• After Labour understood the weakness of the Muslim vote, Starmer felt no reluctance to show distance to the Muslim community.
• The mafia playbook that Starmer loves to play to prevent any opposition to his rulership
After a tangle of confusion from Monday, where government Labour ministers were suggesting that they would scrap the two child benefit caps, even calling them ‘cruel’, a day later, only hours before a vote was held on the matter, the government changed tactics and ordered its MPs to either vote against or abstain from voting on the proposal to scrap the cap. As a result, seven Labour MPs who voted for the scrap have had the whip removed from them. Meaning they are no longer a part of the Labour Party and must now go back to their constituent as an independent MP.
Mafia-like behaviour was not seen even in the Blair era
According to one of the MPs who was removed, Zara Sultana, she did not expect to be kicked out but said she would have voted for it regardless. While speaking to Times radio, she said:
“If scrapping the cap is not an urgent priority for a Labour government, you have to question what is… every day it is in place, hundreds of thousands of children are enduring unnecessary poverty.”
Something to note is that during the previous Labour rulership between 1997 and 2010, Corbyn, who at the time was an MP throughout, voted 428 times against the whip yet was not removed from the party or even threatened with removal on a public level. In what was deemed to be a progressive democracy, it did not make sense for a government to silence dissent from its own ranks. Yet, only on Tuesday, without warning, seven MPs had the whip taken from Starmer only weeks into his government’s formation. This outlines the mafia-like behaviour Starmer is harbouring against his party members. Three of those who were removed were Muslim MPs: Apsana Begum from Limehouse and Poplar, Imran Hussain from Bradford, and Zara Sultana, who is an MP for Coventry South.
There were also others who had their whip taken away, such as John McDonnel, the former shadow chancellor, who would be in the same shadow cabinet as Starmer and sit by him multiple times.
The timing of the removals is only weeks after the recent elections, in which Labour secured a landslide majority. It’s possible that Starmer plans on having a tight grip on power throughout his time in office and thus made the removal so soon without warning to send a strong message that dissent will not be tolerated within the party. This is tantamount to a modern-day dictatorship. A MP is elected by their constituents and must speak on behalf of their needs; if their needs are not aligned with their party’s official position, it does not deem their decision unrepresentative.
For Starmer to now eject anyone who disagrees with him within a few hours of prior notice, it becomes evident that the government is prioritising party needs over the needs of the people.
A massive Islamophobic display that went unnoticed?
The aftermath of the Labour Party’s decision to keep the two-child policy cap in place was met with fierce criticism. After the vote in parliament, the MCB described the two-child benefit limit as “an unfair policy that disproportionately affects families in low socio-economic groups, including religious minorities such as Muslims”.
The reality of the situation is that 60% of Muslim households have three or more children, so they are affected by this policy. The policy affects Muslims more than any other faith group. The Labour Party knows that supporting this policy will make it even more distant than the Muslim community, but all in all, the Muslim vote has not worked to rupture Labour’s landslide majority in the recent election, so it’s very possible that Starmer may feel entitled to bash the Muslim community through this policy because the repercussions from the Muslim community are obsolete on the electoral ballot.
Something further to support this is the fact that three of the only pro-Palestinian Muslim MPs in parliament were removed without prior warning. If the Muslim pro-Palestinian voice was stronger in parliament after the election with far more pro-Palestinian Labour MPs who have voted for the end of the cap, it’s possible Starmer may not have been so swift in taking the whip away from the MPs as the fear of upsetting Muslim voters would have been seen as a dramatic loss of support, but the fact that the numbers are so low and the Muslim vote has been proven to be so weak, Starmer seems to have felt very little fear when making the decision of removal.
Is Starmer trying to prevent the Muslim population from growing at its own pace?
During the 2019 election, well over 80% of Muslims are believed to have voted for Labour. That number has dropped this election by up to 20 percentage points, and in some constituencies, the Muslim vote for Labour clearly fell further. According to PEW research, Muslims had the highest fertility rate compared to any other subgroup between 2015 and 2020. The rapid increase in Muslim numbers in the coming decades could very well shift the voting demographic substantially and thus lead to more voters being upset at the mainstream parties. As discussed already, the two-child benefit cap affects the Muslim population disproportionately, and out of the many reasons for its continuation, it could be that Starmer, who has a ‘professional relationship’ with Tony Blair, the same man who has dire Islamophobic views, wants to prevent the quick and fast rise of the Muslim community’s population by continuing with the propagation of the difficulty of having three or more children.
Starmer had said he has a ‘professional relationship’ with Mass murderer and staunch Islamophobe Tony Blair
China’s one-child policy had prevented families from getting more children than one; otherwise, they faced a ‘social-maintenance fee’ which would be burdensome and hard on families who were struggling on the lower end. If the fee was not paid, the second child would not be registered in the national household system, which means they would not ‘exist legally’. Causing them to not have access to healthcare or education. For the UK, just the simple lifting of the cap on the two-child cap policy would lift 300,000 children out of poverty. According to the IFS last year, the number of children affected by the cap was 1.6 million last year. Currently, there are about 12.7 million children in the UK, so the number of children who are affected by the cap is more than 10% of the total number of children. The UK government has, both in the previous administration and this administration, not chosen to clamp down on legal offshore tax havens where more than 570 billion pounds of UK wealth are stored to avoid tax. This legality, which the corrupt strive for, could have been more than enough to cover the costs of lifting the two-child benefit cap. Unfortunately, the current Labour-Starmer led mafia like government does not want to bring about this change.
