Birmingham, Europe’s largest council, stands on the brink of significant political change, with the possibility of coming under the influence of sectarian Muslim politicians in the near future.

This may sound dramatic, but after 14 tumultuous years under Labour leadership, coupled with the challenges of mass immigration, Birmingham faces a stark reality as voters head to the polls next Thursday.

A wave of Muslim ‘independent’ candidates has emerged, gaining traction by leveraging both ethnic and religious ties in the city. Their campaign is as much about the local issues like the bin strike as it is about international matters such as the conflict in Gaza.

The political scene in Birmingham is so splintered that no party is anticipated to secure an outright majority. Current polls indicate that these independents could become a major force within the council, potentially holding significant sway in forming a coalition.

This potential shift could lead to further instability for a council already plagued by crises, including its declaration of effective bankruptcy in 2023.

The situation raises pressing concerns about the safety and security of Birmingham’s diverse communities, such as the Jewish and LGBTQ+ populations, in light of the controversial positions held by some leaders within the independent movement.

And, with the pace of immigration handing some communities the numbers to turn their faith into a political project, is it evidence of Britain sliding unavoidably towards a Balkanised future?

The new cultural battleground is neatly illustrated in Birmingham by the flags which have fluttered from lampposts across the city in recent years.

To the east, where the population is predominantly Muslim, a Palestinian flag is never far from view. Yet Birmingham’s traditionally white working-class areas are nowadays marked out by the flag of St George or the Union Flag.

An almighty row erupted last summer when Birmingham City Council cut down England flags in areas such as Northfield, having spent years ignoring Palestine flags hanging from virtually every lamppost in Sparkbrook. Ironically, this clumsy intervention only led to an explosion in the number of national flags across the city.

They now serve as a strange, unofficial demarcation line between white working-class areas and immigrant neighbourhoods.

It is this divide – the flags of Palestine set against the flags of St George – which have, in a very real sense, displaced red and blue as the political faultlines of modern Birmingham.

Few have benefited from their association with the Palestinian cause more than the poster boys of the new sectarian politics: Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-driving ‘TikTok lawyer’-turned-political candidate; and Shakeel Afsar, a property developer who led ugly protests outside a Birmingham primary school where pupils were taught about LGBT relationships, despite having no children at the school himself.

Akhmed Yakoob, right, is a Lamborghini-driving ‘TikTok lawyer’-turned-political candidate, and Shakeel Afsar, left, is a property developer who led ugly protests outside a Birmingham primary school where pupils were taught about LGBT relationships

Now, Yakoob and Afsar are leaders of the Independent Candidate Alliance of dozens of council candidates, although they are not standing themselves

The two men also led the Muslim agitators who last year pressured West Midlands Police into banning Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans from attending a match against Aston Villa – a blunder that cost the chief constable his job.

Yakoob has defied steep political odds in the past. Running as a virtually unknown independent, he came third in the West Midlands mayoral elections in 2024 and, just two months later, nearly ousted Labour’s Shabana Mahmood from her Westminster seat of Birmingham Ladywood.

Both campaigns relied on slickly edited, incendiary social media videos whipping up local discontent about Gaza, while Yakoob’s supporters were accused of aggressive and intimidatory tactics.

Now, Yakoob and Afsar are leaders of the Independent Candidate Alliance of dozens of council candidates, although they are not standing themselves.

The group nakedly pander to Muslim voters in the knowledge that Keir Starmer’s handling of the Gaza issue fatally severed the community’s long-time support for Labour. Yakoob tells me that Starmer’s party ‘one million per cent’ took the Muslim vote for granted. Afsar nods in agreement, adding: ‘It’s not a hidden fact that our communities voted blindly for Labour.’

Although the Green Party are now widely viewed as bedfellows with Muslim voters – having run an aggressively sectarian campaign to oust Labour in the Gorton and Denton by-election – they are loathed by the independents, who view them as duplicitous.

It is not hard to see why. The Greens are exhibiting a kind of political schizophrenia: on the one hand, pitching the party as the clear choice for conservative Muslims, while also pandering to the far-Left with a platform of cartoonishly socially liberal policies that sits uneasily with that same voter base.

The independents have sought to exploit these contradictions with leaflets warning that the Greens will ‘legalise drugs, even near your kids’ and condemning their tolerance of LGBT issues with claims such as: ‘Trans women in women’s toilets? They said yes!’ The dismal failure of community integration in Birmingham provides fertile ground for their message: more than 75 per cent of some neighbourhoods identify as Pakistani, while those identifying as Muslim make up more than 90 per cent of other areas.

Yakoob and Afsar’s videos are simple – they each deliver diatribes to camera, often surrounded by other local Muslim men. Their content exudes macho self-confidence.

‘The Labour Party took our elders down the path of war, starvation, slavery, dictatorship… now the Green Party want to lead our children and future generations down the path of drugs, sex and degeneracy,’ Yakoob declares in one typically pugnacious video.

When I join both men for an afternoon of leafleting, it is clear their mastery of social media has made them celebrities of the TikTok age, particularly among younger Muslim men. Cars slow down to honk or wave, people stop and point. There is a reason their faces are on every independent candidate’s leaflet – to give a sprinkling of star dust.

The pair are universally well received on the doorstep, slipping effortlessly between English and Urdu, with regular deployment of ‘inshallah’ (God willing) and ‘assalamualaikum’ (Peace be upon you). Afsar tells one woman: ‘May 7 is “independence day”.’

A young Muslim man is clearly awed to see them. ‘I know you from TikTok,’ he says, eagerly adding he will ‘100 per cent’ be voting for them.

The oldest Independent Candidate Alliance candidate, 68-year-old Raja Amin, had not heard of TikTok two months ago but the impact of putting Yakoob and Afsar in charge of his social media has stunned him. ‘Youngsters give me a shout and want to come and get their picture taken, like I’m a celebrity,’ he marvels.

Yakoob’s popularity does not seem to have been dented by the fact he is due to face trial in 2027. He is accused of illegally laundering millions of pounds of dirty cash but denies the claim.

I sit down for a kebab with Yakoob and Afsar in another part of the city where they hope to find success: Sparkhill.

Both are keen to present an open-minded and inclusive front. ‘We want to expand our movement into areas that are not Muslim majority,’ Afsar says. ‘We believe this is a people’s movement.

‘If those people are 99.9 per cent Muslim or Asians in that area we’re looking to represent, that’s not our fault.’

Inevitably, though, it does not take much probing to discover that gay people and Jews may not feel hugely welcome in this ‘inclusive’ movement.

I ask about a video in which Yakoob described footage of Green Party leader Zack Polanski – who is openly gay – with a leather-clad male dancer as ‘degeneracy’, as well as Afsar’s months-long protests outside Anderton Park primary school in 2019 over its LGBT education programme.

After telling me ‘on the record’ that ‘we want to live and let live’, the pair spend several minutes ranting about ‘LGBT extremists wanting to push their narrative on other people’ and claiming ‘even the most conservative people would think a man dancing with half-clad strippers’ is ‘not very British’. There is similarly muddled thinking over Judaism, with Yakoob insisting ‘as Muslims, we can’t be against the Jewish community’, before declaring Zionism – the belief in a Jewish state, held by a significant majority of British Jews – is a ‘fascist ideology’.

In his many, many TikTok videos on the subject of Israel, Yakoob has been more blunt, threatening to name and shame ‘anybody campaigning for the genocidal-complicit Labour candidates’, adding: ‘They will be exposed on the day of judgment in front of Allah and they will face punishment, inshallah.’

He has also expressed his belief that Allah chose him to ‘challenge the Zionist regime’.

That such inflammatory anti-Israeli rhetoric could catapult Yakoob and his acolytes into positions of political influence has only increased fear among Jews in Birmingham; its Jewish population is barely 1,500-strong, leaving them feeling particularly vulnerable amid surging anti-Semitism.

The assessment of Ruth Jacobs, chairman of the Birmingham and West Midlands Jewish Community, is stark: ‘I personally don’t feel that safe here any more.’

She has tried to write to every local election candidate, seeking reassurance they would work to combat anti-Semitism. Of the scores of independents standing, only one has replied as yet. ‘We’re feeling, as a community, somewhat anxious that the council will change so radically and that the policies of the council will be altered,’ she tells me.

Yakoob, for his part, rejects the suggestion that he is a sectarian politician, insisting the term is only mentioned ‘when a brown Muslim man gets into politics’.

I ask how the pair respond to accusations they are Islamists who believe Islam should govern public life, rather than remaining a private faith. ‘We don’t believe in that,’ Afsar says.

The claim is not particularly helped by the fact that one of their candidates in Sparkbrook, Shahid Butt, is a convicted terrorist – jailed in Yemen in 1999 for plotting to blow up the British consulate.

Shahid Butt, one of the candidates in Sparkbrook, is a convicted terrorist – jailed in Yemen in 1999 for plotting to blow up the British consulate

Butt tells me his conviction was viewed as unsafe by Western authorities and claims counter-terror police in Britain have never even questioned him.

Yet he was undoubtedly a committed jihadist at one time. Towering at 6ft 4in, he has previously been described as the enforcer of the hook-handed radical cleric Abu Hamza and readily admits he fought in Bosnia and went to Afghanistan for military training. ‘Your understanding of extremism is not my understanding of extremism,’ he says. ‘When I was fighting in Bosnia, I was defending other Muslims – the British government knew exactly what I was doing,’ adding that his activities were only viewed as extremism after 9/11.

‘I’m against terrorism, I’m against suicide bombing, I’m against killing innocent people, I’ve spoken out against 9/11, 7/7, and for that I’ve got threats from other Muslims.’

It is clear that Yakoob and his movement have generated huge enthusiasm among young Muslims in Birmingham, but my time talking to voters revealed a clear generational divide.

Butcher Mohammed Saleed owns the Al Halal Meat Shop in Sparkhill, Birmingham

Standing in line at a halal butchers in Sparkhill, Mukhtar Ahmed expressed unease over the independent candidates. They are the latest symptom, he believes, of the Muslim community turning in on itself.

‘For me, it’s the same thing as Farage or somebody standing for racist things, it’s the same with the Gaza independents. My argument is we live in Britain, we live as a community,’ he says.

The 63-year-old taxi driver came to Birmingham in 1979, when the area featured a diverse mix of backgrounds. ‘In these kinds of areas now, unfortunately, all the children are from an Asian or a Muslim background. I personally don’t like that,’ he continues. ‘I wouldn’t quite say it’s racism, but you’re segregating yourself.’

Around the corner, food delivery driver Asghar Ali, 43, also questions whether independents hold the answer.

‘We want Birmingham to be clean, the roads are broken; it’s not like we live in the UK, it’s like we are in a third-world country,’ he says, questioning if independents would have the budgetary back-up to solve these problems.

Of those Muslim voters sticking with other parties, I find they have two things in common: they used to vote Labour, and now will vote Green.

The traditional parties have no idea how to deal with this radical new political mood. Most representatives I meet are happy to privately condemn the emergence of sectarian politics, but, publicly, few will grasp the nettle. Labour are bearing the brunt of the discontent being exploited by the independents, not just over Gaza but also their management of Birmingham. Under Labour, the council has not only been forced to declare bankruptcy but presided over a year-long bin strike which left mountains of rubbish on the streets.

One Labour candidate has even removed the party’s branding from his social media videos, instead tellingly introducing himself as ‘your candidate’, not ‘your Labour candidate’.

Rob Pocock, a Labour cabinet member, tells me campaigning has been a ‘pretty unpleasant experience’. He is among the few willing to speak about the independents forthrightly.

‘There is all sorts of skulduggery going on behind the scenes, with individuals being supported by disreputable characters who are not themselves standing,’ he says.

‘Pressure has been brought to bear within Birmingham families… I think there’s a real risk that these people get elected on the pretext of being a local independent, but actually form an unhealthy, destabilising influence should they be elected.’

Others are less direct. Reform candidate Jex Parkin says the election ‘needs to be about Birmingham first, rather than international politics’, while Tory group leader Robert Alden tells me: ‘The Labour Party are reaping what they sow – they used the very same tactics against other parties for decades.’

Under Labour, the council has not only been forced to declare bankruptcy but presided over a year-long bin strike which left mountains of rubbish on the streets

Reform candidate Jex Parkin says the election ‘needs to be about Birmingham first, rather than international politics

Conservative Robert Alden says: ‘The Labour Party are reaping what they sow – they used the very same tactics against other parties for decades’

The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are aping the independents, with leaflets for candidates in Sparkbrook featuring the Palestine flag next to the party’s logo.

Much remains uncertain about next Thursday, save for Labour’s likely ejection from power here. One poll predicts independents will win 31 seats – becoming the biggest group on the council – while another suggests they could be the second biggest with 20 seats.

Yakoob is reluctant to make predictions, but tells me his alliance ‘could be the biggest faction, that’s a possibility’.

Afsar adds: ‘We believe we’ve already won. We believe that our movement is going to grow. We are here to stay, winning or losing, in the hands of God.’