“The party is being dismembered on the ground. Members anywhere left of the hard right, Muslims, trade unionists and young members are key demographics that have exited the party in droves, destroying its activist base.”
Richard Price, Leyton and Wanstead CLP, traces the right wing rampage across one of Labour’s heartlands
East London is the bedrock of the Labour movement. Where New Unionism was built through the great struggles of matchgirls, dockers and gas workers in the 1880s. Where in 1892 Keir Hardie became the first independent working class MP for West Ham South. Home to successive waves of migrants escaping poverty and persecution. Where George Lansbury and the Poplar councillors defied the Tories in the 1920s. Storm centre of the struggle against Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s. Home to what was Europe’s largest council estate (Becontree) and its largest factory (Ford’s Dagenham). Scene of bitter but ultimately successful struggles against the National Front and the BNP in the late 1970s and early 1990s.
These days it hosts some of Britain’s most diverse communities. Even as new waves of gentrification and rocketing house prices have spread across East London, five of its boroughs have significantly higher levels of poverty than England as a whole.
And it’s also at the centre of witch hunts in the Labour Party. Of course, it’s not alone. Merseyside was singled out for treatment early into the life of Keir Starmer’s leadership. The banning of Jamie Driscoll from the selection process for Mayor of the North East was another landmark in the creation of Starmer’s “changed party”. But it’s certainly one of the most concentrated.
The reasons are not hard to fathom. Many of its constituency parties had large memberships that were resistant to the charms of New Labour, and came under the control of the left at some point of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Three its MPs – Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington), Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) and Sam Tarry (Ilford South) – were also supportive of Jeremy’s leadership, while Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) was independent-minded enough to nominate him in 2015. And it is home to some of Britain’s most concentrated Muslim communities, deeply alienated by the Labour leadership’s attitude to the Gaza conflict.
Labour’s misfortunes in Tower Hamlets have hit the headlines repeatedly over the last two decades. George Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 General Election as a Respect candidate, defeating sitting MP Oona King. In 2006, Respect won 12 seats on Tower Hamlets Council. Lutfur Rahman won the Tower Hamlets mayoralty as an independent in 2010, having been removed as Labour’s candidate. Disqualified from office in 2014 for five years, he was re-elected in 2022, this time as the leader of the Aspire party. Aspire currently holds 25 out of 46 council seats on Tower Hamlets Council.
In hindsight, it’s evident that the right wing of the party had a hit-list of sitting MPs and prospective candidates that they were determined to remove. In Chingford and Woodford Green, a two-pronged attack developed against the CLP and its 2019 candidate, Faiza Shaheen – this in one of only six Tory-held seats that saw a swing to Labour at the last general election. The extensive media coverage of Faiza Shaheen’s removal as Labour’s candidate needs little repeating. What preceded it is less well known.
The right got to work even before the announcement of Keir Starmer’s victory in the leadership election on April 4th 2020. One re-joiner early in 2020 was Jack Baldan, who only weeks before had been election agent for former MP Mike Gapes, who had stood against Labour in Ilford South in the General Election. No 5-year exclusion for him. A distorted report of a C&WG meeting held on November 30th 2020 appeared in the Jewish Chronicle on December 1st, following which the CLP chair, vice-chair and one other member were suspended. The chair was subsequently unsuspended, only for the CLP secretary to be suspended. The London Region withdrew all access to membership data and forbade the remaining officers to contact members.
In the wake of the confusion and demoralisation this caused, the constituency AGM was held in the summer of 2021, at which the right swept the board. This had the effect of changing the balance of Waltham Forest Local Campaign Forum – the body responsible for overseeing local government selections – from left to right. One of its delegates was now Jack Baldan, who also became C&WG Campaigns Coordinator. The LCF, as if by magic, sprang back to life in July 2021, having not met since December 2018. It would go on to fail 4 sitting BAME councillors in Waltham Forest, and 13 out of 15 Muslim new applicants at the interview stage.
With the parliamentary selection for C&WG looming, Labour HQ put in a shift. No less than five Labour MPs in neighbouring constituencies, including shadow cabinet members Wes Streeting and David Lammy, were mobilised to call for support for Faiza Shaheen’s main opponent, her predecessor as candidate in 2017, Bilal Mahmood.
Interventions on this scale by MPs into selection contests are virtually unknown – so much so that some called it collective bullying. But local members responded magnificently and organised an excellent campaign in support of Faiza Shaheen, who was re-selected in July 2022 by a majority of votes in the first round of balloting.
Following Faiza’s blocking as a candidate and subsequent resignation from the party, Jewish News journalist and serial libeller Lee Harpin wrote: “The absolute failure of many of those supporting Faiza Shaheen to accept that the Labour candidate is herself a woman of colour exposes the racism inherent in their nasty, divisive and sad political ideology.” Former Guardian journalist Gary Younge shot back: “You must know that ousting democratically selected people of colour and replacing them with people of the same colour that you’ve chosen is straight out of the colonial playbook? Because we do. It doesn’t make you less racist; it makes your racism more cynical.”
In Ilford South, the sitting MP, Sam Tarry, lost a trigger ballot in July 2022 – coincidentally the same month he was sacked from his position as Shadow Minister for Buses and Local Transport, for an unauthorised media appearance, and having appeared on picket lines – and he faced a selection contest as a result. The selection meeting on October 10th, at which Tarry lost to Redbridge Council leader Jas Athwal, has been the subject of detailed allegations surrounding its probity.
Back in August 2009, when Leyton and Wanstead CLP was starting the procedure to choose its parliamentary candidate, Luke Akehurst wrote in his blog: “I know a bit about Leyton & Wanstead CLP because it’s in the patch I represent on Labour’s London Regional Board. It’s a fiercely independent-minded CLP and won’t take kindly to ‘senior party sources’ thinking they can drop one of their own number into the vacancy created by Harry Cohen’s retirement, or to any insinuation that the democratic process by which local members pick a candidate is being pre-empted.”
John Cryer came through a crowded field to win the selection in 2010, but by 2015 CLP and MP were moving in opposite directions. Cryer resigned from the Campaign Group, having become chair of the PLP in 2014. The CLP became among the first to nominate Jeremy, and remained staunchly loyal throughout his leadership.
And now full circle. On May 29th – just one week after a General Committee meeting at which no indication was given – Cryer was one of eight coordinated Labour retirees, ensuring that those “senior party sources”, of which Akehurst is one of the most important, would be able to parachute in one of their own in the shape of Wing Commander Calvin Bailey, whose sole connection with the area may be having flown over it at some time in the past.
The long cat-and-mouse game to block Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington also received a great deal of media coverage. It failed after a combination of three factors – a BBC investigation that established that the inquiry into Diane had finished in December 2023, contradicting Starmer’s claim on May 24th that it was still about to conclude; widespread public protest, both in Hackney and nationally; and a split at the top of the party when Angela Rayner stated that she could “see no reason” why Diane should not be allowed to stand.
Once again, there has been correspondingly less focus on the lengths to which Labour HQ has gone to de-stabilise her constituency party. This detailed account sets out the facts. Once again, note the factionalism on steroids. Surely, only Labour First could see the opportunity in a child abuse scandal that engulfed one of its leading organisers in Hackney, and took out Hackney’s elected mayor, Phil Glanville, in its wake. At its centre was a newly elected councillor called Tom Dewey, who had been arrested six days prior to the election in possession of multiple images of child abuse of the most extreme category.
John Henderson, the head of the independent review into how the council responded to the arrest of Dewey, told a scrutiny panel hearing “I didn’t follow-up with any of his [Dewey’s] contacts. None of them were named to me, it has to be said. Nobody said ‘he’s best friends with X, you need to speak to them’. Had they done so, I would have followed up, but they were never named, and that was quite telling.”
It’s a fair bet, if I’ve observed that milieu correctly, that many of his friends and contacts will have been political friends that share his right wing views. And another fair bet that several of them will have been Labour First/Labour to Win supporters. So they closed ranks and took the oath of Omertà. Instead, the legitimate safeguarding concerns of party members were turned into a means to cut off contact between the CLP and its members, and replace the three leading CLP elected officers with three unelected Labour First stooges, one of whom doesn’t even live in the constituency, with the seal of approval from the Regional Director. The brazenness is breathtaking.
Until the first week of June, Darren Rodwell looked to be odds on favourite to be confirmed as Labour’s candidate in Barking, succeeding Margaret Hodge. Rodwell, the Leader of Barking and Dagenham Council, had seemingly survived the exposure of several Bernard Manning-style comments, made an apology (while telling a constituent that it was “part of a smear campaign against me”) and been reinstated.
But then two further allegations surfaced – one of sexual harassment, and the other a bizarre account of how Rodwell’s office had phoned up the police and told them ‘Don’t worry if you get a call’ from a resident he was planning to confront. Clearly this was a bit too much even for an NEC that has been extraordinarily lenient towards right wing offenders, so Rodwell withdrew to “put family first”, like that procession of Tory MPs did under John Major.
Luckily there was a replacement “high quality candidate” with her parachute pre-packed in the shape of Nesil Caliskan, Leader of Enfield Council. Caliskan, it should be remembered, shot to power, becoming council leader in 2018, just three years after she had won a by election. The selection process that preceded this was the subject of widespread complaints of irregularities and saw every sitting black councillor de-selected. Following allegations of bullying and intimidation of fellow councillors, Caliskan was rebuked by the NEC for failing to follow explicit instructions, and the Enfield Labour group placed in special measures.
This track record would be enough to sink many political careers – but under Keir Starmer she has gone from strength to strength, becoming an NEC member and leader of the Local Government Association Labour group. In a piece for LabourList, she even depicted herself as having been the victim of “a combination of sexism and racism” in 2018.
Newham, where the constituency parties of West Ham and East Ham were placed in special measures in 2021, now has the new seats of Stratford and Bow and West Ham and Beckton. In the latter, Starmer loyalist James Esser has been parachuted in – chair of the NEC and one of 6 NEC members handed seats by their mates.
And so back to Tower Hamlets – Britain’s most populous Bangladeshi community – where we began. In Bethnal Green and Stepney, the successor seat to Bethnal Green and Bow, Rushanara Ali has faced angry protests since she abstained on an SNP amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire last November. It is the only one of 11 London constituencies where Muslims make up at least a fifth of the electorate that Labour has directed volunteers to campaign in, despite her 37,524 majority at the last election.
Campaign Group MP Apsana Begum in Poplar and Limehouse, has faced years of harassment, islamophobia and misogyny both from elements within her local party and from her ex-husband and his associates, as well as a malicious prosecution for fraud. At her trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court in July 2021 Labour Party officials gathered, waiting to gloat at a conviction. Instead, she was found not guilty on all charges. Labour’s NEC decided to confirm Apsana’s re-selection despite a last minute appeal to have her blocked by local opponents. Perhaps blocking her was a bridge too far after all the negative publicity surrounding Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen.
So this is what is happening to the once-proud Labour movement in this historic area. The party is being dismembered on the ground. Thousands have left the party. Photos from canvassing teams – accompanied by the usual whoops about “brilliant” and “amazing” candidates – again and again show Potemkin villages of candidates and the payroll (councillors and other officials) and virtually no members. It is likely that all Labour’s candidates in the constituencies mentioned will win, but at a huge structural cost for the future. Members anywhere left of the hard right, Muslims, trade unionists and young members are key demographics that have exited the party in droves, destroying its activist base.
The praetorian guard that is spearheading this dismantling of branches and general committees in constituencies and regions is itself not very numerous. It’s primarily composed of the payroll – councillors, Labour group officers, borough organisers, officers of other right wing affiliates, people who work for right wing MPs and right wing trade unions, plus a smattering of think tank types. It’s young-ish (twenty-somethings to mid-30s), predominantly white and middle class.
Many are graduates of the discredited Labour Students organisation, which distinguished itself by only including a fraction of the tens of thousands of students that joined under Jeremy Corbyn. But they are to the right of their peer group on the economy, the environment, foreign affairs and workers’ rights. They often don’t have much local support or many roots in the area. Like the famed Trotskyist bedsitter infiltrators of the 1970s, they seem to move around in small groups, house sharing. They are the new Atlanticists and they are almost certainly members of Labour Friends of Israel.
The style is pushy-managerial. Too busy to waste too much time having boring meetings. Certainly too busy to debate policy or consult meaningfully on it. To block as many forms of accountability to CLPs and branches as possible. To isolate councillors from members as much as possible, and to substitute them for membership activity.
And yet this is a group that clearly spends a lot of its time in meetings, plotting, and poring over opponents’ social media. Their key political characteristic is an almost cult-like ruthlessness. No task is too low that it can’t be done, whether it is gathering in a court hoping for a guilty verdict to humiliating Britain’s first black woman MP. From sacking a candidate while she’s out canvassing and briefing the press beforehand to completely ignoring the Rule Book when it suits. Seek a factional advantage out of a paedophile scandal. Does it get any worse?
Expelling Jewish activists for antisemitism, blocking black and brown women candidates, overseeing racialized purges in local government, downgrading women’s conference and alienating the party’s Muslim membership, while ramping up the rhetoric on small boats and securing our borders – these all point to where the party is headed. These ideas aren’t in any way “centrist”; they represent the hard right of the Labour movement.
John Henderson noted at the Hackney scrutiny committee that Tom Dewey was “very ambitious”. It’s a group characteristic, combined with day-to-day communication that includes racial slurs and insults as exposed in the leaked dossier. Combine the two together and you have the kind of arrogance that allows people with a few years’ experience to expel people who have given decades of service to the party.
The next stage of the struggle will be over the Labour Party’s very existence as a party of labour.
- Richard Price is a member of the Leyton and Wanstead Constituency Labour Party and a regular contributor to Labour Outlook.
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Annonivote is the elephant in that room.