An organisation called “The Muslim Vote” has invited Labour to satisfy 18 “demands” if the party wants to win back UK Muslim support it has lost over the war in Gaza. “There’s more,” it tweets, “but that’ll do for starters.”

Already, however, Labour is evidently expected to do more to woo this body, which includes the Muslim Association of Britain, than correct its initial response to Gaza and adopt a more hostile stance towards Israel. TMV’s list of demands doubles as its guidelines for a better world, with some proposals uncontroversial: “deliver alternative student finance”; “ensure insurance quotes don’t cost more for someone called ‘Muhammad’ ”; “increase council and public health funding for the 10% most deprived areas”.

But a better Britain for the authors of this list is also, clearly, a more overtly religious one. For any party to fulfil TMV’s faith demands would be to generate immediate concern within what is yet formally to organise as “the Secular Vote”: a significant UK community that welcomes any growing separation of religion from public life, and devoutly hopes for a complete rupture, featuring an end to compulsory worship in schools, to faith schools, to appointed clerics in the House of Lords, to daily prayers in the Commons, even to – impossible dream – the last ghastly homily on the BBC’s Thought for the Day. Had it not been for Mr Bates, it seems a certainty that the C of E’s favourite CEO, the Rev Paula Vennells, would be regularly explaining God to Radio 4 listeners.

Even allowing for a........

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