Labour surveys UK Muslim voters as Burnham seeks to rebuild trust

Nearly a month into Andy Burnham's premiership, Labour is confronting one of the most consequential fractures left by the Keir Starmer years - the collapse in trust among many Muslim voters who once reliably supported the party.

On Monday, the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) launched a survey of current and former Muslim Labour members and supporters, seeking to measure attitudes towards the party under its new leadership and what it would take to win them back.

"The election of Andy Burnham MP as Labour leader and Prime Minister presents us a unique opportunity to reset the Labour Party's relationship with Muslims across Britain," an LMN spokesperson told The New Arab. "We know that many Muslims have lost trust in our Party over the last few years. New leadership gives us a new chance to win back their support and trust."

The survey offers an early attempt to quantify the scale of that challenge.

Respondents are asked how positively they view the Labour Party and Burnham, how likely they are to vote Labour at the next general election, and which issues matter most to them, including the Gaza war and the cost-of-living crisis.

They are also asked how they would like to see Labour change its approach to Gaza, an issue that became one of the most damaging fault lines between the party and Muslim voters under Starmer.

The survey comes almost a month into Burnham's time in office, during which he has pledged to reach out to supporters lost under the previous government, particularly those in Britain's "forgotten" regions.

But repairing Labour's relationship with Muslim voters means confronting the legacy of nearly two years under Starmer, during which the party lost significant numbers of supporters to independent candidates and the Green Party, while Reform UK made gains among other parts of Labour's traditional electoral coalition.

Starmer's 2024 election victory delivered Labour a landslide parliamentary majority of 172 seats. But beneath the scale of that victory was a sharp erosion of support among Muslim and left-wing voters, leading some observers to describe the result as a "Pyrrhic victory".

Much of the anger among Muslim voters centred on Gaza.

Starmer faced intense criticism over his early support for Israel's war, particularly after an October 2023 interview with LBC in which the then opposition leader said Israel "had the right" to withhold water and power from millions of Palestinians.

Labour also resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire during the early months of the war.

After rejecting a Scottish National Party motion calling for an end to the war, Labour called for an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire" days later, prompting accusations that the party had been playing politics with the issue. By then, Israel had killed at least 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

The political consequences became visible at the ballot box.

Labour's position on Gaza was widely seen as helping fuel the rise of pro-Palestine independent candidates, particularly in parts of northern England and constituencies with large Muslim populations.

In Leicester South, independent candidate Shockat Adam defeated Labour's shadow health secretary, while elsewhere pro-Palestine candidates came close to unseating prominent Labour figures, including Wes Streeting.

Once in Downing Street, Starmer's relationship with Palestine activists deteriorated further.

His government oversaw a wider crackdown on protest freedoms, particularly around Palestine activism, and proscribed the direct-action group Palestine Action in July 2025, placing it on the same legal footing as groups including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.

Thousands of protesters were subsequently arrested amid demonstrations opposing the ban and Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Can Burnham win them back?

Burnham has sought to draw a line between his leadership and some of the decisions that alienated those voters.

He has acknowledged that Labour "didn't get it right" on Gaza, remarks widely interpreted as an olive branch to Muslim communities and other voters who abandoned the party over its handling of the war.

But the new prime minister has stopped short of accepting one of the central demands of many Palestine campaigners, resisting calls to recognise Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, despite that conclusion being reached by UN experts, leading human rights organisations and genocide scholars.

That leaves Gaza as an early test of how far Burnham's promised reset will go.

The LMN survey asks respondents not only how important the issue remains to them, but what Labour would have to change about its approach.

The answers could provide an early indication of whether a change of leader is enough to repair a political relationship damaged over several years, or whether Muslim voters expect a more fundamental break with the policies of the Starmer era.

For LMN, the opportunity presented by Burnham's arrival is clear. Whether that opportunity translates into renewed support is the question the organisation is now putting directly to Muslim voters.

The results are expected to be published in several weeks.