Mosques in Britain ignored rules forbidding them from endorsing political candidates to back the Green Party, a top party official admitted.
Manchester City Councillor Asma Alam, who recently helped coordinate the successful by-election campaign to elect Hannah Spencer as a Green Party Member of Parliament for Gorton & Denton, said mosques are actively flouting Charity Commission rules by endorsing Green candidates.
Alam is quoted by the Times of London as telling attendees of a Green Party Conference fringe event last Friday: “Talking about mosque endorsements, it’s actually really, really hard. In fact, it’s impossible because they all have got charitable status, and with that charitable status, it means that they can’t endorse a political party… So they can do it under cover, which happened with me.”
The Green Councillor said that while some mosques reneged on plans to endorse candidates, she is said to have specifically cited a Manchester mosque which “did break away … and they actually announced it [a Greens endorsement]”.
Alam added that “they had actually announced it that you need to ‘vote Green, break free’. And I think that was because they had been so disappointed by Labour, so much so that they were willing to break ranks, and I think that’s what happened this year in particular. Mosques are willing to break ranks because enough is enough, complicity is enough.”
Given that many mosques are registered charities in the United Kingdom, they must abide by the rules set out by the Charity Commission, including on political impartiality. The regulatory body said that it has received a tip over the claims from Alam at the Green conference and will be assessing whether rules were broken.
Beyond the law of the matter, there are also longstanding social conventions and norms separating religion and elections. Elections are held by tradition on Thursdays in Britain for a plethora of reasons including the influence of the pub on a Friday, and the influence of the church on a Sunday.
The Gorton & Denton by-election that gained Spencer her seat also faced accusations at the time of “family voting” in which older males are claimed to have accompanied their wives or daughters into the voting booth to ensure that they voted for the family’s preferred candidate, which some tied to the area’s large Muslim population.
A spokesman for the Greens claimed that Alam’s comments were “anecdotal” and said that “neither she nor the Green Party have ever sought or facilitated any breach of the law.”
“In referring conversationally to ‘under cover’ support, she was talking about individuals choosing to express personal political support, not formal endorsements. We are not aware of any mosque formally endorsing the Green Party.”
The reported admission from the Green official came ahead of the party sparking international backlash over the weekend as members at their annual conference in Brighton voted in favour of making it official party policy to label Zionism as racism.
The motion, put forward by Greens for Palestine, was passed by members by a margin of 1,022 to 813, closely mirroring the public divide within the party between the traditional middle-class environmentalist wing and the more recently added Islamic faction, which has grown significantly following the war in Gaza and former PM Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to label Israel’s military action against Hamas terrorists in the territory as a genocide.
Although Green leader Zack Polanski did not attend the vote, and said that he would only support the motion if it was amended by removing the call for a single Palestinian state and to create a carve-out for Jewish Greens to attend Synagogues without being called racist by their own party, he ultimately backed the move to describe Zionism as racism.
“I think it’s about how you define Zionism, and if your Zionism is the displacement of the Palestinian people, then that’s clearly racist, and I say that as a Jewish leader of a political party,” he said last week.
In response, the state of Israel announced that they would be barring Polanski from entering the country, with the Foreign Ministry declaring that the Greens had adopted the “green” ideology of Hamas, namely the “elimination of Israel through armed struggle”.
Polanski missed out on his bid to become a Parliamentarian overnight from Thursday into Friday as the Holborn and St Pancras by-election saw him come a relatively distant second on 8,928 votes to Labour’s 12,292. Between Polanski’s dancing around the party’s antisemitism and his by-election loss, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports Friday that he is now only clinging on to the leadership as more hardline pro-Palestine entryist factions within the party prepare to move against him.