Sadiq Khan’s win ‘bucks trend’ of Muslim voters rejecting Labour over Gaza, say party figures

The 53-year-old won a third term as the capital’s mayor on Saturday, without seeming to have lost the support of large numbers of Muslim voters – unlike Labour candidates elsewhere in England last week.

Richard Parker became West Midlands mayor after a knife-edge contest with Andy Street, but it would have been much easier for the Labour man had substantial numbers of voters not backed an independent candidate whose campaign focused on Gaza.

“We faced a campaign of nonstop negativity, but I couldn’t be more proud that we answered fear-mongering with facts, hate with hope and attempts to divide with efforts to unite,” Khan said in his victory speech.

Labour supporters had been concerned that the mayor might suffer a Gaza backlash, opposition in outer London to the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), and a switch from proportional representation to first-past-the-post, even though a YouGov poll last week put Khan on 47%, well ahead of Susan Hall, on 25%.

At last week’s polls, this translated into a 17.9% drop in the Labour vote in areas where more than a fifth of people identified as Muslim, according to Professor Will Jennings of Southampton University.

It failed to regain Oxford, lost ground in Blackburn with Darwen and Bradford, while the Workers Party of Britain, founded by George Galloway, unseated Manchester council’s deputy leader Luthfur Rahman.