Alleged slum landlord Jas Athwal – the biggest landlord in Parliament – has hit the headlines for his atrocious treatment of his tenants. But how did he become an MP in the first place? Angus Satow investigates.

The sitting Labour MP in Ilford South was Sam Tarry, an Socialist Campaign Group member and trade unionist who was sacked as a shadow minister by Keir Starmer for the crime of going on a picket line.

But Jas Athwal – the leader of Redbridge council and a close ally of Labour right attack dog Wes Streeting – wanted the seat.

In 2017 Keir Starmer declared himself strongly opposed to deselecting MPs: “We have a government that is in crisis, that… is on the ropes… is clearly in-fighting itself. In those circumstances Labour should be dignified, it should be united and it should rise above.”

But the Keir Starmer of 2020 onwards had no such scruples – as long it was the left being targeted. So Team Starmer gave the green light to deselect Tarry, with the (extraordinary) public backing of Wes Streeting. Here’s what Wes himself had once said: “Real Labour people don’t spend their time trying to deselect MPs, they spend their time getting them elected.”

The first step was to ‘trigger’ Sam Tarry for deselection. The process was stacked with irregularities and wrongdoing, documented by Tarry in a dossier. This included voter fraud. Incredibly, Labour recognised this had occurred… but refused to intervene.

Other allegations included evidence clearly showing Athwal breaking rules against negative campaigning, and widespread reports of voter impersonation. Starmer’s handpicked General Secretary David Evans ignored them all.

Sam Tarry’s y statement following the conclusion of Ilford South CLP’s reselection process

So, onto the full selection. Team Tarry briefed their confidence off the back of member canvassing. It’s extremely rare for Labour members to deselect their own MP, regardless of factional allegiance. Yet the official results showed Athwal ‘won’ comfortably…

Tarry questioned the result and asked the Party to be transparent and disclose details of who had voted and by what method, amid evidence of ‘ghost voters’. He also raised questions around the Anonyvoter system used for the selection – of which, more later.

Yet once again the Labour Party bureaucracy – elsewhere engaging in a mass purge of socialists – refused to even investigate. Tarry continued to raise complaints.

Then earlier this year, a major scandal broke. The Telegraph published a detailed report suggesting that Labour’s Parliamentary selections had been systematically rigged using the Anonyvoter system.

You can read the full details of the Anonyvoter scandal in this thread. Anonyvoter was used in both Tarry’s trigger and the full selection. Team Tarry requests for independent tellers and independent verification were rejected by Labour.

Significantly, the report revealed massive discrepancies between Athwal and Tarry’s vote tallies online versus in-person. In sum, Tarry was well ahead with in-person votes, which are not riggable. But the electronic votes (riggable) bucked this trend and broke for Athwal. It looked highly suspicious.

Tarry certainly thought so. He now said explicitly that the vote had been rigged against him in favour of Athwal – quite a thing for a sitting MP to say: “Since October 2022 I have stayed silent, seeking to right the wrong done to me and the people of Ilford. I want to be absolutely clear – the Anonyvoter system was used to deselect me, rigged to change the result against the wishes of my local Labour Party.”

Tarry now submitted a formal complaint of vote-rigging to the Party. The methods and evidence he detailed were eerily similar to the membership tampering seen in Croydon Labour, which the Met police cyber-crimes unit ended up investigating.

Yet again Labour appeared to stonewall. They even ignored their own affiliated unions when they demanded transparency.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. The man in charge of investigating all of this is (a) very right-wing; (b) handpicked by Starmer to oversee the purge of the left (c) literally connected to the people involved.

So ends the tale of how alleged slum landlord Jas Athwal became the Labour candidate. He went on to lose 25% of the Labour vote at the election.

No, this was never about ‘high quality candidates’. It was about purging the left and making Labour safe again for the British establishment.

Angus Satow is a writer and former head of communications at Momentum. This article is an edited version of a recently posted twitter(X) thread. Labour Hub has previously reported on allegation of Labour vote-rigging here and here

Image: Jas Athwal.https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CouncillorJasAthwal.jpg Author: Editadelaide, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.