In Ilford North, Leanne Mohamad and the British left set their sights on Labour

It’s a hot Friday night at the City Gates Conference Centre in Ilford, where the suburbs of east London begin to creep towards the county of Essex.

On stage, a young British-Palestinian woman is joined by two lions of the political left: Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC member of the South African parliament turned campaigner and arms trade investigator, and Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader turned independent MP.

Aged 24, Leanne Mohamad, born and raised in Ilford, ran as an independent candidate against Health Secretary Wes Streeting, the Labour right-wing’s favoured son and a man tipped as a future prime minister, in the UK’s 2024 General Election.

Surfing a rising tide of anger about Labour’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza, Mohamad lost by just 528 votes.  

The aftermath of the defeat was a time of “heartbreak, pain and deep reflection”, she says on stage.

There is a lingering disappointment about what she feels was a failure to understand, outside Ilford, that she really had a chance of winning.

But in front of 500 members of her local community, many of whom were part of the campaign, Mohamad projects confidence about what will come next.

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“We made sure that Wes Streeting was sweating on election night,” she tells them. 

Both Corbyn and Feinstein refer to her as the next MP for Ilford North. Mohamad and her team are convinced that at the next General Election, in 2029, the British-Palestinian campaigner will win.

In an area with a large Muslim population, Labour’s response to Gaza is one of the main things fuelling this confidence. Many of the crowd were once members of the party.

They aren’t anymore. 

“The televised murder in Gaza changed the world forever,” Mohamad says. Starmer, Streeting and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, “care more for Israeli propaganda than Palestinian lives”.

‘Labour has alienated communities’

In Ilford, there is palpable anger about their local MP’s response to the war on Gaza.

For more than 21 months, Israel has relentlessly bombed the besieged Gaza Strip, displacing the entire 2.3 million population multiple times, and killing more than 58,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians.

The figure also includes at least 1,400 health sector professionals, 280 United Nations aid workers – the highest staff death toll in UN history – and at least 228 journalists, with the highest number of media workers killed in conflict since the Committee to Protect Journalists began recording data in 1992.

‘You [Labour] are out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, my friends and neighbours in Ilford North’

– Leanne Mohamad

Streeting has received money from pro-Israel figures, including the 89-year-old businessman Trevor Chinn, who called South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice “a distraction” and repeated Israeli claims that “Hamas uses buildings like schools and hospitals as bunkers.”

Behind the scenes, though, the Ilford North MP has told Starmer that Labour’s approach has alienated communities like the one he represents. He has said, publicly, that Israel has gone “beyond self-defence” in Gaza.

On 29 June, the health secretary, who went on to vote to proscribe direct action group Palestine Action, branded Bob Vylan’s “death to the IDF” chant “appalling”, before saying that Israel should “get its own house in order”.

Mohamad talks about how her family and community used to say that if the Nakba – the “catastrophe” that saw 750,000 Palestinians forced from their homes to make way for the creation of the state of Israel – had been televised, then maybe it would never have happened.

Now we know, she says, “it’s never been about a lack of evidence”.

Mohamad blasts Streeting for “giving our health data to the horrid Palantir, which is working in Gaza”. The US billionaire Peter Thiel’s tech firm is “poised to cash in on Wes Streeting’s NHS plan,” according to the Good Law project, while it has a collaboration with Israel that predates October 2023. 

Salma Kalisvaart, Mohamad’s campaign organiser, told Middle East Eye that Streeting is “a lout, an aggressive man-boy”.

She, along with a senior Labour Party source, allude to a series of “grim” episodes involving Labour officials connected to the health minister.

In 2018, Matthew Goddin, Streeting’s chief of staff, pled guilty to breaking electoral law. Last year, a BBC investigation found that Jas Athwal, who Streeting and Morgan McSweeney, now Starmer’s chief of staff, backed to replace left-winger Sam Tarry as MP in Ilford South, was “renting out flats with ant infestations and black mould”.

Athwal is also “the landlord of an unsafe private care home where children have gone missing and been left at risk of criminal exploitation”, according to an investigation by The Londoner.

In 2021, Athwal’s former policy assistant, Ben Waters, was charged with child exploitation crimes in Australia.

Then in April this year, Sam Gould, a former aide to Streeting, was spared jail after pleading guilty to sitting in a car and performing a “sex act with his trousers down” in front of a 13-year-old girl, who he then followed. Gould, who was a Labour councillor in Redbridge, the London borough Ilford is part of, exposed himself to another woman.

MEE contacted Wes Streeting’s team asking for comment on the cases, which the senior Labour source described as “very fucking grim” and “a strange set of coincidences, to say the least”.

“It’s not going to be difficult to beat him, but I’m convinced he’s going to switch seats,” Kalisvaart said of Streeting.
 
The health secretary is clearly aware of this possibility. Recently, he said he had no plans to “cut and run” to a safer seat. 
 
John Rentoul, once described as “probably the most high-profile defender of Tony Blair’s record in the British media”, said shortly afterwards that this is exactly what he should do.

In an article titled, “Wes Streeting ought to cut and run to a safer seat – his country needs him,” the columnist wrote that the health secretary’s professed desire to “stay and fight” was “admirable but foolish”.

Turning away from Labour

Sitting behind Mohamad, in a short sleeved off-white shirt, is the man who ran the most high-profile independent campaign at last year’s election.

Running on many of the same issues as Mohamad – opposition to the war in Gaza, support for the welfare state and chronically underfunded public services – Jeremy Corbyn defeated his former party’s candidate Praful Nargund, who helps run a family-owned chain of private fertility clinics.

Mohamad’s near-miss and Corbyn’s success, along with the election of four Green Party MPs and four other pro-Palestinian independent candidates, offered a view into the new territory opening up in Britain’s political landscape.

British Muslims, left-wingers and other voters turning away from Labour over its response to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, stance on migration, clampdown on civil liberties and failure to tax the rich to fund public services are looking for a political vehicle that represents them.

For many, this is a far from benign development. The Daily Telegraph recently published a lengthy feature titled, “Inside the ugly relationship between Islamism and the left.”

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Glenn Holmes, a retired teacher from Liverpool who has lived in Ilford for 15 years, has also turned away from Labour. He campaigned for Mohamed, though he worries the young British Palestinian “might not be rough and tough enough”.

Back in 2015, he was helping Streeting organise his successful campaign to win the Ilford North seat, aged just 32.

Holmes quickly turned against his new MP. The first constituency Labour Party meeting following Streeting’s victory was held after interim leader Harriet Harman had ordered MPs not to vote against a Conservative government welfare bill.

At the meeting, Holmes said he left to go to a newsagent across the street. There, he bought two Cadbury’s creme eggs, which he presented to Streeting, who had followed Harman’s dictat. “You haven’t got any balls,” he reportedly said to Streeting. “Try these.”

Firmly on the left, Holmes has helped draw attention to the fact that 60 percent of Streeting’s registered donations have come from people and companies linked to private healthcare, including hedge fund billionaire John Armitage. 

Streeting has said the only thing his donors get for their money are “a Labour MP in Ilford North and a Labour government”.

After Starmer became leader, Holmes, who had campaigned for Labour since 1983, was suspended from the party for antisemitism after he tweeted the phrase: “Wes Streeting and the cabal around him.” It was argued that the use of “cabal” was a dog whistle for Jewish influence.

‘Pissed off by mainstream politics’

Feinstein, who is building the Camden Community Alliance and ran as an independent against Starmer at the last election, slashing the Labour leader’s vote share in the process, told MEE that it wasn’t just people on the left involved in his campaign, but those “pissed off by mainstream politics”.

“There were people engaging with politics for the first time,” he said. “A lot of people who had never been involved. Of course, there were a lot of lefties there, but what I would say to them is: I agree with you, but can we put it into normal language so that everyone can understand.”

At the launch of Mohamad’s Ilford in Conversation, the multicultural coalition the left is looking to wrestle away from Labour was present.

“It’s hard to feel hope in dark times like these,” Mohamad said. “But how many people felt hope when Zarah Sultana made her announcement last night?”

A round of applause and some cheers emanated from the audience. Corbyn, however, did not seem to react.

‘Our entire democracy is under threat from Keir Starmer and his government’

– Andrew Feinstein, former South African MP

Mohamad’s words raised the spectre of an elephant in the room. On 3 July, Sultana, the left-wing MP for Coventry South, announced that she was leaving the Labour Party to form a new party led by her and Corbyn. 

Hours passed by. Corbyn did not join Sultana in announcing the new party. According to multiple sources involved in the discussions, he – and many others – had been completely blindsided by Sultana’s declaration.

On Friday afternoon, just a couple of hours before the event in Ilford, the former Labour leader released a statement saying that “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape” and that discussions over this were ongoing. “Real change is coming,” Corbyn wrote.

The question of leadership, however, went unaddressed. 

According to multiple sources involved in and supportive of the project, it looked like the left might once again be falling before it had even got to the first hurdle. 

“Given the way Starmer has hounded people out of Labour, the creation of a new party has felt inevitable,” one senior Labour figure sympathetic to Corbyn told MEE.

“This party is important. But it just reminds me of the very worst aspects of the left – silly squabbling over process.”

Edmund Griffiths, a left-wing author and activist, told MEE: “Basically I’m furious and disgusted at the whole thing. In view of the historic opportunity that exists and the desperate moral urgency of the current situation – as well as the triviality of the seeming disagreements – it’s criminal to be this incompetent.”

‘Democracy under threat from Starmer’

On stage in Ilford, the Zoom meetings, WhatsApp groups and furious rows in office rooms could all be put to one side.

Feinstein is wearing a rose pink collarless short-sleeved shirt and wins local favour by joking about how his Bangladeshi mother-in-law makes him food that isn’t as spicy because he can’t handle the heat.

The son of a Holocaust survivor says that Starmer and Streeting “have made by far the best democracy money can buy”. The South African compares Corbyn to his “former boss”, Nelson Mandela, saying that they, unlike Starmer, believe that everyone is equal.

“Our entire democracy is under threat from Keir Starmer and his government,” Feinstein says, referencing the proscription of Palestine Action. While Margaret Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist and even suggested killing him in prison, he adds, “she never proscribed the ANC, or the anti-Apartheid movement, all of which carried out the same kind of actions”.

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With his wife Laura Alvarez in the front row, Corbyn got up to speak after a glowing introduction from Mohamad. He pointed out that under his leadership, in 2017 and 2019, Labour got more total votes than Starmer did in 2024. 

He criticised the Labour government for maintaining the two-child benefit cap and Starmer for echoing the language of Enoch Powell in his “island of strangers” speech.

“Private enterprise and free market capitalism will not solve the climate crisis,” Corbyn said, before hitting out at the ongoing privatisation of the NHS.

He caused a stir by incorrectly referring to the constituency as Ilford South not Ilford North, and his response to a question about what food he’d like to eat on Ilford Lane – “chicken korma” – impresses nobody, but the crowd are with Corbyn, particularly when he condemns the “hunger games” taking place in Gaza and British complicity in Israel’s war there. 

Corbyn did not talk explicitly about a new left party. Instead, he spoke of a “community organising vehicle” that would “bring together all these independent groups across the country”. These groups will be champions “of peace, of the redistribution of power and wealth, of community”, he said. 

After he finished speaking, a local Palestinian resident bought a pot of homemade Corbyn jam for £1,000.

On stage, Ilford residents gathered round the former Labour leader for selfies and words of support.

Labour is ‘out of touch’

The crowd began filing out into the warm night. Qasim, who went to school with Mohamad and volunteered on her campaign, said that his friend’s bid to unseat Streeting was incorrectly framed as “just a Gaza thing”. “But if it was just a Gaza thing, why are all these people still here?” he asked.

Qasim, who is a Muslim, spoke with warmth about Ilford, about his friends from “white, Black, Hindu and Sikh” backgrounds, about how everyone respects each other’s cultures. He said Labour used to be the party for these communities. Increasingly, it’s not seen this way. 

“It is disheartening and saddening, this big party that used to stand for us,” he told MEE. “But all these people came together to support Leanne – people united.”

‘Labour was the party to keep us safe. Now it is echoing Reform, talking about an island of strangers’

– Arman, former Labour member

Arman, who is 20 and from Dagenham, the east London neighbourhood once infamous for the presence of the far-right British National Party (BNP), said he was a Labour member until last year. He described himself as left-wing on economic issues and as a socially conservative Muslim. 

“I think Muslims have always been attracted to the left,” he said. “Labour was the party to keep us safe. Now it is echoing Reform, talking about an island of strangers.”

Arman described Mohamad, Corbyn and Feinstein as “three legends”. He said he has differences with left-wing voters on “for example, LGBT rights”, but that this is something he’s “willing to overlook”.

Out on the street, Mohamad is in a buoyant mood.

“It’s the best thing that’s happened in Ilford,” she says of the night, which is intended to be the beginning of a series of events. She laughs at Corbyn’s choice of chicken korma. “I know, I know,” she tells MEE, rolling her eyes. 

The proposed new left party is “definitely exciting”, she said, adding that at the moment, she is “focused on my local community” and “will work with anyone who aligns with my cause”.

For the Labour Party, she has a clear message: “You are out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, my friends and neighbours in Ilford North.”