The revolt on Streeting’s doorstep Leanne Mohamad is poised to overthrow him

In a basement in Ilford, the scene is decorated as if for a wedding. White plastic flowers adorn the walls; neat rows of chairs face the stage. Elderly leftists, young Palestine activists with leaflets that warn of state repression and a clutch of young Muslims have gathered here on a cold November evening to watch not a marriage but a conversation: Taj Ali, a young journalist, is due to speak to Leanne Mohamad, a still younger pro-Palestine independent politician, about how to defeat the far-Right.

Just over a year ago, Mohamad, smartly turned out tonight in a brown wool blazer and flared trousers, ran Labour’s Wes Streeting to within 530 votes at the general election with a pitch heavy on his alleged complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza. The British-Palestinian campaigner was just 24 at the time. “There is a growing appetite to move away from this two-party system,” she told ITV afterwards. “We are not going away.”

In person, Mohamad radiates youthful sincerity. If there were a vibes-based spectrum of Britain’s pro-Palestine independents, it would stretch from Birmingham’s brash, Prada-wearing Akhmed Yakoob at one end to the warm and polite Mohamad at the other. When an elderly couple approach her to say they wished she had managed to win, she smiles broadly and commiserates with them. 

Thanks to these personal qualities — and Labour’s polling nosedive — Mohamad’s supporters remain convinced they can oust Streeting next time. For the Health Secretary, who has never concealed his ambition to become the Prime Minister one day, this is a problem. He insists publicly he will not make a chicken run to a safer seat. But the shifting demographic tides in Ilford that allowed him to seize this constituency from the Conservatives a decade ago now threaten to sink him.

On stage, Mohamad and Ali conduct a nuanced discussion of the British political scene to the right of the Tories, which is undergoing a process of ideological foment at least as turbulent as that taking place on the Left in Ilford. He clarifies the difference between Tommy Robinson, an Israel supporter, and Nick Griffin, an opponent. She explains that she would like to host events on Fridays, but won’t in order that Jewish supporters are able to attend.

When the conversation is opened up to the audience, however, it takes on a harsher tone. An elderly gentleman in a black baseball cap stands up to say he used to be a Labour councillor but that he could now kill Keir Starmer. A young man haltingly asks for advice on how he can avoid befriending extremists. Old men ramble on about Winston Churchill and the impending collapse of the West and how useful idiots are secretly being paid to attend far-Right protests. 

For many Muslims and others on the Left, Starmer’s timidity on Gaza has marked a turning point. Labour’s share of the Muslim vote fell by almost 20% at the last election. But with the failure of Your Party to seize on this momentum, it appears that at least for now the opposition will remain local. 

In Ilford — which sits within the London Borough of Redbridge — this has been driven by a remarkable demographic transition over the last 20 years. When the 2001 census was taken, a majority of its inhabitants were Christians and less than 12% were Muslim. Three quarters had been born in England and 64% were white. By 2021, however, Muslims were the single largest religious group and Asians had risen from a quarter to 47% of the population; 45% of residents had been born outside England. 

While many people I spoke to in Ilford said the area retained a strong sense of community, some older white inhabitants feel they have been left adrift. Standing at a junction near Streeting’s office, Martin, a retired loss adjuster who has lived in Ilford for decades, told me the transformation had been “massive and fast”. 

He is not racially prejudiced, he insisted unprompted, a woollen hat pulled down towards his eyes — but he is concerned that migrants and their descendants living in Redbridge have not integrated. “They keep themselves to themselves,” he said. “When I walk past women on the street they look down.” While at his GP’s practice recently, he had spoken to a young Muslim lady who told him her life was controlled by her father, who acted as if they were still living in Pakistan. Politicians just did not seem to understand what was happening to his community, he said.

Martin’s friends have gradually moved out into Essex to get away. Some are now in Ongar (95% white) and others are in Shenfield (88% white). He and his wife plan to stay, though. Their road remains ethnically mixed and their neighbours are friendly. But they are less comfortable than they used to be.

Fred, who also did not wish to provide his surname, said he thought Ilford was improving. They had at least got rid of the beggars. His voice shaking with age, he said he had once been homeless himself, but he had never begged. He just played music from a speaker and people tossed him coins. He didn’t ask for them. So when he sees beggars now, he does this to them, he said, shoving two fingers up at my face. And when he sees asylum seekers who have washed up on small boats getting housing it makes him angry with the politicians who never helped him.

The Asian families who sparked this demographic shift by moving to Ilford were following a well-worn groove. For decades, white British and Jewish eastenders made the same journey up the Central Line to secure gardens and larger houses. Today, Ilford North still bears the marks of an upwardly mobile suburb: pebbledash facades replaced by creamy render; windowsills and gutters accented black; flash cars hidden under grey sheeting. 

When Vaseem Ahmed’s parents moved to Britain from Pakistan in the Sixties, they settled in Walthamstow, where he was raised. But by the time his children were preparing for their GCSEs, he wanted to live somewhere with better schools, so he followed many of his friends and headed out to Ilford. Now, he told me over coffee in Naan Staap, a brightly decorated Indian street food cafe above the basement in which Mohamad’s supporters had met the month before, he could not afford to move back.

Like his parents, Ahmed had always supported the Labour party. He knew Streeting well, he claimed, and had fought to get him elected in 2015. But in the wake of October 7, when Starmer said Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza, he rejected the party and helped to found the Redbridge Community Action Group (RCAG). It was this organisation that would later select Mohamad to stand against Streeting. 

Ahmed, who has neat salt and pepper hair and a beard, is now the leader of the party that may end up running his council after next year’s local elections: Redbridge & Ilford Independents. Gaza was, he said, the “oomph” that pushed them to act. But Muslim voters have been trending away from the Labour party for a long time. “Labour have been in power for a decade [on Redbridge Council] now and the area’s gone down, council taxes are going up,” he said. “People are fed up.”

Aside from Palestine, the focus is on local issues and, in that respect, the independents differ little from the revolts that bubble up in comparatively affluent suburbs anywhere in the country. The party would like to prevent the construction of new housing and fear that tower blocks will blight the area. They believe the council is wasting taxpayers’ money by building a lido in a local park. They resent flytippers and do not want Ilford to become a “ghetto” like Newham.

The Muslim community breaking with their traditional voting habits was less a sign of insularity, he said, than of growing engagement with their country. “People like my parents, when they first come over, they would have voted Labour regardless, yeah? It was the thing to do because they’re much more sympathetic when it comes to things like immigration.”

While his father was a bus driver, Ahmed is a recruitment consultant. His brother was a major in the British Army. Several of his siblings have degrees. “With education comes awareness as well… You’re a bit more clued-up and you think, ‘I’m not just gonna vote for the same people that my parents voted for, just because it’s Labour and because it’s red.’ You start then looking into things and you think, ‘Well, hold on. What’s the benefit for me, and my family, my community, of voting for these guys, yeah?’” His parents’ generation had built the first wave of infrastructure for the British Muslim community: halal butchers, mosques, Islamic schools. His contribution will be building a political party.

For many voters in Ilford, such a development will come as a welcome step. Meera, out pushing her newborn baby on a bright December morning, said she felt embarrassed to have voted for Streeting at the last election. She had always supported Labour and wished to block the Tories from power, but was now disgusted with his stance on Palestine. Her local area, meanwhile, was beginning to deteriorate thanks to the cost-of-living crisis and years of austerity. “I wish we had an MP in the area we could respect,” she said. At the next election she will likely vote for Mohamad. 

In March, the Redbridge & Ilford Independents scored a major victory when they won a council by-election in Mayfield ward, formerly solidly Labour. The poll was called when Jas Athwal, the MP for Ilford South and a local party stalwart, resigned his council seat over revelations that he had been renting out flats with black mould and ant infestations.

Now, the seat is represented by Noor Jahan Begum, who was also selected by RCAG to stand against Athwal at the last general election. Almost as soon as she won, however, she was accused of impropriety. She had handed out leaflets that claimed Tanweer Khan, a Labour representative, did not wish to divest the council’s pension fund from Israel — a move that he was unable to carry out because of his fiduciary duties. Khan claimed that Begum had been part of a “targeted campaign” to “stalk, harass and endanger him as a sitting councillor”. Begum in turn claimed Khan had harassed her in the street, though an investigation found that her claims were malicious and intended to smear. 

Until recently, Khan told me, local politics in the area had never descended to this level. For the first time in his life he had started to feel “genuinely unsafe” in his own neighbourhood. He told the investigation that it would be hard to get his daughters married if their father were branded a Zionist in the community. One point on which Begum and Khan both agreed in their testimony to the inquiry was that this might only be the start. They both feared that next year’s local elections could spark a further increase in hostility.

Despite these rising tensions, Streeting remains confident in public he can win. Speaking recently to the Spectator, he insisted he would not dash to a safer seat. Ilford North is his home. There is also no question that Streeting commands a level of personal support that is uncommon. A focus group conducted by Lord Ashcroft in Ilford last month found that several Labour voters felt an imperative to stick by him. One dubbed him a “really, really decent guy”.

When I spoke to a source close to the Health Secretary, they insisted there was still a path to victory, but they could not express much confidence about its chances of succeeding. If an independent candidate stood against him, they said, Left-wing voters might tack behind their MP to prevent a split that would let in Reform. This would mirror what Labour hopes people will do on a national level when faced with the prospect of a Nigel Farage-led government. 

What’s more, they said, there is a belief that Ilford North has more people opposed to the pro-Palestine independents than in support of them. Streeting has not given up on Reform-curious voters, either — and there is a hope that many on the Right will eventually consolidate behind him. When I related this theory to one local Tory voter, however, he simply laughed. He had no interest in saving Streeting. He knew the future was Leanne Mohamad. 

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