LABOUR LOST THE MUSLIM VOTE. THEN IT BUILT A BACKDOOR BLASPHEMY LAW TO BRIBE IT BACK.
Their own equality and free-speech watchdog warned Labour. The government still went ahead. Then every submission showing who influenced the policy was deleted.
Two Freedom of Information responses have landed this week. The first shows the government privately asked the equalities watchdog to adopt its new definition of anti-Muslim hostility, after that watchdog had warned in writing that the definition risked chilling lawful speech, and refused. The second shows the department that commissioned the definition has deleted every submission made to the consultation that produced it.
In February 2025 I wrote that Labour was in electoral panic and was going back to its Muslim core vote with an offer. Eighteen months later, here are the documents.
Raja Miah
THE VOTE THEY LOST
In 2019, according to Survation, 86 per cent of British Muslims who voted backed Labour. Labour has owned that bloc vote for thirty years.
In July 2024 it left. In the 21 constituencies with the largest Muslim populations, Labour's vote fell from more than 600,000 to under 300,000. That collapse alone accounts for more than half of every vote Labour lost nationally between the two elections. Turnout in those seats fell by 11 points. Four sitting Labour MPs lost to independents in Leicester South, Dewsbury and Batley, Blackburn and Birmingham Perry Barr. All four winners were endorsed by The Muslim Vote, an organisation founded in December 2023 to direct that vote, which instructed supporters to spoil their ballots where no pro-Palestine candidate stood.
Labour still held 17 of the 21 seats and won a landslide.
Then Gorton. On 26 February 2026 Labour lost Gorton and Denton, a Greater Manchester seat it had held in one form or another for nearly a century, to the Green Party, and finished third behind Reform.
Twenty-eight per cent of the electorate is Muslim. In the four Manchester wards the figure averages 40 per cent. The Greens campaigned for that vote in Urdu. Their leaflet showed the candidate in a keffiyeh outside a mosque with the words "Stop Islamophobia. Stop Reform." on one side and an instruction to punish Labour for Gaza on the other.
A translation of the leaflet states: “Give the faltering walls a push. Labour must be punished for Gaza" and "We have to defeat Reform and vote for the Greens. To give the Muslims a strong voice, give your vote to the Greens.”
Zack Polanski had told The Times a month earlier that Gaza would be used to solicit Muslim votes in the seat. Labour's share fell from 50.8 per cent to 25.4. Independent observers recorded family voting, one person accompanying another into the polling booth, at 68 per cent of polling stations visited, against 12 per cent at the Runcorn by-election a year before.
Greater Manchester Police investigated, confirmed observers had estimated 32 occasions across 15 polling stations, and said it found no evidence of intent to influence or prevent anyone voting.
Labour's response on the night was to accuse the Greens of manipulating Muslim voters. Something. some might say, they know all about.
THE PARTY THAT TOOK THEM
The Green Party's co-deputy leader is Mothin Ali. A Leeds councillor first elected in May 2024, he is an Islamic teacher, who was in Labour for 20 years before he left in 2020.
On 7 October 2023, while the Hamas attack was still under way, he posted that "White supremacist European settler colonialism must end".
He has called a Leeds rabbi who serves as an Israeli reservist an animal. That rabbi says Ali played a key role in the threats that drove him from his home under police advice. Ali denies wrongdoing and says the rabbi should be investigated by police.
In April this year Ali was recorded telling Green members suspended over antisemitism to take serious legal advice, put the party on notice and consider a class action, and showing suspended candidates how to keep campaigning under a Green banner without the party logo. The party says he was encouraging them to stay and use its internal democracy. Zack Polanski has stood by him.
A councillor two years in the job is now deputy leader of a national party. I'm not saying he's done anything unlawful. I'm showing the value Ali has to the party that is trying to woo the bloc Muslim vote.
THE COUNTER-OFFER
The Muslim vote left Labour over Gaza. Labour cannot give it Gaza. The government's position on Israel is set by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office, and it is not going to be rewritten to win back Gorton. So the Communities Secretary had to find something the department could give instead.
In February 2025, seven months after losing the four seats, Angela Rayner appointed a five member working group chaired by Dominic Grieve KC to produce a definition of anti-Muslim hatred. The group ran a five week call for evidence from 16 June to 20 July 2025. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, Britain's statutory equality and human rights watchdog, was not invited to submit.
It wrote to the group regardless, warned that the definition risked chilling lawful speech, and advised that any definition go to full public consultation before adoption.
The government went ahead without doing so.
The working group's report has never been published. The list of organisations invited to contribute has never been published. Rayner resigned in September 2025. Then Labour lost Gorton, to a party whose leaflet said "Stop Islamophobia". Within weeks, in March 2026, Steve Reed announced the definition on the floor of the Commons, renamed anti-Muslim hostility, ahead of the May local elections.
Look at the dates.
The definition is non-statutory. It creates no offence. The government's own guidance says it covers behaviour that is not necessarily unlawful and urges organisations across the public, private and third sectors to adopt it. That is how it works.
Nobody has to be prosecuted. A council, a university or an employer adopts the definition, a complaint is made, and the person complained about is now in a disciplinary process over something a court would never have touched. The government has handed every one of those institutions a document with a crest on it to justify the decision.
Grieve and his group were given a job and did it. The questions are for the people who gave them the job.
THE WATCHDOG SAID NO
On Sunday The Times reported a Freedom of Information response from the EHRC. During what the Commission describes as an informal discussion, the department raised the question of whether it would consider adopting the definition. The Commission will not be adopting it. It has said the definition risks a chilling effect on speech. None of this was disclosed until the FOI forced it.
Baroness Falkner chaired the EHRC from 2020 until November last year. She told The Times the government had been warned repeatedly that the definition would restrict legitimate criticism of a religion, and that it pursued it regardless in pursuit of "a Muslim vote which they have, for far too long, taken for granted."
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THE DELETION
The second FOI came from the Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Timothy. It revealed that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has deleted every response submitted to the working group's call for evidence.
The department says the responses contained a large volume of special category personal data on religious belief and political opinion, which under the Data Protection Act 2018 could not be kept beyond the life of the consultation. That's what they say. It is nonsense.
Other departments keep consultation responses for years. The Treasury retains consultation material indefinitely as a historic record and unpublished personal information for three years. MHCLG itself tells respondents to its other consultations that their personal information will be kept for two years.
Departments redact the names and keep the rest, because the rest is the only record of who told them what to write. Here they deleted all of it.
MEND is one of the organisations the government says it will not engage with. Yet MEND has published the submission it says it made to the working group. It also ran a campaign urging its supporters to submit evidence themselves, providing guidance on what it wanted them to say.
MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development) presents itself as an organisation campaigning against Islamophobia and for greater Muslim participation in politics.
But successive governments have treated it very differently. The 2023 Independent Review of Prevent singled MEND out over its opposition to Prevent and cited the former national lead for Counter Terrorism Policing accusing it of “fostering grievances and isolation”.
The then Home Secretary subsequently said police and other public authorities should not fund or work with organisations that “legitimise extremism, such as CAGE or MEND”.
Labour has continued the policy of non-engagement: its Communities Department says it does not engage with MEND and would tell Parliament only that government engages with organisations when it is “in the public interest”.
Ministers were later asked directly whether MEND, CAGE, the Muslim Association of Britain or the Muslim Council of Britain had submitted written evidence. They did not answer. They said only that the call for evidence was open to everyone and repeated that the government does not engage with those organisations.
Now we cannot check. The submissions have been deleted.
Timothy has written to the department's interim permanent secretary demanding answers. Rayner returned to the department as Communities Secretary on 20 July and the letter is on her desk. Nothing published establishes when the deletion happened or who authorised it.
I'm not saying she did it. Her department adopted a definition that reaches beyond criminal conduct, was warned by the equalities watchdog that it risked chilling lawful speech, urged organisations across the public, private and third sectors to adopt it, and then deleted the only record of who asked for it.
THE PRICE
In the same months, a retired Cleveland police officer was prosecuted for a joke.
Stephen Gray, 65, nearly thirty years in the force, a foster carer, reshared two posts on Facebook. On 30 April 2026 a District Judge at Newton Aycliffe ruled the first, about immigration, was not an offence. The second was an image of bacon with the words "People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a nine-year-old!"
Gray told the court it was satire pointing at the recorded age of Aisha at the consummation of her marriage and the acceptability of child marriage that follows from it.
Gray told the court the meme was satire intended to provoke a serious debate about child marriage. District Judge Steven Hood rejected that argument, finding that its light-hearted nature meant it was not making a serious political point and that it had been designed to offend. He convicted Gray under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for sending a grossly offensive message.
Hundreds of people shared the same post. One was prosecuted. The complainant was his neighbour, and not a Muslim. Gray is appealing to the Crown Court in November.
Max Thompson
That conviction came under a law from 2003, before any definition existed, so nobody can say the definition caused it. What it shows is the climate the definition arrives into.
Parliament abolished blasphemy in 2008. Since then the police and Crown Prosecution Service have been able to reach the same result for one religion by deciding which of the hundreds of people who shared a post gets charged, and the courts have gone along with it. Until now, an officer making that decision had to own it. From now on, he can point to a government definition and say the decision was made for him.
THE RECORD AND THE VERDICT
- A vote that behaves as a bloc withdrew from Labour in 2024 and was delivered to the Gaza Independents and then the Greens in 2026 by a party whose deputy leader you've just read about.
- Within seven months of losing the bloc the government commissioned a definition.
- Within weeks of losing Gorton it announced one. The equalities watchdog was excluded, warned, ignored and then privately asked to sign.
- The consultation evidence was destroyed.
- The report is unpublished.
- An organisation the government refuses to meet says it lobbied the process, and the government will not say whether it listened.
- A retired police officer now has a criminal record for a meme.
That's the record. Now what I think.
Labour wanted its Muslim voters back and could not pay the price they were asking. So it gave them something that cost Labour nothing. The rest of us pay. It doesn't change a word on Gaza. It keeps the men who deliver wards happy. The bill goes to Stephen Gray and to everyone who now thinks twice before saying what he said.
I have spent eight years writing about how this works in Oldham. Labour did not hold that town by persuading anyone. It held it because a small number of men in the Musim community could deliver whole wards, and the party gave them what they wanted in return. Council seats. Grants. Silence.
When Pakistani heritage men were raping White girls across the borough, the people who could have stopped it understood that saying so out loud would cost them the men who delivered the votes. So they did not say so. The girls were the price.
This is the same arrangement moved to Westminster. The vote walked in 2024 and walked again in Gorton. The party that took it printed its terms on a leaflet: "Stop Islamophobia." Labour cannot give them Gaza. It can give them a definition that makes criticism dangerous, and it has.
The people who will pay for it are the same as the girls that were gang raped. They are a retired policeman in County Durham, and every person who now works out what they are allowed to say before they say it.
In towns like Oldham, the currency was children. Now, across the entire country, it is free speech. The buyers, the sellers and the reasons remain the same.
I’m Raja Miah MBE. For eight years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.
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