A poll found the Labour party’s support among British Muslims has halved since 2019.
Incorrect. A poll of British Muslims found that the number of respondents who said they would vote for Labour has fallen by 30% (or by 26 percentage points) since a previous survey which asked how respondents had voted in 2019 (excluding undecideds and those who didn’t answer).
“The Labour Party’s support amongst British Muslims has halved during this parliament, according to a new opinion poll”.
An article published by ITV News reporting on a poll claimed that the Labour party’s support among British Muslims “has halved during this parliament”.
It reported: “Data produced by Survation and the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) has found support for the party from British Muslims has dropped to 43% having been at 86% during the 2019 general election.”
This claim has also been repeated in a number of posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
As Survation, the polling company which conducted the survey for the Labour Muslim Network, has explained on X (formerly Twitter), this isn’t an accurate comparison. ITV News did not respond to Full Fact’s request for comment, but has since corrected its article.
A poll conducted in 2021 did find that 86% of respondents (excluding people who said they didn’t vote, or didn’t answer the question) said they voted for Labour in the 2019 General Election.
However, the more recent poll, which asked 683 British Muslims which party they would vote for if there was a general election tomorrow, found that, excluding people who said they were undecided or refused to answer, 60% of respondents said they would vote for Labour.
This shows that the number of respondents (excluding undecideds and those who didn’t answer) who said they would vote for Labour has fallen by 30% (or by 26 percentage points) since the previous survey, not by half as the ITV News article originally claimed.
The 43% figure on which ITV News based its claim that support for Labour has “halved” includes people who said they were undecided or didn’t answer, so is not comparable with the 86% figure from the 2021 survey.
18% of respondents to the recent survey who said they voted for Labour in the 2019 general election were currently undecided as to how they would vote if a general election were held tomorrow.
It’s worth noting that Survation has warned that, given the sample size, “subsamples from the cross-breaks [for example, looking only at respondents who voted Labour in 2019] will be subject to higher margin of error” and that “conclusions drawn from cross-breaks with very small sub-samples should be treated with caution.”
News organisations should make every effort to achieve due accuracy in all output. False or misleading claims should be appropriately and clearly corrected in a timely manner.
Image courtesy of Robert Lamb
Update 29 February 2024
We’ve updated this article to include examples of this claim being shared on social media.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this isn’t what a poll of British Muslim voters found. It actually showed that the number of respondents who said they would vote for Labour has fallen by 30% since a previous survey, which asked how respondents had voted in 2019 (excluding undecideds and those who didn’t answer).
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