The Useful Idiots: Why Every Alliance Between the Left and Islamism Ends the Same Way

In February 2026, the British political left celebrated what they perceived as a historic triumph. In the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton, Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer overturned a Labour majority spanning nearly a century. Green Party leader Zack Polanski hailed the win as proof that a “multicultural coalition” could defeat the establishment.

To achieve this upset, the eco-socialist Green Party aggressively courted the constituency’s Muslim population — around 30% of the electorate — capitalising on anger over Gaza, distributing campaign videos in Urdu, and positioning themselves as the ultimate anti-imperialist champions. The Green Party is officially “unequivocally pro-trans” and deeply committed to LGBTQ+ rights. Their new voters, polling consistently shows, want homosexuality criminalised. They promised progressive revolution. Their new voters want a rather different kind of revolution.

Why would a progressive party build a coalition with voters who oppose everything it stands for? The answer is not ideological. It is arithmetical. The left has lost its natural voter base — the industrial working class, hollowed out by decades of deindustrialisation — and has found a replacement in immigrant communities who vote reliably for the party that let them in. The values of those communities are, for now, a secondary concern. They are votes. That is enough.

History has a name for this arrangement. The term “useful idiot” — traditionally attributed to Lenin, though without documentary proof — describes those who lend their organisational apparatus and intellectual legitimacy to a movement that will, once it has sufficient power, turn on them. The historical record of alliances between the secular left and Islamism is unambiguous. Every single one has ended the same way: the left builds the revolution, provides the organisational energy, and is then destroyed by the forces it helped to power. Iran. Indonesia. Sudan. The pattern has no exceptions. The only variable is whether the left is shot, hanged, or simply made irrelevant.

The Only Thing They Share

The intellectual vulnerability of the left in these alliances stems from a failure to recognise that Islamism is not merely a religion but a competing comprehensive political system. In 1920, Bertrand Russell was among the first to spot this. In The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, he argued that Communism and Islam are structurally comparable: both view their frontiers as provisional, make no distinction between religion and politics, emphasise group goals over individual liberty, claim absolute universalism, and seek to convert the world. Both provide a vision of a perfectly just society on earth — the classless utopia versus the restored Caliphate.

Crucially, both share a deep antipathy toward Western civilisation and individualism. That shared hatred is the solvent that dissolves the ideological barriers between historical materialism and Islamic fundamentalism. It is why Grigory Zinoviev could stand before the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku and call for “a true people’s holy war, in the first place against British imperialism!” — to enthusiastic applause from the Islamist delegates. Anti-Western imperialism was the common language then. It remains so now.

But the alliance is structurally suicidal, because what the two sides want after the West is dismantled is radically different and completely incompatible. The left envisions a secular, egalitarian, materialist order. Islamism envisions a theocracy governed by divine law. Once the shared enemy is weakened, the only remaining business is to destroy each other.

Islamist intellectuals understood this asymmetry and exploited it. Sayyid Qutb, the key ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, openly cannibalised Leninist methods. In Milestones, he advocated for an “Islamic vanguard” to combat jahiliyyah — the state of pre-Islamic ignorance — a concept that directly mirrors Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party. By adopting the revolutionary mechanics of the left, Islamists could present themselves as fellow revolutionaries, masking fundamentally reactionary objectives until it was too late. The left saw an ally. The Islamists saw a tool.

The Historical Record

Iran

In November 1979, Noureddin Kianuri — the sixty-four-year-old General Secretary of the Tudeh Party, who had spent decades in exile in East Germany under the pseudonym “Dr. Silvio Macetti” — sat for an interview with the Greek newspaper Elevtherotipia and boasted of his party’s “favourable reception” in revolutionary Tehran. He dismissed the Islamists as a temporary, “petty-bourgeois” phenomenon. They would fade. The left would inherit the state.

The Tudeh Party had provided immense organisational capacity to the revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh had embedded deep anti-imperialist sentiment in Iranian political culture, pushing the Islamist camp — led by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini — into tactical alignment with the radical left. When demonstrations reached critical mass in 1978, communists, socialists, and Islamists marched side by side.

What followed was systematic eradication. Hezbollah gangs targeted leftist gatherings. The newly formed Revolutionary Guards unleashed the full force of the state. The purge reached its zenith during the 1988 executions, when death commissions inside Evin Prison presided over drumhead tribunals. Tens of thousands of leftists were executed. The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center documents state violence on an industrial scale.

In April 1983, Iranian state television broadcast the sixty-eight-year-old Kianuri — broken, tortured, barely recognisable — opening his forced confession with the words “Imam Khomeini, the Great Leader of the Revolution.” He denounced his own life’s work as “high treason.” His chief intellectual, Ehsan Tabari — the philosopher who had spent a lifetime arguing that scientific materialism would triumph over religion — was paraded as having “converted to Islam” after months of solitary confinement. Kianuri died in Tehran in 1999, a broken man in a country he had helped deliver to the clerics.

Indonesia

By 1965, Dipa Nusantara Aidit had built the Indonesian Communist Party into the largest in the non-communist world. He was forty-two, a cabinet-level figure in Sukarno’s government, and supremely confident. Over three million members. The state itself had given the PKI a seat at the table — through NASAKOM, Sukarno’s formula holding that nationalism, Islam, and Marxism were wholly compatible. They were not.

On 1 October 1965, left-wing military officers kidnapped and murdered six senior army generals. The army, led by Major General Suharto, seized control and laid the blame at the PKI’s feet. What followed was a swift campaign of mass killing — and the military did not act alone. They actively armed Islamic organisations to carry out the slaughter at the grassroots level. The youth wing of Nahdlatul Ulama, Ansor, served as the primary death squads in East Java. US Consulate telegrams from Surabaya noted: “We continue to receive reports [of] PKI being slaughtered by Ansor in many areas East Java.” Between 500,000 and 1.5 million leftists were murdered. A million more were imprisoned.

Aidit fled to Central Java, was captured within weeks, and summarily executed on 22 November 1965. He was forty-two. His deputy, Njoto — a refined intellectual who played the violin and wrote poetry — was shot three weeks later, aged thirty-eight. The third-largest communist party in the world had been physically liquidated. Its leader did not receive a trial.

Sudan

Abdel Khaliq Mahjub had led the Sudanese Communist Party since 1949, championed women’s rights and secular education, and provided the organisational backbone for the 1964 October Revolution that toppled the Abboud military dictatorship — fighting alongside the Muslim Brotherhood in a coalition of “modern forces.” He was thirty-seven when they triumphed. The coalition did not survive the peace.

Once the military fell, the Brotherhood pivoted to align with traditional religious parties and orchestrated the political cover to outlaw the SCP in 1965. Mahjub’s party — the organisation that had supplied the intellectual and organisational energy for the revolution — was banned by the forces it had helped to power. When Jaafar Nimeiri seized control in 1969, Mahjub supported a counter-coup in 1971 that briefly toppled Nimeiri. It failed within three days.

On 28 July 1971, Mahjub was hanged at Kobar Prison in Khartoum. He was forty-three. His comrade Joseph Garang — the first South Sudanese man to earn a law degree, who had served as Minister of Southern Affairs — was executed beside him.

Three countries. Three continents. Three decades. The same outcome every time: the left built the revolution, and the Islamists took it.

The Electoral Bargain

In the West, the Islamists do not yet have the power to kill the left. They do not need it. They have something more effective: the ballot box. And the left, far from resisting, is actively building the coalition that will undo it — because it has no choice.

For most of the twentieth century, the British left did not need immigrant communities. It had a natural constituency: the industrial working class. Miners, steelworkers, dockers, factory hands — the backbone of the trade union movement and the foundation on which the Labour Party was built. In 1966, 69% of manual workers voted Labour. The party did not belong to the universities. It belonged to the shopfloor.

That base has been systematically destroyed. Deindustrialisation, globalisation, and the shift to a service economy hollowed out the communities that once filled Labour’s ranks. The mines closed. The steelworks shut. The dockyards fell silent. And with them went millions of voters who had no reason to support a party that increasingly spoke the language of Hampstead rather than Hull. By 2019, Labour’s share of C2DE voters — the skilled and unskilled working class — had collapsed to 33%, lower than the Conservatives. The Red Wall did not fall in 2019. It had been crumbling for forty years.

The left’s solution was not to reconnect with its lost base. It was to replace them. Mass immigration — particularly from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa — has created entirely new voting blocs in precisely the constituencies Labour needs to hold. First-generation immigrants overwhelmingly vote for the party that facilitated their entry. Their children inherit the affiliation. The electoral arithmetic is straightforward: every new community established in a Labour heartland is a constituency secured for a generation. This is not conspiracy. It is observable structural incentive. The constituencies with the highest immigration return the safest Labour majorities.

The emotional dimension makes the strategy irresistible. Immigration allows the left to combine electoral self-interest with moral self-congratulation — simultaneously welcoming the stranger and building a replacement voter base. Any criticism of immigration can be reframed as bigotry, which conveniently also protects the electoral supply line. Virtue and self-interest align so perfectly that the left cannot distinguish between them — and has stopped trying.

But unlike the old working class — who shared the left’s secular, egalitarian instincts even when they disagreed on economics — the new voters arrive with a comprehensive, divinely ordained political system of their own. They do not need the left. They are using it.

The Betrayal in Real Time

The contradiction between the left’s stated values and the values of its new voters is not subtle. It is measurable, and it is growing.

The 2024 JL Partners poll for the Henry Jackson Society asked 1,000 British Muslims what social changes they wanted over the next twenty years. The answers read like a manifesto from a parallel civilisation: 57% want halal food compulsory in all schools and hospitals. 52% want it made illegal to depict the Prophet Muhammad. 32% want Sharia law. 32% want Islam declared the national religion. 27% want homosexuality outlawed. The ICM survey for Channel 4 found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should already be illegal, and 39% agree that wives should always obey their husbands.

On free speech, secular governance, and LGBTQ+ rights, a Labour voter and a Conservative voter disagree on emphasis and speed. They do not disagree on direction. The British Social Attitudes survey reports that 67% of the general public consider same-sex relationships “not wrong at all” — a figure that holds across the political mainstream. The gap between a Labour voter and a Tory voter is a few percentage points of enthusiasm. The gap between a Labour voter and the Muslim community the left is courting is a civilisational chasm. The left is culturally far closer to the right-wing Conservatives they despise than to the Islamists they have chosen as allies.

The evidence is not merely statistical. It is playing out in real time, in a drumbeat of capitulations. In Birmingham in 2019, hundreds of Muslim parents protested the “No Outsiders” programme — a curriculum teaching children that LGBTQ+ families exist. The programme was suspended. In 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School showed an image of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson on blasphemy. He was suspended, received death threats, and went into hiding with his family. No prominent left-wing politician defended his right to teach. In Hamtramck, Michigan, an all-Muslim city council — elected with the help of progressive voters — voted in 2023 to ban Pride flags on city property. In France, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise courted the Arab-Muslim electorate through pro-Palestinian stances that prompted state inquiries into islamo-gauchisme. Each time, the left chose the alliance over its principles. Each time, the principles lost.

But the starkest expression of the bargain is the grooming gangs scandal. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, Huddersfield, and Newcastle, organised networks of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men systematically raped and trafficked thousands of white working-class girls — many in the care of Labour-run councils. The 2014 Jay Report found that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013. Council staff and police had known for years. Professor Alexis Jay’s report was explicit about why they did not act: there was a “widespread perception” that senior officials conveyed messages to “downplay” the ethnic dimensions of the abuse, and staff described being given “clear direction from their managers” not to identify the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being labelled racist.

Children were not sacrificed despite the left’s values. They were sacrificed because the electoral calculus demanded silence. If the left will cover up the mass sexual exploitation of children to preserve a voting coalition, there is no principle it will not abandon when the alliance demands it.

What Comes Next

Kianuri confessed on television. Aidit was shot without a trial. Mahjub was hanged. They were not fools. They were among the most capable political operators of their generation. They simply could not conceive that their allies hated them more than their shared enemy.

The Western left will not be shot or hanged. It will simply become irrelevant. Once Muslim communities reach sufficient demographic concentration — and in Birmingham, Bradford, and Blackburn they are approaching it — they will not need Labour or the Greens as a vehicle. They will form their own parties, elect their own candidates, and implement their own values. Gorton and Denton is the tremor before the earthquake. The Green Party did not win that seat because of its climate policies. It won because a Muslim voting bloc chose the most convenient anti-establishment vehicle available. Next time, they may build their own.

The demographic trajectory suggests Muslim populations in European cities will continue to grow. The left’s fatal assumption is that cultural conservatism is a “phase” that education and exposure will cure. The 2016 ICM survey found that younger British Muslims are no more liberal on homosexuality than their parents. Integration is not softening the conservatism. It is consolidating it. The asymmetry is structural: one side commands a vast, spiritually obedient network that can fill a street with disciplined protestors by Friday afternoon. The other can write a strongly worded letter to The Guardian. When the alliance fractures — as it always does — the side with deeper roots in the community will prevail.

The left will have lost both. First the working class, who left because the party abandoned them. Then the immigrant communities, who will leave because they never needed the left in the first place — only its machinery. The country will have been transformed irreversibly. The left will be gone. And every value it held dear — secularism, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, free expression — will be dismantled not by the right, but by the people the left invited in and called allies.

Every alliance between the secular left and Islamism has ended the same way. Iran, Indonesia, Sudan — the pattern has no exceptions. The only question is whether the British and European left will learn from history, or whether they will become its next chapter.