is greatly mistaken, for it is so only during the election of members of Parliament.” In today’s war on terror, it sometimes feels the same for Muslims - so let us enjoy that freedom while we can. And let us use it in such a way that our freedoms will be better preserved all the other days of the year.