By Ray Goodspeed (Leyton and Wanstead CLP)
Just when you think you have seen the worst of the despicable behaviour from the right of the party and the contempt from party officials who connive with them, they always seem to be able to find new depths to plumb. The attacks on Apsana Begum, the newly elected MP for Poplar and Limehouse, in Tower Hamlets (in London’s East End) are genuinely shocking, being described by John McDonnell as a “combination of ruthlessness and a basic lack of care and decency”.
The full story has been set out in an exclusive for Novara Media by Rivkah Brown, and I urge all activists and supporters to read it in detail (here). [title photo – Harry Mitchell/Somerford Grove Renters]
It includes the jaw-dropping revelation that Starmer was sent un urgent email from an “independent domestic violence advocate” (IDVA) working with the charity Refuge. This declared their belief that the so-called “trigger ballots” that were underway in Begum’s Constituency Labour Party (CLP) – to decide whether or not to move to a full selection process of the new MP – were “a further extension of the abuse she has already endured” from her ex-partner, who was a prominent member of her local Labour Party. The email received no answer from Starmer and only a standard, pro-forma answer from the “safeguarding team.”
Because of this abuse, the latest in a long line, Begum had even gone to the A&E, half way through the series of local branch meetings, with problems with her mental and physical health and had been signed off on health grounds. Of course, in such circumstances, any decent person would expect the process to be abandoned but, shockingly, this did not happen and half of the trigger meetings continued while Begum was on sick leave, as she still is at the time of writing!
Dozens of complaints
Dozens of complaints have been made by local party members about irregularities, bullying and intimidation in and around these meetings. A number of MPs added their voices to the calls for the process to be stopped, including, it must be said, right-wing women Labour MPs such as Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy, who have sent private messages to the labour leadership. The full selection campaign process has now finally been temporarily halted while Begum is signed off, but the whole process should be declared invalid.
Look at the contrast with what happened under Corbyn. The Lewisham MP, Ellie Reeves, is a sister of right-wing MP and current Shadow Chancellor, Rachael Reeves, and partner of John Cryer MP, the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party. She was no friend at all to Corbyn. Yet a threatened attempt to trigger a full selection contest in 2019 was completely called off by the Corbyn leadership at the time on the sole grounds that she was pregnant.
Can you even imagine the howls from the press, the BBC, Sky and ranks of Labour MPs if any right-wing woman MP had been treated as appallingly as Apsana Begum has been? Yet this disgraceful episode has barely been reported outside left media, such as Novara and Owen Jones’s own You Tube channel.
The officers of the CLP during all this – Chair, Chris Worrall, the Vice-Chair, Adam Allnut and Treasurer, Mohammed Sultan Hayder – are all personal friends of Begums ex-partner, Ehtasham Haque. All of them have been pictured, with Haque, at Worrall’s wedding celebration in Poland! Incredibly, Hayder was even appointed to be a CLP observer of the trigger meetings, as a response to the complaints, to ensure they were run fairly!
Just the latest outrage
However, this is just the latest outrage in a long story of abuse in which the party officials and leadership are widely believed to be complicit.
Apsana Begum represents the area where she grew up in East London and, like many of her constituents, is a Muslim woman from the severely disadvantaged Bangladeshi community and the first ever hijab-wearing MP. She is also a firebrand socialist and fighter for working people of all communities, inspired to enter politics by hearing a speech from Jeremy Corbyn.
In her campaigning in her constituency and around the country, as well as her fearless speeches in Parliament, she has acted as a tribune for trade unions, tenants and working-class communities, a voice for victims of domestic violence and coercion, and an advocate all of the radical policies of the recent Corbyn manifestos. She has clearly called for the whip to be restored to Corbyn himself. As such, she has become a target for the right, who would love to see the back of her.
They have found a useful ally in Begum’s ex-partner, Haque, from who she claims she had to flee because of his alleged coercive control, domestic abuse and “honour-based” abuse. Haque, who has been suspended from the party since September 2021, denies these allegations and says he will clear his name. But in any case, he is still close to leading members of the local CLP and is a friend and ally of the Labour ex-mayor of Tower Hamlets, John Biggs, (recently defeated, in the 2022 mayoral election, by Lutfur Rahman of the more left-wing “Aspire” party).
Disruption, abuse and intimidation
Ever since Begum became active on the left of the Tower Hamlets Labour Party, Haque, together with his supporters and relatives, are alleged to have waged a campaign of disruption, abuse and intimidation at any meeting she attended or spoke at. The local Momentum branch had to ban him from their meetings.
But once Begum was successful in her bid to become the Labour candidate, the harrassment, some of it so-called “honour-based”, continued, including at Begum’s 2019 election campaign launch. Haque was even issued with a formal police warning.
Then, on the day her nomination papers were submitted for the 2019 general election, Begum was prosecuted for housing fraud, based on a complaint from none other than Haque’s brother-in-law. The case was brought, not by the Crown Prosecution Service, but by Tower Hamlets Council, run at that time by her political enemies and friends of her ex-partner. The case cost the Council £90,000, which is £24,000 more than they claimed Begum had defrauded. Begum clearly listed her the abuse and coercion in her defence.
Having rumbled on for eighteen months, trashing Begum’s reputation and subjecting her to unbearable stress, she was completely acquitted of all charges. Bizarrely, the then director of London Region Labour Party, Amy Fode, turned up in Snaresbrook crown court, far from central London, to hear the verdict. Many observers have alleged that she was visibly disappointed at the result. In the light of the Forde Report, readers may draw their own conclusions why that might have been the case. Nazir Afzal, an ex-North-West regional chief prosecutor called the prosecution a “waste of public money”.
The current situation is unclear. If Apsana Begum’s health recovers, which we must all fervently hope for, she will still have to face the trauma of a full selection ballot in her CLP. In that event, it is absolutely critical that socialists in the party do all they can to help her campaign amongst members and win the nomination again, to retain an authentic socialist voice in Parliament from the East End.
Shameless
It is clear that the new leadership of the party nationally will stop at nothing in their attacks of socialists in the party, working with the local right-wingers, mainly based on councillors or careerist “future councillors”. They can also generally rely on the network of party officials, most of whom are utterly shameless in their right-wing factionalism and their contempt and loathing for left-wing party activists.
when she got the nomination as Labour candidate
The Forde report has already gone in the rubbish bin, never to be mentioned again in polite circles. Starmer has no intention whatsoever of addressing the problems it outlines because he is, quite simply, one of the same right-wing clique that the report mentions. That is why the rather limp, “kumbaya” tone of the report, preaching love, tolerance and understanding on all sides, was so ridiculous.
The divisions in the Labour Party are unbridgeable because they reflect the crisis of capitalism itself. The central question is “What is the party for?” – to try to make a vicious and exploitative system somehow nicer or to campaign for a socialist alternative to capitalism?. Even the claims of the Labour “centrists” around their anti-sexism and anti-racism do not stand up to scrutiny, unable even to offer a capitalist society where all working people are exploited and impoverished on an equal basis!
The current ferment among trade unionists, renters and other community campaigners, and how this develops in future, will be crucial factors in how these issues are decided. The impending wave of generalised strike action will give enormous confidence to working people to stand up for their interests and this will inevitably be reflected at some stage in the Labour Party itself, including at a national level, as trade union leaders either lead a fight for working class politics or at least come under pressure from below to do so.
The Labour Party right have nothing to offer working people, other than the pitiful claim that “At least we are not Tories!” Their current ruthlessness and viciousness are not signs of the strength but of the weakness of their ideas, or rather, their lack of them. They are desperate to use administrative measures to crush the left before their own political bankruptcy in the face of crisis capitalism is shown up for what it is and they are swept aside.
