I have voted Labor in every election since I was 18 – until now | British news

There was once a time when the approaching general election filled me with excitement.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have stayed up for hours on election night watching the votes roll in and clinging to the hope of a landslide Labor victory.

But ironically, despite this year being the first time in my living memory that a Labor victory is almost guaranteed, I feel nothing but apathy towards the general election that has now been held. called for the 4th of July.

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

I have been a Labor supporter – and former member of the party – all my life. Since I was 18, I have put an X in the box next to the Labor candidate at every election.

However, I can no longer entertain the idea of ​​giving my vote to a party that I see as complicit in the massacre of 35,000 people, the mutilation of thousands more and the total decimation of Gaza's infrastructure.

Admittedly, even before Israel escalated its 76-year military occupation of Gaza into an outright attack, I had already grown tired of a Labor Party that seemed to offer no real alternative to the decades of Tory rule inflicted on this country.

Under Keir Starmer, the party's support for austerity policies such as the two-year child benefit cap – which plunges millions of children into poverty – the treatment of minority MPs such as Diane Abbott and Afsana Begum, as well as their recurring problem with Islamophobia was enough to make me feel despondent.

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

I believed that the prospect of a new Tory government with even more widespread cuts and the destruction of more of our public services was worse than anything Labor could deliver.

But for me this changed in October 2023 when Starmer was asked on LBC Radio whether 'turning off the power' [and] cutting off the water supply during a siege of Gaza was appropriate. He replied that 'Israel nevertheless has that right' constitute a war crimeaccording to UN experts.

Starmer has since tried to backtrack, saying he simply meant that Israel had the right to defend itself, but his initial comments – plus the fact that other senior Labor figures such as Rachel Reeves and Emily Thornberry seemed to follow the same line following days – are unforgivable to me.

For a potential future Prime Minister – not to mention the former human rights lawyer – to advocate for the treatment of citizens in this way smacks of a wider problem of Islamophobia within the Labor Party.

How can I, a British Muslimgive my vote to a party that seems to view the lives of people who share my heritage and religion as mere collateral damage and worth less than the lives of Western allies?

Clearly I'm not the only one. In this month's local and mayoral elections, the Labor Party suffered significantly among Muslims, losing almost a third of their votes in some areas.

There has been a concerted campaign among Muslims and those who care about justice to force Labor to account for their general 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 boundaries of race and religion. It has become the great moral issue of our time. What matters is whether we approve our tax financing, and whether our politicians have a 'plausible genocide'in our name.

Presenting this problem as a Muslim-only issue – or worse, as the concern of extremists, anti-Semites and Islamists – simply furthers the government's agenda to criminalize Muslims. support from Palestine and maintain their ties with the Israeli government.

We have seen this in the way Suella Braverman portrays ceasefire demonstrations as “hate marches” and student protests at universities as “anti-Semitism on campus.” We saw this again 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 Labor and Conservative parties will desperately try to regain some of the votes they lost during the election. recent local elections.

But at least I hope they realize that it is too late for many voters like me, who can no longer support any party that is complicit in the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

Our choice at the ballot box this summer looks like a choice between two parties as blood-stained as the other – or to vote for an independent candidate in protest, and that's what I'm going to do.

And while I am aware that a national Labor victory is all but guaranteed, I hope that by July 5 enough Labor votes will have been lost to independent candidates that the party will have no choice but to grapple with how its general support for Israel has failed. It only co-signed the total destruction in Gaza, but has vilified and alienated a group of voters it has always counted on.

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