Labour's game plan for a Commons majority, to win people and places that were not already onside, was executed to perfection when reaching out.
By Sunder KatwalaJul 09, 2024
“Change”. That was what this election was about. Change, above all, from Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. Fourteen million voted Conservative last time. Fewer than seven million did this time. The Conservatives lost a quarter of the vote to Reform on the right and another quarter to their left. The losses on either flank were enough for Sunak to lose power on their own. The combination was devastating. When it came to seats, the Conservatives lost a handful to the Greens and Reform – while many were swept away by the Lib Dems and Labour.
Labour won a crushing, yet curious victory. This 1997-style landslide of 412 seats was won on the lowest turnout since 2001 and a lower vote share than in 2005, or for any previous winning government. The new electoral map suggests Labour has a “coalition of everywhere” – making sweeping gains across Scotland, winning back every ‘Red Wall’ seat lost in 2019, having the most seats in every region and making once-in-a-century gains in Cheshire, Somerset and Norfolk.
Labour’s game plan for a Commons majority, to win people and places that were not already onside, was executed to perfection when reaching out. But the message – that the party was prioritising people and places who do not habitually vote Labour – was also heard by those who normally do.
Bristol Central ousted Labour to strengthen the Green voice – offering a cosmopolitan counterblast to Nigel Farage’s insurgency in Clacton on the Essex coast. Islington North chose to keep Jeremy Corbyn in parliament. Labour’s support was down among the under 40s, generally, but it fell most of all, by an average of 20 per cent, in constituencies where most voters are not white.
Most black voters still voted Labour, on a reduced turnout. But 2024 was the first modern general election when most British Asian voters did not vote Labour. Focaldata’s ‘How Britain voted’ analysis estimates that Labour averaged 43 per cent across Asian voters as a whole, with the Conservatives on 20 per cent, and around one in 10 for each of the Lib Dems (nine per cent), Greens (11 per cent) and independents (10 per cent). Voting patterns and the reasons for voters’ choices will clearly differ across different groups and generations.
Sir Keir Starmer’s party lost around half a million Muslim voters – usually to its left – as the ‘Gaza effect’ outstripped that after Iraq in 2005. Alongside Corbyn in Islington, Labour lost four more seats to independents in Birmingham, Blackburn, Dewsbury and Leicester South, all constituencies with large Muslim electorates. Yet the party still holds 46 of the 50 constituencies with the largest Muslim populations, as it held all of its east London seats, on reduced majorities, and gained three more, removing George Galloway in Rochdale and taking Peterborough and Wycombe from the Conservatives. Pro-Gaza candidates won less support in the south than in the Midlands and Yorkshire.
Meanwhile, Tory progress with Indian voters helped to make Harrow East the sole constituency in Britain where the Conservatives reached 50 per cent. The Church of England was once called ‘the Tory party at prayer’, but the Hindu temples of Harrow might now contest that title. There was even one Tory gain in Leicester East, on a night of 250 losses, as Shivani Raja, not yet 30, defeated both her Labour opponent and the constituency’s previous two Labour MPs. Keith Vaz came fifth with under 4,000 votes. Most Leicester voters found their veteran MP of three decades an unlikely champion of change.
Beyond Harrow and Leicester, Labour still holds 26 of the 28 Westminster constituencies where most voters are Asian. Its strong parliamentary presence offers Labour MPs opportunities to reconnect – but a governing party will struggle unless it roots those efforts with voters from specific groups in a more coherent approach to engage fairly and effectively in a diverse democracy with citizens from all minority and majority groups at the same time.
Sunder Katwala
There is more change in the Commons than ever before - 335 first-time MPs and 15 retreads outnumber the 300 re-elected incumbents. With 90 ethnic minority MPs, it is the first time the House of Commons reflects the diversity of the electorate. But there is less ethnic diversity in the Starmer government than in recent Tory administrations, with three ethnic minority ministers around the Cabinet table – David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and Lisa Nandy – but nobody among the ministers of state, demonstrating a weak Labour pipeline from its strong parliamentary representation to bigger leadership roles.
The test of this new government will be delivering change. The Rwanda scheme was scrapped on day one. It has a mandate to build – favouring YIMBYS over NIMBYS – and promises to focus on growth, the NHS, energy and breaking down barriers to opportunity.
Labour should govern for its new “coalition of everywhere” – but the election tactics of the opposition made some people and places more equal than others. It will be important to rebalance that in government: a decade of national renewal depends on ensuring that everywhere really does mean everywhere.
Finding romance today feels like trying to align stars in a night sky that refuses to stay still
When was the last time you stumbled into a conversation that made your heart skip? Or exchanged a sweet beginning to a love story - organically, without the buffer of screens, swipes, or curated profiles? In 2025, those moments feel rarer, swallowed up by the quickening pace of life.
We are living faster than ever before. Cities hum with noise and neon, people race between commitments, and ambition seems to be the rhythm we all march to. In the process, the simple art of connection - eye contact, lingering conversations, the gentle patience of getting to know someone - feels like it is slipping through our fingers.
Whether you’re single, searching, or settled, the landscape is shifting. Some turn to apps for convenience; others look for love in cafés, gyms, workplaces or community spaces. But the challenge remains the same: how do we connect deeply in a world designed to move at lightning speed?
We’ve become fluent in productivity, in chasing careers, in cultivating polished identities. Yet are we forgetting how to be fluent in intimacy? When was the last time you sat across from someone and truly listened - without checking your phone, without planning the next step, without treating time like a currency to be spent?
It’s a strange paradox: we have more access to people than ever before, yet many feel more isolated. Fun is always available - dinners, drinks, nights out, fleeting encounters - but fulfilment is harder to grasp. Are we mistaking access for intimacy? Are we human, or are we slowly adapting into versions of ourselves stripped of those raw, humanistic qualities - vulnerability, patience, tenderness - that once defined love?
Perhaps we’ve grown comfortable with the fast exit. It’s easier to ghost than to explain. Easier to keep moving than to pause. But what does that cost us? What do we lose when romance becomes a checkbox on an already overstuffed to-do list?
The truth is - the heart doesn’t move at the pace of technology or ambition. It moves slowly, awkwardly, with a rhythm that resists acceleration. Maybe that’s the point. Love has always lived in the messy spaces - hesitant pauses, nervous laughter, words spoken without rehearsal.
So the real question for 2025 is not “Have we gone too far?” but “Can we afford to slow down?” Can we still allow ourselves the sweetness of beginnings - the chance encounters, the unplanned moments, the quiet courage to be open?
Because in the end, connection is not about speed or access—it’s about presence. In a world that won’t stop moving, choosing to be present might be the bravest act of love we have left.
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Shabana Mahmood, US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, Canada’s public safety minister Gary Anandasangaree, Australia’s home affairs minister Tony Burke and New Zealand’s attorney general Judith Collins at the Five Eyes security alliance summit on Monday (8)
PRIME MINISTER Keir Starmer’s government is not working. That is the public verdict, one year in. So, he used his deputy Angela Rayner’s resignation to hit the reset button.
It signals a shift in his own theory of change. Starmer wanted his mission-led government to avoid frequent shuffles of his pack, so that ministers knew their briefs. Such a dramatic reshuffle shows that the prime minister has had enough of subject expertise for now, gambling instead that fresh eyes may bring bold new energy to intractable challenges on welfare and asylum.
“Can Shabana Mahmood save Keir Starmer?” is the question being asked in Westminster. Small boats are increasingly talked about as an existential risk to the government. It will not be the only issue at the next general election – the economy and public services will matter, too – but Labour fear being unable to get heard on anything else without visible progress in the Channel.
The new home secretary has been asked to “think the unthinkable”. Ministers and MPs should be eager to try anything that might work – but might heed the lessons of six years of failure to stop the boats as they do. It is hardly as if former Conservative home secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman were unwilling to brainstorm the unthinkable, nor indeed to legislate the unworkable. If performative gestures – asylum seekers on barges – could stop the boats, it would have been all quiet in the Channel long ago.
As justice secretary, Mahmood’s voice was tough on crime, reflecting her communitarianism. Yet her policy involved a liberalism of necessity. With the prisons overflowing, shortening sentences and seeking public consent for alternative forms of punishment was unavoidable. Number 10 media briefings about being willing to make Labour MPs ‘queasy’ on asylum could – ironically – be a form of comfort zone politics; a distraction from tougher choices that might actually work. Hotel use for asylum could end in 2026 – not 2029 – if ministers both streamlined appeals and gave asylum seekers from high-risk countries limited leave to remain – with the right to work and the responsibility to house themselves. It could save billions, if the government can navigate the political risks. Labour’s challenge is to show how it can deliver an orderly and humane system by cooperating with allies, not ripping up treaties.
Migrants in a dinghy crossing the English Channel
As Mahmood becomes the most prominent British Asian and British Muslim in public life, others project contradictory ideas of what they imagine her politics, faith and personality mean. It is curious that Maurice Glasman could declare her the new leader of his Blue Labour faction (though Mahmood does not share the baron’s misplaced enthusiasm for US president Donald Trump) while Reform donor Aaron Banks declared that a Muslim lawyer as home secretary would immediately ‘open the floodgates’ to refugees from Gaza, exemplifying more about his presumptions and prejudices, than her politics.
There is no novelty in a British Asian home secretary now. Sajid Javid broke that ceiling in the Conservative government of 2018, yet Mahmood is already the fifth visible minority politician to hold that office. However, overt racism towards her goes unchecked on X/Twitter – where radicalised site owner and US businessman Elon Musk is infinitely more likely to retweet than to suspend racist voices who say no Muslim should ever be home secretary. That is Tommy Robinson’s view – yet Musk champions his London march on Saturday (13), where ex-soldier and minor TV celebrity Ant Middleton will pitch a London mayoral campaign founded on the absurdly racist proposition that Sadiq Khan, Mahmood and Conservatives opposition leader Kemi Badenoch should be barred from high office if their grandparents were not British-born.
This is the curious paradox of multi-ethnic Britain today: British Asian faces in high places have never been more common. Yet a vocal minority challenges the equal status of ethnic and faith minorities more aggressively than for a generation. It is not just the government that must show more leadership by speaking up to defend our multi-ethnic society. Every civic institution can contribute to how we respect differences and strengthen our common ground.
Knowing our history better is one vital foundation. Everyone is aware of this country’s pride in defeating fascism matters – but fewer know that the armies that won the war look more like our modern Britain of 2025 than that of 1945. Half of the public do know that Indian soldiers took part. Not so many understand that Hindu, Sikh and Muslim soldiers fought alongside British officers in the largest volunteer army the world has ever seen. The My Family Legacy campaign from British Future, the Royal British Legion and Eastern Eye will help British Asian families find and tell their stories. Writing this vital chapter fully into our national history remains work in progress – but can show why national symbols, like the poppy, belong to us all and can help to bring this diverse society together.
Sunder Katwala
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
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Indian infantrymen on the march in France in October 1914 during World War I. (Photo: Getty Images)
This country should never forget what we all owe to those who won the second world war against fascism. So the 80th anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day this year have had a special poignancy in bringing to life how the historic events that most of us know from grainy black and white photographs or newsreel footage are still living memories for a dwindling few.
People do sometimes wonder if the meaning of these great historic events will fade in an increasingly diverse Britain. If we knew our history better, we would understand why that should not be the case.
For the armies that fought and won both world wars look more like the Britain of 2025 in their ethnic and faith mix than the Britain of 1945 or 1918. The South Asian soldiers were the largest volunteer army in history, yet ensuring that their enormous contribution is fully recognised in our national story remains an important work in progress.
About half of the public do know that Indian soldiers took part. It is better known among British Asians - with almost 6 out of 10 aware of the contribution. Yet while that means that more than three million British Asians have heard something about this, that suggests too that a couple of million of Asians in Britain today remain unaware of the South Asian contribution to the war effort.
It is less well understood that Hindu, Sikh and Muslim soldiers fought alongside British officers in the largest volunteer army that the world has ever seen. About four in ten report being aware that there were Hindu and Sikh soldiers in the Indian Army - while just under a third are aware of the Muslim contribution. Yet there is an appetite to learn more. Three-quarters of the public believe that learning more about this history could help social cohesion in Britain. It is a view held as strongly by the white British and by British Asians.
So the My Family Legacy project from British Future, the Royal British Legion and Eastern Eye seeks to make a contribution to doing that. It aims to raise awareness of the South Asian contribution in the world wars, among South Asian communities and people from all backgrounds in Britain today. It asks British Asian families to share stories and pictures of ancestors who served, creating an archive for future generations.
When we talk about the Indian Army, we are talking about the army drawn from the India of the 1940s. This was pre-independence India – so it included modern day India and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The Indian Army grew from 195,000 men in the Autumn of 1939 to over 2 million by the end of the war. A fledgling Indian Air Force went from 285 men to 29,000. This made the Indian army of the Second World War the largest volunteer army in history.
It may sound strange to our modern ears: that Indian soldiers would volunteer for the army of the British imperial power. Yet those who volunteered often saw the German and Japanese regimes as an existential threat as well as believing that India should govern itself after the war. So the Indian Army volunteers outnumbered – by a 50:1 ratio – the 43,000 rebels who heeded the call to form a rebel army for the Germans and Japanese.
We should not shy away from the complexity and controversies of understanding that we are a post-imperial society. But this country’s role in winning the Second World War should always endure as a source of shared pride.
It matters because we should honour the past properly: we should recognise the service and commemorate the sacrifice of all who contributed, especially when the liberties of all of us today are their legacy.
Yet this matters too because of how it can help us to look forward as well as back and help us to bind together our society today. To have a story of how our past, present and future are linked, is an important part of what it means to be a nation. Understanding the diversity of the war effort is a crucial way to join the dots in the making of modern post-war Britain.
That becomes all the more important in times like these, when a vocal, visible and toxic minority are making their most aggressive attempt for a generation to all into question the equal status and very presence of ethnic minorities in Britain.
Yet the toxic and racist far right fringe have always been deeply ignorant of the history of which they claim to be so proud. What could be more absurd than neo-fascists trying to wrap themselves in the very flag under which we defeated fascism - especially when that victory over fascism was achieved by multi-ethnic and multi-faith armies just as diverse as the modern Britain which honours today the victory which made this democratic and diverse society possible.
So this new effort to help people to find, document and tell their family stories of courage and contribution, service and sacrifice can make a difference. It can help show how our national symbols and traditions of Remembrance can bring today's modern, diverse Britain together ever more powerfully when we commemorate all of those who served.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
How noticing the changes in my father taught me the importance of early action, patience, and love
I don’t understand people who don’t talk or see their parents often. Unless they have done something to ruin your lives or you had a traumatic childhood, there is no reason you shouldn’t be checking in with them at least every few days if you don’t live with them.
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of looking after my parents – they lived with me while their old house was being sold, and their new house was being renovated.
Within this time, I noticed things happening to my dad (Chamanlal Mulji), an 81-year-old retired joiner. Dad was known as Simba when he lived in Zanzibar, East Africa because he was like a lion. A man in fairly good health, despite being an ex-smoker, he’d only had heart surgery back in 2017. In the last few years, he was having some health issues, but certain things, like his walking and driving becoming slow, and his memory failing, we just put down to old age. Now, my dad was older than my friend’s dad. Many of whom in their 70’s, dad, at 81 was an older dad, not common back in the seventies when he married my mum.
It was only when I spent extended time around my parents that I started noticing that certain things weren’t just due to old age. Some physical symptoms were more serious, but certain things like forgetting that the front door wasn’t the bathroom door, and talking about old memories thinking that they had recently happened rang alarm bells for me and I suspected that he might have dementia.
Dementia generally happens in old age when the brain starts to shrink. Someone described it to me as a person’s brain being like a bookshelf. The books at the top of the shelf are the new memories and the books at the bottom are the new memories. The books at the top have fallen off, leaving only the old memories being remembered. People with dementia are also highly likely to suffer from strokes.
Sadly, my dad was one of the few that suffered a stroke and passed away on 28th June 2025. If you have a parent, family member or anyone you know and you suspect that they might have dementia, please talk to your GP straight away. Waiting lists within the NHS are extremely LONG so the quicker people with dementia are treated, the better. Sadly, the illness cannot be reversed but medication can help it from getting worse.
One thing I would also advise is to have patience. Those suffering with dementia can be agitated and often become aggressive, but that’s only because they’re frustrated that they cannot do things the way they used to.
The disease might hide the person underneath, but there’s still a person in there who needs your love and attention.” - Jamie Calandriello
This one is for you, dad x
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DIVISIVE AGENDA:Police clash withprotesters outside Epping councilafter a march from the Bell Hotelhousing asylum seekers last Sunday(31)
August is dubbed 'the silly season’ as the media must fill the airwaves with little going on. But there was a more sinister undertone to how that vacation news vacuum got filled this year. The recurring story of the political summer was the populist right’s confidence in setting the agenda and the anxiety of opponents about how to respond.
Tensions were simmering over asylum. Yet frequent predictions of mass unrest failed to materialise. The patchwork of local protests and counter-protests had a strikingly different geography to last summer. The sporadic efforts of disorder came in the affluent southern suburbs of Epping and Hillingdon, Canary Wharf and Cheshunt with no disorder and few large protests in the thirty towns that saw riots last August. Prosecutions, removing local ringleaders, deter. Local cohesion has been a higher priority where violence broke out than everywhere else. Hotel use for asylum has halved - and is more common in the south. The Home Office went to court to keep asylum seekers in Epping’s Bell Hotel, for now, yet stresses its goal to stop using hotels by 2029. The Refugee Council’s pragmatic suggestion of giving time-limited leave to remain to asylum seekers from the five most dangerous countries could halve the need for hotels within months.
The drumbeat from hyping up the asylum protests helped those trying to shift the political argument to the right. Reform leader Nigel Farage set out his plans on asylum: to abolish it entirely. Any asylum seekers who did arrive would be sent somewhere, anywhere else - perhaps to a faraway island, or back to the regimes they had fled. Farage’s opponents offered the most muted criticism. Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch declared he had copied the Conservatives’ homework. The government’s main point was that Farage had not shown how it would all work in practice. The Taliban said they would be delighted for Farage to deliver those who had fled their persecution back into their clutches - and would hardly need a cash bribe, too. Opinion polls showing broad public revulsion at this idea might yet encourage opponents to challenge the principles, not just the practicalities, of Reform’s plans.
A year ago, Farage said he would not pitch ‘mass deportation’ plans that were impossible to deliver. Doing exactly that, his former MP Rupert Lowe declared this a victory for the online right - but said he would keep pushing for a ‘proper deportations’ plan to remove many millions of legal migrants too. An increasingly radicalised Elon Musk critiqued Farage’s plans as “weak sauce”, promoting Tommy Robinson’s far right street protests and even the furthest right factions who decry Robinson for not advocating the forced deportation of British-born minorities too. Even as Musk shows no limits to which racists he will personally promote, the government stays mute on an epidemic of online racism. It is a strange world where the expectations we place on every primary and secondary school on British values, tolerance, respect and the rule of law go out of the window when the world’s richest man promotes neo-Nazis. If the government cannot find a voice to challenge racism, it can expect no credibility when it talks about community cohesion from ethnic minority Britons - nor, I would hope, from many of our fellow citizens too.
It was a summer when flags could be symbols of both pride and prejudice. We wore red and white face-paint in the Katwala household to cheer England’s Lionesses to winning the women’s Euros. The St George’s bunting in our High Street in Dartford has a welcoming intent, but the red paint crosses daubed messily on our street sign send a more intimidating message. An important British ethnic minority response - from the Windrush onwards - to those questioning our status as British has been that the racists should try to learn a little bit more of the history of our country. We should be loath to let our national flags be claimed as symbols of exclusion, by those of all ethnicities and faiths doing more to say and show what they can mean when we fly them together.
That depends on preventing the populist right setting the agenda by default. The irony of Farage being dubbed a populist is that he is often on the unpopular side of most major issues - slashing public spending, scrapping human rights, ditching closer UK-EU post-Brexit links, or not bothering about climate change. Yet Farage often speaks much more confidently for what a quarter of the public think than those who could try to mobilise the anti-populist majority. So the stakes are high for prime minister Sir Keir Starmer this autumn. If Starmer does not find a stronger response, populism may turn out to be more than a passing storm, exposing a lack of strategy, leadership, and ethics that could prove fatal for this government.