I have voted for Labour in every single election since I was 18 – until now (2024)

There was once a time when an impending General Election would fill me with excitement.

Since I was a teenager, I have stayed up for hours on election night watching the votes roll in and clinging onto hope for a landslide Labour victory.

Yet, ironically, despite this year being the first time in my living memory that a Labour win is almost guaranteed, I feel nothing but apathy towards the General Election that has now been called for July 4.

Gaza has changed everything for me – and for many others.

I have been a life-long Labour supporter – and former member of the party. I have placed an X in the box next to the Labour candidate in every election since I was 18.

However I can no longer entertain the idea of lending my vote to a party that I see as complicit in the massacre of 35,000 people, the maiming of thousands more and the utter decimation of infrastructure in Gaza.

Admittedly, even before Israel escalated its 76 years of military occupation in Gaza to a full blown assault, I had already grown weary with a Labour party that seemed to offer no real alternative to the decades of Tory rule wrought upon this country.

Under Keir Starmer, the party’s support of austerity policies like the two child benefit cap – which plunges millions of children into poverty – the treatment of minority MPs like Diane Abbott and Afsana Begum, as well as their recurring problem with islamophobia was enough to leave me feeling despondent.

But I still clung to the idea that they were the lesser of two evils.

I believed that the prospect of another Tory Government with yet more widespread austerity and the annihilation of more of our public services was worse than anything Labour could bring.

But for me, this changed in October 2023 when Starmer was asked on LBC Radio if ‘cutting off power [and] cutting off water’ during a siege in Gaza was appropriate. He replied that ‘Israel does have that right’, despite this constituting a war crime, according to UN experts.

Since then, Starmer has attempted to backtrack and said that he simply meant Israel had the right to defend itself, but his initial comments – plus the fact that other senior Labour figures like Rachel Reeves and Emily Thornberry seemed to tow the same line in the following days – are unforgivable for me.

For a potential future Prime Minister – not to mention former human rights lawyer – to advocate for the treatment of civilians this way smacks of a wider problem of islamophobia in the Labour party.

How can I, a British Muslim, give my vote to a party who seems to view the lives of people who share my heritage and religion as simply collateral damage and worth less than the lives of western allies?

It is clear that I am not alone. In this month’s local and mayoral elections, Labour’s Muslim vote suffered considerably, with the party losing almost a third of their vote in some areas.

There has been a concerted campaign among Muslims and those who care about justice to force Labour into accountability for their blanket support of Israel’s actions by voting for independent candidates or smaller parties.

Despite the anger and betrayal I feel as a Muslim voter, it is important to note that Gaza transcends the boundaries of race and religion. It has become the great moral question of our time. It is about whether we approve of our taxes funding, and our politicians supporting a ‘plausible genocide’ in our name.

Presenting it as a fringe Muslim-only issue – or worse, as the concern of extremists, antisemites and Islamists – simply feeds into the Government’s agenda to criminalise support of Palestine and uphold their ties with the Israeli government.

We have seen this through Suella Braverman’s portrayal of pro-ceasefire rallies as ‘hate marches’ and student protests at universities as ‘antisemitism on campus’. We saw this again, back in March, with Rishi Sunak’s ominous reference to extremist ‘forces at home trying to tear us apart’.

As the General Election approaches, it is likely that both the Labour and Conservative parties are going to be desperately attempting to scrape back some of the votes they haemorrhaged at the recent local elections.

But I for one hope they realise that it is too late for many voters like me who can no longer support any party complicit in the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

Our choice at the ballot box this summer looks like choosing between two parties as blood-stained as each other – or to vote for an independent candidate as a protest, which is what I will be doing.

And while I am aware that a national Labour victory is almost guaranteed, I hope that on July 5, enough Labour votes will have been lost to independent candidates that the party will have no choice but to grapple with how its blanket support of Israel hasn’t just cosigned the utter destruction in Gaza, but has maligned and alienated a group of voters it has always counted on.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.

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