Hanif Abdulmuhit out on the Labour campaign trail
While we’re on the subject of people changing parties – not especially unusual in the small world of Newham politics – let’s talk about Hanif Abdulmuhit, who is currently out campaigning for Labour ahead of the upcoming local election.
Abdulmuhit began his political life as secretary of Newham Liberal Democrats. He then joined George Galloway’s Respect party, winning a council seat in 2006, defeating Labour incumbents in the process, and standing as the party’s London Assembly candidate for City & East in 2008. As Respect collapsed in on itself, he completed the remainder of his term as a Labour councillor, sat out the 2010 elections, and then returned — fully reconstructed — as a Labour member in 2014. He went on to serve as a mayoral advisor for Building Communities and community lead for Green Street in the administration of Sir Robin Wales.
That second Labour stint lasted until 2022, when he was deselected by the NEC panel charged with picking the party’s candidates. There were suggestions that he was the victim of dirty tricks in the run-up to the selection process, and he took it very badly. In social media posts, subsequently deleted, he announced his support for the Conservatives.
Abdulmuhit’s bitterness towards his former party was on open display in July 2023, when he posted gleefully about Labour’s defeat in the Boleyn ward by-election. “Some refreshing news out of Newham at last!” he wrote, celebrating the victory of independent candidate Mehmood Mirza and describing it as “proof people of Newham have had enough of broken promises and lies of Newham Labour.”
The irony — or the problem, depending on how you look at it — is that Mehmood Mirza is now Labour’s principal opponent in the Newham mayoral election. The same man whose victory Abdulmuhit publicly cheered, whom he held up as a symbol of Labour’s failure and the community’s rejection of the party, is today the candidate Labour most needs to defeat.
The contradictions do not end with his serial party-hopping. Abdulmuhit was also posting views that sit strikingly at odds with Labour’s national platform and Newham Council’s own stated priorities.
When Sadiq Khan shared a video explaining the health effects of toxic air, Abdulmuhit dismissed it as “Propaganda! Absolutely no definitive evidence for this whatsoever!” — a remarkable claim given that the scientific consensus on the harm caused by air pollution is overwhelming. Newham is one of London’s most polluted boroughs; the health consequences for its residents are not an abstraction.
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He also amplified a Toby Young article from the Daily Sceptic — a well-known climate-sceptic outlet — approvingly characterising climate scientists as “fanatics” and “gloom merchants” driven by “wishy washy feelings” rather than science. These are not merely heterodox views within the Labour family. They are positions associated with the right flank of the Conservative Party and its outriders, not with a movement that has made clean energy and environmental action central to its offer to voters.
Newham Council has declared a climate emergency and committed to ambitious net-zero targets. Labour nationally has staked significant political capital on its green agenda. A Labour activist publicly aligning himself with Toby Young on climate science is not a minor quirk — it is a meaningful ideological statement.
Hanif Abdulmuhit spent eight years as a Labour councillor before being deselected. He then publicly celebrated Labour losing a council seat, specifically praising the independent candidate who is now Labour’s main opponent in the mayoral race. He has dismissed the scientific evidence on air pollution as propaganda and shared climate-denying content from a right-wing sceptic outlet. He has also, at various points in the more distant past, been a Liberal Democrat and a Respect councillor.
None of this is secret. It is all a matter of public record — or was, before it was deleted along with the rest of his Twitter/X account.
The question worth asking is not why Abdulmuhit wants back in. Political calculation is a constant in Newham, and the motivations of someone who has navigated this many different party loyalties are presumably pragmatic. The real question is why Labour would want him close to its campaign — and, more pointedly, why it would welcome back someone whose loudest recent contribution to Newham politics was cheering on the very candidate Labour is now trying to beat. And who retweeted this kind of thing:
Voters are entitled to know who is working on behalf of candidates they are asked to support. In a contest where Labour’s credibility and trustworthiness in Newham is itself at issue, the company a campaign keeps matters.
Having someone whose political journey spans the Lib Dems, Respect, Labour, the Conservatives (however briefly), and back again — and who was publicly delighted by Labour’s embarrassment less than two years ago — seems, at best, an unusual choice.
Tags: Hanif Abdulmuhit, Labour, Respect
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