By Dr Paul Stott – 11th November 2016

EXPLANATIONS for the disillusionment of working-class voters with the Labour Party are fashionable and numerous: the development of an increasingly post-industrial Britain since the 1980s; the abandonment of working-class concerns within the Labour Party under Blair; through to mass immigration post-1997 and an increasingly atomized society.

There is a further explanation: that the left has embraced an Islam whose worldview is anathema to many working-class people in Britain, of any religion or none.

If this shift has a defining image, it is one of two pictures from Labour’s campaign in the 2015 Oldham West and Royton by-election.

At the Labour Friends of Bangladesh event, men are placed on one side of the room, women segregated in the other.

In the second image, no women are present at all, and the candidate, Jim McMahon, sits awkwardly, the only white person in a room full of Muslim elders.

Read more at- http://www.lapidomedia.com/analysis-islam-labour#.WCXxF7G8vsQ.twitter