Her six-month suspension is up in January, pending a review. Sultana revealed she doesn’t know the terms of the review. An email from the chief whip, sent after the vote, simply told her she was expected to vote with Labour and that: “At the end of this period, I will make a judgement about restoring the whip based on your conduct during the suspension and your willingness to comply with the whip in the future.”
Zarah Sultana was in the dark over the rest of the process, she said: “It could be I get an email, it could be a call to a meeting, it could be something briefed out to journalists and then I just read about it on Twitter. I really don’t know.”
‘If a Labour government isn’t committed to ending child poverty and ending pension poverty, then what do you stand for?’
Labour may be on shakier ground with the public than many are willing to realise, she said. “In voting for the Labour Party, it wasn’t because they ultimately believed in the vision or all of the policies. In many ways, it was just to get rid of the Tories,” she said.
Take Gaza: it has been credited with a massive fall in Labour’s Muslim vote, with more than 300,000 votes lost in areas with the highest Muslim populations. Independent MPs unseated Labour from Birmingham Perry Barr and Blackburn, to Leicester South and Dewsbury and Batley. Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonnaire, shoo-ins for cabinet roles, lost their seats. It contributed to a big, yet under-discussed trend from 2024’s election: overall, 537,000 fewer people voted for Labour than in 2019. So was Zarah Sultana – a young, Muslim woman, from the left of the party – consulted on how the party might reach out to voters concerned about the ongoing military action?
“There were so many meetings we had before the general election with MPs who felt particularly concerned about this issue. They knew that there would be ramifications in their constituency, and it was literally a talking shop exercise, which I found quite futile, because I found myself moving away from making the moral, legal, right argument about what was happening in Gaza to an electoral argument that this was all part of the Labour Party, and that feels so dehumanizing. But that was a genuine concern,” she said.
“You had other people that were quite senior in LOTO [the leader of the opposition’s office], Keir was sitting in those meetings, Shabana Mahmood was sitting in on those meetings. You had a coalition of MPs who were Muslim, MPs who have significant Muslim voters, people who just care about the issue. You had quite a broad range of people. I would say there were in those meetings, 20 to 30 MPs making the same point repeatedly, and we had very little to show in terms of what came out of those meetings, if I’m honest with you.”
This national approach contrasts with the party’s regional strategy, where the West Midlands party asked Sultana to get involved with May’s mayoral election. While she managed to get an agreement from winning candidate Richard Parker on free school meals, “The other demand I had from the campaign was to call for an arms embargo. We weren’t able to get to a position that we both agreed on, and that is something that obviously I couldn’t then say we are working together on Palestine and Gaza. But I was able to endorse Richard Parker based on the free school meals campaign,” she said.
Sitting in the lobby of Portcullis House – parliament’s office block, where MPs drink gossipy coffee with journalists and landlord politicians eat lunch – Zarah Sultana spoke of the life-and-death stakes of the decisions made in Westminster. Labour is wrong to try and get the bad bits out of the way, though. “There’s no sign to show that’s going to stop, because the welfare reforms are for next spring,” she said. “This winter, we’re going to see the impact.” Constituents constantly came to Sultana worried about unexpected bills, the bus fare cap rising, and the winter fuel payment for pensioners being means tested. While she credited the government for increasing the minimum wage in the autumn budget, she cited figures that the two-child benefit cap will hit 63,000 children by April 2025, and that winter fuel payment changes could push up to 100,000 pensioners into poverty.
“That is just cruelty by choice. Those figures – I’m saying 63,000 here, 100,000 here – those are individual people who do not deserve to make those difficult choices around heating and eating. And politicians always say, ‘Oh, it’s a really difficult choice having to vote this way.’ Like, no, we earn a very good salary, we are going to be fine. We’re not going to have to make decisions about whether we put the heating on or whether we can afford a meal,” she said.
“And so I just wish that they would make different decisions, because if a Labour government isn’t committed to ending child poverty and ending pension poverty, then what do you stand for?”
‘Keir is doing pretty bad’
Starmer – who despite winning the recent election has never been a particularly popular politician when it comes to personal approval ratings – has his eye on improving the country within five years. But Zarah Sultana warned a “sandcastle majority”, built on a low vote share, could cause problems sooner.
“If we look at polls since the general election, the Labour Party isn’t doing particularly well. Keir is doing pretty bad. This parliamentary term is going to be another four, five years. The Labour Party has time, but you’ve already lost a lot of goodwill by making decisions that you shouldn’t have,” she said.
Political turmoil and economic hardship is often talked about as always being a big opportunity for the right. But it can be an opening for the left, Sultana argued.
“The left has to be in a position where it can be influential, it can shape policy, and – like Jeremy’s election showed within the Labour Party – the left can take power. Obviously people look at the 2019 election, gloss over the gains of the 2017 election, which is all political, let’s be honest,” she said.
“But politics changes very quickly. That’s what I’ve learned in my five years here. Boris, the 80 seat majority, is now banned from the House of Commons. Things change very quickly. Moments happen.”
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