Soft-left candidate victim of last-minute Labour purge designed to leave no time to organise as independent
Soft-left Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen has told the BBC how she found out, while out campaigning, that she had been suspended by Labour and deselected as a general election candidate.
Shaheen, one of a handful of candidates to make gains in 2019, was campaigning in Chingford and Woodford Green when she got the news because of calls from journalists and appeared on BBC Newsnight an hour later to recount how she had been blocked because of tweets about the Greens when she was not a Labour member and for a comment about Israel’s genocide in Gaza:
Shaheen is the latest victim of what many expect to be a wave of last-minute deselections as Labour purges anyone remotely left, especially critics of Israel’s war crimes, and seeks to install friends of genocide and war enthusiasts.
The move to deselect Shaheen was described by US commentator John Stewart ‘the dumbest thing [from the UK] since Boris Johnson’. Stating the obvious, Shaheen said that Labour has a ‘problem with black and brown people’, but has indicated she will try to challenge the deselection rather than capitalise on public outrage and stand as in independent so she is not at the mercy of Labour’s racist leadership machine.
Keir Starmer is every bit as dangerous as any Tory, including Thatcher or Blair.
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