On Wednesday night I was removed, via email, from being the Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. I live and grew up here, and this battle means so much to me personally.
I was asked to attend a sham 45-minute online meeting via email just hours before my deselection, with three members of the National Executive Committee – one of whom never put his camera on or said a word – and my fate was decided. More than four years’ work thrown in the bin. My connection to my community brushed aside. My deep and utter commitment dismissed. And the desires of thousands in my constituency disregarded.
For what? A series of 14 tweets over 10 years, including me liking a colleague’s tweet saying he was running as a Green councillor, and a retweet containing a list of companies to boycott to support Palestine, both from 2014. A tweet containing a photo of me and Jeremy Corbyn from 2019 was twisted to say I was showing I was proud of antisemitism in that era.
I couldn’t believe this was enough, especially as others have been let off for far worse. But after months of being isolated and bullied, including being stripped of paid organiser support when I was seven months pregnant, I should have known this was coming. The real reason for it all? I’m too interested in wealth inequality, public ownership and Palestine to be welcomed in today’s Labour party.
Officially it has been decided my candidacy “would frustrate [the Labour party’s] primary purpose of winning elections”. Yet when I stood in 2019, I ran in one of only six Tory-held seats that saw a swing to Labour. The irony is that taking me off the ballot and replacing me with someone no one in my community knows will jeopardise Labour’s ability to win this seat and finally unseat the Tory grandee Iain Duncan Smith. Depriving us of a Labour seat – and the chance of justice for all those sick and disabled people, including my own mother, who experienced benefits cuts because of Smith’s policies – is rotten.
My fate was leaked to the press before I found out, and I knew I had to get my side of the story out quickly. One of my first thoughts when I realised this could be the end of my political career was: “Please don’t ruin my life. Don’t make it so I can never get another job again.”
They have made people like me and the political icon Diane Abbott beg and grovel. But I’ve been overwhelmed by support after my Newsnight interview. Hundreds of people have been in touch locally and nationally saying they will no longer vote Labour because of my treatment. It turns out that humiliating a new mum who was out pounding pavements for the party six weeks after a C-section doesn’t go down well.
After many conversations with angry volunteers and supporters, I realise the cruellest thing is my community being robbed of the hope of having one of our own elected, and breaking the series of awful Conservative MPs we’ve had to endure in my London borough. People who knocked on doors for Labour for decades are tearing up their Labour party membership cards and have told me they feel they have wasted their lives. It is heartbreaking.
Of course, people will say I should have known better. There is a reason why people say politics is a dirty game. But in any other workplace scenario, what happened to me would be considered unfair dismissal. That the Labour party treated me this way should not be lost on anyone.
So how do I stand up for myself? How do I send a message to these bullies that they can’t treat me or anyone else this way? I’m trying to work out what avenues I have – but please rest assured, they’ve picked on the wrong person. In the meantime, I hope the backlash will give Labour pause: to think about how it wants to win and what values it is willing to sacrifice on the journey to power.
Faiza Shaheen was the Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green in 2019, and teaches at the London School of Economics
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