When George Galloway roared to victory in the Rochdale byelection in February, his win was dismissed by many as an anomaly. And in many important respects, it was.
Galloway is a uniquely charismatic politician. Labour’s campaign had imploded in an antisemitism row. And one issue above all loomed over the battle for the Pennines town: Gaza.
Yet if commentators, pollsters and senior Labour figures had convinced themselves that Rochdale was a one-off, the results of the 2024 general election show how wrong they were.
Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth is the most high-profile victim so far of this complacency.
The Leicester South MP and former shadow minister may have expected to be sitting around the Cabinet table this weekend. Instead he is coming to terms with losing his seat to an independent, Shockat Adam, by fewer than 1,000 votes.
In Blackburn, Kate Hollern lost by fewer than 200 votes to the independent Adnan Hussain. And in Dewsbury and Batley, Heather Iqbal, a former adviser to the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, lost by nearly 7,000 votes to Iqbal Mohamed. In Birmingham Perry Barr, Labour’s Khalid Mahmood lost an astonishing 15,317 majority to the pro-Gaza independent candidate Ayoub Khan.
Taj Ali, the co-editor of Tribune magazine, pointed out that pro-Gaza independents now account for four seats in parliament – the same as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the Green party. When including Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong pro-Palestine campaigner, that makes five.
In several other seats, high-profile Labour MPs were also run close by independent candidates, including Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley.
Wes Streeting, the man who will almost certainly be shaping the future of the NHS as health secretary, was within 528 votes of losing his Ilford constituency to the 23-year-old British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamad.
Luke Tryl, the director of the research group More in Common, tweeted: “Crikey. Every focus group we’ve done in the area suggests Wes is hugely popular, so I think this really does show that Labour have a bigger problem on the left – driven by Gaza – than we thought.”
In Burnley, we reported four weeks ago that Labour’s “most winnable” seat was much closer than anyone expected due to Gaza. Thousands of Labour’s most loyal supporters in the town had defected, almost en masse, to the Liberal Democrats – a move totally under the radar of the much-vaunted MRP polls.
In the end, the Liberal Democrat candidate, 80-year-old Gordon Birtwistle, came within 3,420 votes of beating Labour to its lowest hanging fruit.
Lib Dem sources at the count, in a large Pentecostal church on the edge of Burnley, said they had been hamstrung by a lack of support from party headquarters, who had – they said – diverted their small and ageing band of activists from Burnley to Hazel Grove, near Stockport, which they took from the Tories.
It would be wrong to suggest Gaza is the concern of the Muslim community alone. It is not. And no community is a monolith. Voters of all demographics have relayed to us their concerns about healthcare, housing and the cost of living crisis in recent weeks.
Yet there is no doubt that against a blanket of apathy that has pushed turnout to potentially its lowest in more than a century, the conflict in Gaza has been one of the biggest driving factors for the most highly motivated part of the electorate.
Again, the conflict in the Middle East is not the concern of one demographic alone. But it is striking how closely the Muslim community’s desertion of Labour resembles the collapse across the “red wall”.
That, too, was about voters feeling taken for granted and it was an erosion in support catalysed in the second half of the last decade by Brexit, Corbyn and Boris Johnson. Gaza has had a similarly profound effect.
In Rochdale, meanwhile, Galloway slumped to defeat overnight, losing to Labour by 1,440 votes. His party, the Workers Party of Britain, had a decent show in constituencies like Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull but this was far from the “shifting of the tectonic plates” the veteran campaigner had declared.
Still, the casualties and close scares are enough to take some of the shine off Labour’s historic landslide.
It is a warning they should ignore at their peril. As Tony Blair’s former adviser John McTernan tweeted in the early hours: “Labour need to take the votes lost over Gaza as seriously as we took the loss of red wall.”
It took Labour years to wake up to its loss of support across its industrial heartlands. The work to repair relations over Gaza should start today.
