Found this article quite interesting in the NYtimes today. I am not sure if I agree with being anti-blair simply because you are against war..or some ill perceived sense of islamic victimization, but whatever the motivation, good to see participation in the democratic process. Even the fundos are running scared 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/international/europe/22britain.html?pagewanted=1
BIRMINGHAM, England, April 19 - The war in Iraq brought Salma Yaqoob to public life, and with an election due next month, the politics of that same conflict could make or break her dream of staying there.
Once a leader of the pacifist Stop-the-War campaign, Ms. Yaqoob is now one of a handful of candidates fighting the mighty Labor electoral machine in the name of a tiny start-up movement called Respect - feeding on the antiwar sentiment that consumed many Britons in the prelude to the conflict in 2003 and that lingers in the deep mistrust many voters avow toward Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But as the May 5 election approaches with Mr. Blair clearly in the lead in opinion polls, the Iraq war has come to occupy ambiguous ground. The damage that the war has done to Mr. Blair’s credibility has made trust in the prime minister an issue throughout Britain. But opposition to the war itself, which particularly animates Ms. Yaqoob and many of her fellow Muslims, is rarely mentioned by the main contenders for power on the campaign trail.
The opposition Conservatives, led by Michael Howard, supported the invasion and cannot therefore make political capital out of it. And the antiwar Liberal Democrats have done little on the hustings to exploit the issue.
“In this election the war is everywhere and nowhere,” said the columnist Jonathan Freedland in the antiwar newspaper The Guardian, comparing the British election with those last year in Spain and the United States. “While JosĂ© MarĂa Aznar and George Bush were pounded by their electoral challengers over the conflict, Tony Blair enjoys a free pass from his chief rival, Michael Howard. Iraq is not exactly the lead item in any of the main party manifestos.”
Or, as Ms Yaqoob put it in an interview at her suburban home, “it’s the elephant in the room.”
Her campaign here in the British Midlands has a special twist. Her constituency, called Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath, has 27,000 Muslim voters, almost half the electorate, giving it one of the highest concentrations of Muslims of any of the 646 electoral districts in contention, according to electoral experts. But the district also has the sixth largest Labor majority in the country -16,246 votes. Writ small thus, the contest here will offer one test of Mr. Blair’s ability to avoid political punishment among Britain’s Muslim population for ordering British troops to Iraq as America’s ally.
“Wherever there is a strong Muslim population, Tony Blair is going to lose,” said Mohammed Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham’s Central Mosque. Dr. Naseem also supports the Respect movement, which is led from London by a maverick former Labor legislator, George Galloway, who visited twice with Mr. Hussein in prewar Iraq.
Just as important, though, the fight here reflects a contest among Britain’s more than 1.6 million Muslims - less than 3 percent of the population - between an older, first generation of immigrants that generally looked to the Labor Party and their younger, more assertive offspring, born and raised in Britain.
“My father voted Labor forever, but the war in Iraq changed everyone’s opinion,” said Farrah Zaman, 37, a British-born Muslim homemaker who wore the niqab headdress covering everything except her eyes.
“Tony Blair sent the troops out to Iraq and he adamantly said he believes he did the right thing, but I can’t stop thinking about how many innocent people were killed,” she said. “He always said he never did anything wrong, but they never found the weapons of mass destruction,” whose existence - the core of Mr. Blair’s argument for ousting Mr. Hussein - was never proved.
Like other people interviewed for this article, Ms. Zaman preferred to dwell on the number of dead since the war - which she and others here reckoned, without offering proof, to be 100,000. Mr. Blair, like President Bush, prefers to remind skeptics that the invasion brought an end to Mr. Hussein’s atrocities, which, by their account, claimed many more lives than allied military action.
In the hardscrabble Sparkbrook area of Birmingham, the Muslim influence is evident in the halal foodstores and Islamic bookshops, the flowing black robes and dark headdresses of the women. Over the decades, waves of immigrations brought people here, predominantly from Kashmir and Afghanistan and most recently from Somalia. Many are women.
“For the first time you have got young British-born females wearing the hijab,” said Parwez Hussain, 32, manager of an educational Web site, referring to the Islamic head scarf covering women’s hair and neck and reflecting Islamic piety. “Half the voters are female,” he said. “You don’t know what they are going to do. Historically women didn’t get involved. Now they make up half the people at political rallies.”
That may not, though, add up to anything like a rout for Mr. Blair in this critical region. “Whoever wins the Midlands will win Britain,” said Robert Waller, a co-author of the Almanac of British Politics reference work. But to win, Mr. Blair’s adversaries would need a huge and improbable-seeming swing in their favor.
The opposition, moreover, is splintered in various ways. “There’s no monolithic bloc” among Muslim voters, said Ms. Yaqoob, 33, a psychotherapist who is seeking to increase the number of Muslims in the British Parliament beyond its current level of two. She is not alone in that ambition.
The Liberal Democrats - the junior opposition party, which opposed the deployment of British troops in Iraq - have fielded their own Muslim candidate in her district, Talib Hussain, a defector from the Labor Party. Some believe that with deeper roots and broader organization, the Liberal Democrats will capture the vote of disaffected Muslims.
“It’s a difficult call,” said Ibrahim Versani, a medical doctor, who said he voted for Labor in 2001 but will not do so in 2005 because Mr. Blair’s government brushed aside widespread opposition to the war in Iraq.
“There’s a lot of sympathy with Respect on the antiwar issue,” he said, “but I suspect they are not so strong on the other issues - jobs and the economy.”
There is some bitterness, too, that the Muslim vote is so fissured. Mr. Hussain, the Liberal Democratic candidate, accused Respect of “helping Labor get back in” by dividing Muslim loyalties.
The potential beneficiary is Roger Godsiff, the Labor candidate first elected 12 years ago, who has maintained Labor’s dominance here.
Mr. Godsiff, who is not Muslim, seemed to be calculating that, whatever the hopes of insurgents like Ms. Yaqoob, Muslims’ traditional tie to Labor would prevail. “The way the system works is that that you talk to the community, you talk in groups, large groups, small groups, particularly to the men and they take the message back to the extended family,” he said.
There are, of course, much broader distinctions within British Islam as a whole. On Tuesday, Islamic militants burst into a news conference in London held by representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain, the country’s largest mainstream Muslim organization, and handed out leaflets saying, “Voting for any political party will guarantee your seat in hellfire forever,”
Later the same day, people from the same militant group clashed violently with followers of Mr. Galloway, the Respect leader in east London, saying it was un-Islamic to vote and that anyone who did so became an infidel.
Some Muslim leaders said that pointed to a further generational divide. Ali Miraj, a Conservative candidate in Watford, north of London, told reporters that younger Muslims were impatient with the mainstream leadership. “They want some sort of Islamic state, some sort of Utopian ideal,” he said.