 Keir Starmer's leadership so far has been a transparent attempt to appeal to older white voters by waiving British flags. It doesn't seem to have worked. It also has caused some problems because Labour has refused to offer anything to anyone else. We've seen in YouGov polling that this myopic strategy has already led many young people to abandon the party and new polling from Servation suggests he has just as serious a problem with Britain's Muslims in a weighted poll of over 500 Muslim voters. Servation found that identification with the Labour Party remains high, but is falling. So to the question, which if any of the following political parties do you most identify with, 72% of Muslims said Labour, so incredibly high. That's down 11 points from 2019, but still not huge cause for concern, although, as I say, direction of travel is worrying. That changing relationship of some Muslims to the Labour Party is clearer in the following question. In the past 12 months, has your view of the Labour Party become more favourable or more unfavourable? 25% of people have said more favourable. 37% of people have said more unfavourable. So that's net 12%. So on the whole, Muslim Britons think Labour is going in the wrong direction. And most worrying for Keir Starmer when it comes to this poll is British Muslims' attitudes towards Keir Starmer himself. Now Boris Johnson, very unpopular among Muslim voters. 20% of people think about him favourably. 53% unfavourably. So that's a net minus 33. He's not popular for obvious reasons. He compared Muslim women to letterboxes or sorts of other unsavoury things in his past writings. Starmer, though, is not doing particularly well either. So 22% think about him favourably. That's only two points more than Boris Johnson. 29% unfavourably. And obviously, that's not as high as 53%. So Keir Starmer is on net minus seven. But that's not looking good for a Labour Party leader. As you can see, Labour polling way, way higher than Keir Starmer among Muslim voters. Now you might say this is just a poll. It's speculative. We won't know what happens until an actual election. In fact, it seems that this is playing out on the ground right now. At least, that's if you believe reports from Batley and Spen. Batley and Spen, obviously, the site of a by-election which will be happening on the 1st of July because the MP has now become the West Yorkshire mayor. It's a very, very high stakes by-election. A little bit like Hartlepool. It's somewhere that voted Brexit and where Labour lost in vote share in 2019, essentially, because they backed a second referendum. However, while Labour was trounced in Hartlepool, there were people suggesting that Batley and Spen would be a different story because Hartlepool is a very white place. Batley and Spen has larger populations of ethnic minorities, in particular Muslims, which is why this polling has come out at a very relevant moment. And the particular worry for Labour in Batley and Spen is that whilst I assume their short-sighted strategists have said, well, we need to focus on the flags because it's the older white people who are going Tory and the young people and the Muslims have nowhere else to go, someone landed in the constituency who's caused some problems for Keir Starmer. It's this guy, George Galloway. He's a former Labour and Respect MP and he is explicitly positioning himself as the candidate to vote for if you're unhappy with Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party. You can see a poster here of Starmer out with him looking like he's ready to do some bareknuckle boxing and he's also running as an advocate for Palestinian rights. He's saying, I'm uncompromising in my support of the Palestinians, contrasting himself with Keir Starmer. This apparently is being brought up repeatedly on the doorstep. Labour sources say their last week on the doorstep has been dreadful. The issue is almost exclusively Palestine. On Friday evening, Galloway had been around 45 minutes before us in one of our stomping grounds. Nobody wanted to speak to us. Worrying for the Labour Party. Keir Starmer has been very, very timid when it comes to basically any foreign policy issue, but obviously Palestine is particularly relevant now because of what's been happening, because of the bombardment of Gaza, because of the evictions, the expulsions essentially in Sheikh Jarrah, because of the storming of the Al Aqsa Mosque. All of these issues mean that people want to hear a loud advocate for Palestinian rights, especially people in the Muslim community, and they're not hearing that from the Labour Party. Now Labour are worried. Now the fact this is causing electoral problems for Labour is a little bit ironic given that we have seen so much bashing recently from centrists of the Labour left, and it all focuses on this idea that of course, no one in their right mind, no voter cares about foreign policy, and we don't know why Jeremy Corbyn, why the left always want Keir Starmer to talk about foreign policy, because no one, absolutely no one cares about it. This was Dan Hodges, one of the Mail On Sunday star columnists. Red Wall voters think Labour cares more about the Palestinians than them, and they're right. So we're saying that the reason Labour are losing the Red Wall is because they talk too much about Palestine. What's happened now? They're going to battle you and spend their money. They're going to lose it because Keir Starmer has not been vocal enough about Palestine. How wrong could Dan Hodges be? Now a week earlier, former Labour MP Anatoly had wrote essentially a similar article. She argued, a party that waves the Palestinian flag from its conference floor, but balks at the flag of its own country will never be able to convince people that it is interested in representing the voters of Hartlepool or fit to govern this country. Now that Anatoly piece was published the day Israel began bombing Gaza. It was shared approvingly by, among others, David Miliband. That Dan Hodges article, of course, was published in the middle of the bombardment of Gaza. That was his point. You say, why are Labour even commenting on this? Obviously, from our perspective, Labour were fairly weak on it. You say that the fact they even commented on it shows that they're not fit to win an election. If they do want to stick to their guns on this, Anatoly and Dan Hodges will now need to have a word with the people in charge of Labour's election literature because the party have responded to disquiet among the Muslim community in competition from George Galloway by making their election leaflets about Palestine, Kashmir and Islamophobia. You can see here a leaflet which is being handed out in batley. It does seem like these centrists for just a month ago, for them to be saying, oh, why the hell would you talk about Palestine? This is ridiculous. This was everything that was wrong with Corbyn and now Kirstarmer's Labour with a candidate who's not from the left, by the way, handing out leaflets which are now desperately saying, oh, these are what we think about Palestine. This is what we think about Kashmir. This is what we think about Islamophobia. It's desperate. But here's the thing about Anatoly and Dan Hodges. As well as being, how can I put this kindly, idiots? As well as being idiots, they're also ideologues. So by using the red wall as a disciplinary tool against the left, they're able to say, look, these things that you care about, but I am ideologically opposed to, i.e. Palestinian self-determination, a lively Palestine solidarity movement in this country, which holds Israel to account the BDS movement. These things which I'm ideologically opposed to, it's not me saying this. It's the red wall. And we forget that the red wall is as diverse and as varied as anywhere else. So you don't have this complete homogeneity across different seats and within individual constituencies as well. You've got a vast array of racial groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, voting behaviors, social views. But it becomes usefully homogenised and presented as one thing by the right, precisely so it can use the left's own guilt for what happened in 2019 against the left and make sure that you never get too many ideas about shaping the foreign policy of the Labour Party ever again. And so I think that that's what's going on there and that's why Palestine was being framed in that way. It's not because it stands up to even an iota of scrutiny. You've got very rich traditions of internationalism and Palestine solidarity outside of London, not that you would ever know it by reading one of Dan Hodges' columns. You've also got large Muslim communities who do feel very strongly about issues like Palestine and Kashmir. But it wasn't useful to acknowledge that. It was strategic to pretend that the only kind of voter in a red wall seat, whether that red wall seat is Hartlepool or Batley and Spen or whether it's Chesterfield or Derby, it's all populated by the same kind of person, which is an older white guy who loves pies, pints, and the queen. And that's it. So it's in its own way deeply patronising and very stereotypical. But I think as for this hemorrhaging of support for Kerstama amongst Britain's Muslims, you have to, I think, take a slightly more nuanced view. And so there are specific issues like Palestine, like Kashmir, where the Labour Party have been absolutely atrocious, either absent or doubling back on themselves and making U-turns all over the shop. But I think there's also something which I think is a lot more nebulous, a general vibe, which was that with Jeremy Corbyn, if you were Muslim in this country, you knew that he was going to fight for you. You knew that he didn't look at you like you were all potential jihadis and you didn't really belong in this country. You got the sense that he wasn't embarrassed by you. He'd stand by you in your fight and would feel really at home doing so. With Kerstama, unfortunately, there I think is this aura that he and the team around him are embarrassed by their most loyal voter cohorts, whether that's people who live in cities, whether that's young people, or whether that's this country's ethnic minorities in particular Muslims. And I think it's because Jeremy Corbyn was hauled over coals for a perceived proximity to Muslims, which made people tar him with the brush of terrorist sympathiser. I always say Jeremy Corbyn was a victim of Islamophobia because he really was. We were used as a means to discredit and delegitimize his leadership. And I think instead of standing against that in a powerful and forthright way, Kerstama in many ways has couted out to it. And that's just plainly obvious. You don't get the sense that he's going to fight alongside you, take you seriously, not be embarrassed by you the way Jeremy Corbyn was. And I also think that there's you know, something else going on here, which is gestural politics, right? Now George Galloway is, in my opinion, a snake oil salesman. I don't think that he's somebody to be trusted. You look at what he was saying about that really wonderful anti-deportation action that took place in Glasgow. He was condemning it in the strongest possible terms. This is not somebody who's anti-racism is reliable. But in talking to Muslims the way that he does, I think something which he is exploiting is a sense amongst many ethnic minorities in this country, not just Muslims, that the way in which the labour anti-semitism crisis was portrayed in the media completely closed down the room to talk about your own experiences of racism. It was always treated as secondary issue to the primary one, which was labour anti-semitism. And then you had that insulting refrain, which I've had said to my face multiple times, which is Ash, you know, no other minority would have been treated the same. You've got Britain's Muslims who are, you know, subject to prevent, subject to surveillance, are vilified from pillar to post in pretty much every tabloid newspaper in this country going, eh, what do you mean no other minority? Like we've been here this whole time. And when you've got that deliberate, I think, insults to the Muslim experience coming from the press. And when it's something which I think implicitly has been reinforced through Keir Starmer's orientation as Labour leader, it does leave space for somebody like George Galloway to come along with this very shallow gestural politics of recognition and go, see, you know, I'm here for you. And that's probably not going to win George Galloway the seat, but it might peel off enough voters or, you know, demoralise enough of Labour's Muslim voters that the Tories sneak through in battle and spend. And again, it's a crisis of Keir Starmer's making is through his own poor strategy and lack of foresight that he's left himself open to being outflanked on his left.