by Martin Odoni
Faiza Shaheen, the suddenly-ousted Labour candidate for Chingford & Woodford Green, is getting a lot of sympathy for the callous way the Labour Party suspended her this week, on the threshold of the General Election candidacy deadline. It is so shameless and blatant what the Party is doing, I have a feeling this is going to backfire on them.
While I do have some sympathy for Shaheen, it is rather saturated by a sense of, “Don’t complain when you are shot with your own gun.” By this, I mean Shaheen is in many ways the victim of a bandwagon identical to one she once leapt on.
In 2018-19, Chris Williamson was one of the most prominent MPs on the Labour left, when he was hounded out of the Party by hysterical and dishonest misquotations of his words in a speech, in which he had talked about Labour being too apologetic about the largely-fictitious “anti-Semitism” crisis. His colleagues in the Socialist Campaign Group, to their shame, did not offer Williamson much in the way of solidarity, with even the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Laura Pidcock unfairly distancing themselves from him.
Outside the SCG, but more or less part of the same wider crowd within the Labour Party, was Shaheen, who had run the Inept Drunken Sh-… sorry, I mean, Iain Duncan-Smith impressively close at the 2017 General Election. Shaheen also showed the same qualities of what the late Tony Benn used to call the ‘weathervane’, when she heard the news of Williamson’s suspension; –
I do not know if Shaheen had something personal against Williamson, if she really did believe Williamson had said something anti-Semitic, or if she was just so ridiculously naive that she somehow thought that the sacrifice of Williamson would be the end of the anti-Semitism furore. Of course it would not. Like the Danegeld Anglo-Saxons paid to Vikings in the hope it would convince them not to burn English villages down, Williamson’s demise just encouraged the liars and toxic filth on the Labour right and in the Zionist lobby to attack the Labour left even more.
So maybe Shaheen has simply had an uncomfortable suck of her own straw?
I still feel for her somewhat because there is no doubt she has experienced a lot of obsolete bullying from the predominantly white males operating the party machine, chiefly for her being a Muslim woman. At the same time though, I resent her, because she co-operated with fake anti-racists who were manipulating another ethnicity – Jewry, my ethnicity – to help them score damaging political points, to derail a real progressive program.
What I can say though is that Shaheen’s past misdeed in no way at all lessens the truly vile qualities of the people running the Labour Party. The really cheap, disgusting aspect of how they are behaving is perhaps the most pointless and inexplicable – the insistence on briefing the press about a suspension or expulsion without telling the suspendee first. They did it, you might remember, to Corbyn back in 2020. It was so cowardly, and clearly had a tinge of really deliberate and calculated cruelty driving it.
This pattern of media tip-offs is quite disgusting, and serves no practical purpose. It is purely about maximising the humiliation by having the suspended member learn the news in front of press people, and force them to face the glare of the world before they have had the chance to come to terms with what has happened. It suggests a truly childish, zealous and malicious level of spite permeating the Labour right wing, and most particularly the Zionist lobby. They just hate anybody who tries not to co-operate with them.
These people on the Labour right really are utterly obnoxious. Foul, unprincipled, greedy, overloaded with blind hate. It amazes me that they can behave with such unrepentant aggression and destructiveness, and yet we on the left are the ones who get called the ‘extremists’.
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