The Gaza Independents are pursuing an organisational strategy which can be countered
After five Gaza Independent candidates won parliamentary seats last year, the campaign group that backed them — The Muslim Vote — declared: “This is just the beginning.” They were not bluffing.
Last weekend, two Gaza Independent candidates, Musharaf Parvez and Shiraz Ahmed, crushed Labour in the Queensgate and Lanehead wards of Burnley in Lancashire. In Queensgate, Parvez took 56 per cent of the vote, winning by 12 points in a ward where Muslims now form the dominant religious group (40 per cent, compared to 38 per cent Christian). In Lanehead, which is 26 per cent Muslim, Ahmed won 44 per cent of the vote with a staggering 36-point margin.
Both Parvez and Ahmed ran explicitly identity-driven campaigns that successfully mobilised voters along extremist lines. Ahmed frequently posted mind-numbing sectarian slop on Facebook about the Israel-Hamas war, which he, of course, thinks is a “genocide”. He couldn’t even take a break from performative grievance-posting on a holy day, writing, “Eid Mubarak and Free Palestine”.
Burnley is not an isolated case. In last year’s General Election, Blackburn — held by Labour since 1955 — sent a Gaza Independent MP, Adnan Hussain, to Westminster. His victory speech made the point unmistakably: “This is for Gaza,” he told his supporters who shouted back: “Free, free Palestine.” The mandate was claimed on behalf of a foreign conflict, not the constituency he had just been elected to represent.
The only thing that prevented more Parliament seats from falling was disorganisation, not lack of support
Other Gaza Independents have since entered Lancashire’s county council, where they now form the third-largest bloc. One new councillor, Maheen Kamran, says she wants to prevent “free mixing” between the sexes, a position drawn directly from Islamic social doctrine.
And this pattern extends beyond Lancashire. Iqbal Mohamed, now MP for Dewsbury and Batley, campaigned on the accusation that Labour and the Conservatives have been “accessories to a 75-year genocide [perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians]”. That’s quite the accusation (if nothing else, the sheer length of time casts doubt on the meaning of the term “genocide”). And Birmingham MP Ayoub Khan has stood in the House of Commons and claimed that “[Palestinian] children are being shot in the genitals” by Israeli forces — a medieval blood libel that he proudly circulates on his own TikTok account.
The significance of all this is not simply that Muslim voters are choosing Muslim candidates. The concern is that these candidates are advancing a fundamentally different understanding of what politics is for. For most Britons, politics is civic: a negotiation of competing interests inside a shared national framework. But for the Gaza Independents, politics is explicitly transnational. It’s about asserting religious identity in the public sphere and organising civic power around an “armed struggle” taking place 4,000 kilometres away. These elected officials do not treat their councils or Parliament as a place to balance opposing needs; they treat it as an extension of an Islamic cause in which British institutions are instruments of Mohammedan moral alignment.
Keep in mind, the scale of the electoral shift has actually been understated. In several constituencies in 2024, Gaza Independents only lost because they split their own vote, running multiple candidates against Labour rather than unifying behind one. The Muslim Vote’s own post-election analysis estimated that double the number of seats would likely have gone to Gaza Independents had they coordinated better. In Ilford North, the Health Secretary only beat out the Gaza Independent by a mere 528 votes. It was the same story in Birmingham Ladywood, where the Gaza Independent challenger came within three thousand votes of unseating the now Home Secretary. In Leicester South, a Gaza Independent actually beat Labour, despite splitting the pro-Gaza vote with another Gaza Independent candidate. The only thing that prevented more Parliament seats from falling was disorganisation, not lack of support.
And this matters because the electoral conditions that enabled these victories exist elsewhere. In May, council elections will take place in areas with significant Muslim electorates: London (where 40 per cent of Tower Hamlets and over 30 per cent of Newham is Muslim), Birmingham (30 per cent Muslim), Bradford (31 per cent Muslim), Leeds (where some wards exceed 40 per cent Muslim), and Sheffield and Rotherham, (where several wards are now above 20 per cent Muslim).
But these upcoming elections don’t need to be demographically predetermined. The Burnley victories were achieved on low turnout: 27 per cent in Queensgate and 34 per cent in Lanehead. In last year’s local elections, turnout across Lancashire averaged just 34 per cent. And in every ward and constituency where Gaza Independents have won without a majority Muslim population, the decisive factor has been concentrated mobilisation, not sheer population headcount.
Which is to say, this is not an unstoppable electoral trend. It is an organisational strategy, and strategies can be countered. But the longer every non-sectarian candidate ignores the fact that Gaza Independents are organising a parallel political project with a fundamentally non-civic conception of representation, the harder it will be to restore the British ideal of a shared polity at all.
