By Lizzy Ali

As a Waltham Forest Labour Party member who has campaigned for Faiza Shaheen on many occasions, my heart goes out to her. In 2009-10, I had similar experiences to her in the same borough.

My father was a Muslim who came to Britain as a migrant from what is now northern Bangladesh shortly before the partition of India, and a year or so before the Empire Windrush docked. My mother was a working class Catholic of Scottish and gypsy heritage. My father died when I was 13, leaving my mother with 10 children. My extended family includes 10 nationalities and several religions.

By 2009, I had been a union rep for 20 years and had a co-led a highly successful strike of Unison nursery nurses in Tower Hamlets in 2003 that resulted in re-grading and a significant pay rise. I had worked with early years’ children for the same period. I was comfortably selected as a council candidate ahead of a sitting councillor – a good fit, you might think, in our highly multicultural, multi-faith borough.

For 18 months, my partner and I trudged the streets, canvassing (and arranging child care) almost every weekend. In all, four sitting councillors were de-selected in the selection round, in each case over issues related to their performance.

Then, two senior white male councillors intervened and appointed themselves arbiters of the ethnic minority make-up of the Labour Group. At a meeting of the Labour Group at the Town Hall at which I was an observer, I was astonished to hear one of them bellow at the Pakistani councillors present, in full hearing of Council staff in the building, that they were “a bunch of f***ing racists”. Together these two councillors persuaded Labour’s London Region to investigate “membership irregularities” in the branches in which councillors had been de-selected.

The bogus inquiry ran for five months, during which time I was forbidden to mention the matter. Absurdly, no details of the alleged irregularities were ever divulged to the borough’s CLPs and branches. As in Faiza’s case, they ran down the clock, and shortly before the 2010 elections I was re-interviewed, after which the sitting councillor, who had finished fifth in the original ballot was reinstated as a candidate. One year into her term, she was removed from all committees for poor attendance, including, ironically, her role as Chair of the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Sub-Committee.  

Humiliated but undeterred, I remained active in the Party. In 2015, Leyton and Wanstead was the first constituency in Britain to nominate Jeremy Corbyn, after which our membership soared by 350 per cent, and our majority ballooned to 22,607 in 2017. I served as Constituency Chair for two years, and have served as Vice-Chair since.

Since 2020, 40 per cent of our membership has resigned or lapsed. In 2022, 13 out of 15 Muslim councillor applicants were failed at interview. Since October last year, events in Gaza have caused outrage locally. Terrible as these have been, as someone who marched as a teenager against the invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982 in which over 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese died, I am perhaps less surprised than some.

The cat and mouse humiliation and harassment of black and brown women – of Diane Abbott, Apsana Begum and Faiza Shaheen – is a disgrace and a mockery of “our shared Labour values”, which are supposed to include things like decency and fairness.

A shortened version of this article was submitted as a letter to the Guardian prior to Faiza Shaheen’s decision to stand as an independent.

Image: Waltham Forest in Greater London. Source: Own work This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Adobe Illustrator. This SVG file was uploaded with Commonist.This vector image includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this file:  Greater London UK location map 2.svg (by Nilfanion). Author: TUBS, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.