Amid the strong Labour gains last week, the party suffered two noticeable setbacks: the defeat in the London mayoral elections and the failure to win control of Bradford Council. While the first has inevitably dominated headlines, the second reveals more about the state of grassroots Labour politics.
Buoyed by George Galloway’s spectacular by-election victory in March, Respect won five council seats in Bradford. The result left Labour one seat shy of winning overall control of a council they have led since 2010. Moreover, Respect also managed to gain some high-profile scalps in their five-seat haul: most prominently, Ian Greenwood, a Labour councillor of 17 years and leader of the authority for the last two.
But having come away from Thursday’s local elections with 823 new councillors and 32 new councils, there’s a danger Labour could view the Bradford result as a one-off. And there is some reason to. The wins in Bradford were wins for Galloway. On voting slips, “the Respect Party” became “Respect (George Galloway),” a ploy which has led to calls to change the rules allowing individual candidates to include extra wording on the ballot paper. Just as Labour lost to a charismatic figure in the mayoral election, they were faced with a popular and populist figure in Bradford, someone able to exploit an anti-politics sentiment and appeal to Muslim voters. Respect candidates were not put up in any other cities. Not London, where Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, nor Birmingham, where Respect leader Salma Yaqoob was, up until 2011, a popular councillor.
The trouble with this argument, though, is that overestimates the popularity of Galloway with ordinary Muslim voters, while underestimating how the Labour Party’s engagement with those voters has substantially changed over recent years.
Traditionally, the party engaged with South Asian voters through community elders: powerful and prominent men who had great influence on how people would vote. From one point of view, the system worked. Right up to the turn of the century, Labour was able to rely on Pakistani Muslim votes in the northern mill towns that were the focus of large scale South Asian migration post-1945. Even today, there are fierce claims the system played a too-prominent role in helping some MPs win election in 2010.
The controversy surrounds the mechanism through which influence is exerted. Within Pakistani communities there exists a traditional system of kinship networks known as “biraderi.” With a meaning close to the English “patrilineage,” biraderi refers to a system where extended families are tightly bound by socially reinforced obligations. In Pakistan, the system means there is a safety net—an internal welfare system—for those who fall on hard times. Transplanted to Britain, however, the system was exploited by many mainstream politicians who used the influence offered by community leaders to obtain bloc votes. As Roy Hattersley once remarked in a little-noted mea culpa: “If, at any time between 1964 and 1997 I heard of a Khan, Saleem or Iqbal who did not support Labour I was both outraged and astonished.”
Biradering, the use of kinship networks for political gain, was encouraged and reinforced by multicultural policies. Community leaders were encouraged to make ethnicity-based claims for their communities and in return endorsed those politicians who supported them. In turn, the principle of patronage underlying biraderi was supported by many parties who recognised it as their winning ticket into Pakistani communities.
The consequences of this are beginning to be documented. Women and young people from the Pakistani community were often silenced by community elders and disenfranchised by local politicians of all parties. Any political process that marginalises more than half its voters is bound to generate discontent, and the biradering process is no different. The first signs of change emerged with the furore over the Satanic Verses. Not only did Muslims leaders find themselves out of favour with the traditional left, but their inability to articulate the objections of ordinary Muslims led to sharp criticism from the communities they purported to represent. Previously courted representatives displayed a lack of media- and political-savvy that was evident to all—not least young Pakistanis, who viewed their leaders’ weaknesses with exasperation.
The slow-drip challenge to the biraderi process reached a crescendo in 2003 with the anti-war movement. Pakistani Muslim women and young people rejected the Labour party’s stance on Iraq and biraderi gatekeepers found themselves impotent. The anti-war campaign and the newly formed Respect Party carried the wave of these young Pakistani Muslims interested in politics but disenfranchised by the biraderi system. Labour could no longer take their votes for granted.
In ordinary circumstances, the party would be a natural home for the majority of Pakistani Muslims, many of whom still live in traditionally working class areas. However, Labour politicians—more so than others—took the short and lazy route to courting their vote, relying on the influence and patronage of a few community elders instead. In the final analysis, the short-term revival of Respect should not be viewed as a passing blip by Labour, and indeed other political parties in Britain, but as a starting point for reforming the relationship between politics and ethnic minorities. The current support for Respect shows clearly that young British Muslims are not politically apathetic but alienated by a party which is too unsure of how to engage with them.
And here the first lesson for Labour would be to heed the voices of those young people who voted for George Galloway in the Bradford West by-election, and Respect (George Galloway) in the local elections. Namely, to view them not as an ethnic bloc vote which can be guaranteed through middle (aged) men but as individual citizens who have similar concerns to the wider population over jobs, the economy, schools, the NHS. Labour has the opportunity, when the celebrations of their overall victory have subsided, to really reflect on these issues: to reconnect with the minority communities who could be a genuine source of support once again.
Parveen Akhtar is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol
Lessons for Labour after the Elections
May 08, 2012
