I was mistreated – and that’s why hundreds of people will no longer vote Labour, they’ve told me | Faiza Shaheen

On Wednesday night I was removed via email from being Labor candidate MP for Chingford and Woodford Green. I live and grew up here and this fight means a lot to me personally.

I was asked to attend a mock 45-minute online meeting by email just hours before my cancellation, with three members of the National Executive Committee – one of whom never turned on his camera or said a word – and my fate was sealed. More than four years of work thrown in the trash. My connection to my community was removed. My deep and complete commitment was rejected. And the wishes of thousands in my constituency were ignored.

For what? A string of 14 tweets over 10 years, including liking a colleague’s tweet saying he’s running as a Green councilor and retweeting a list of companies to boycott in support of Palestine, both from 2014 Tweet containing a picture of me and Jeremy Corbyn from 2019 was twisted to say that I was showing that I was proud of the antisemitism of that era.

I couldn’t believe that was enough, especially since others were left for much worse. But after months of isolation and harassment, including being deprived of paid support to an organizer when I was seven months pregnant, I should have known this was coming. The real reason for it all? I care too much about wealth inequality, public ownership and Palestine to be welcome in today’s Labor Party.

It was officially decided that my application “will fail [the Labour party’s] the main objective is to win elections’. Yet when I stood in 2019, I ran in one of only six Tory-held seats that saw a swing to Labour. The irony is that removing me from the ballot and replacing me with someone nobody in my community knows will threaten Labour’s ability to win this seat and finally unseat Tory grandee Ian Duncan Smith. Stripping us of a Labor seat – and the chance of justice for all those sick and disabled people, including my own mother, who suffered benefit cuts because of Smith’s policies – is rotten.

My fate was leaked to the press before I knew it, and I knew I had to get my side of the story out quickly. One of my first thoughts when I realized that this might be the end of my political career was, “Please don’t ruin my life. May I never find another job again.”

They left people like me and political icon Diane Abbott begging and snorting. But I was overwhelmed with support after my Newsnight interview. Hundreds of people got in touch locally and nationally and said they would no longer vote Labor because of my treatment. Turns out the humiliation of a new mom who was out pounding the pavement for the party six weeks after a C-section doesn’t go down well.

After many conversations with angry volunteers and supporters I realize that the cruelest thing is that my community has been robbed of the hope of having one of our own elected and breaks the streak of terrible Tory MPs that we have had to live through in my London borough. People who have knocked on the doors of the Labor Party for decades are tearing up their Labor Party membership cards and have told me they feel they have wasted their lives. This is heartbreaking.

Of course people will say I should have known better. There’s a reason people say politics is a dirty game. But in any other workplace scenario, what happened to me would be considered unfair dismissal. that Labor the party that treated me in this way should not be lost to anyone.

So how do I stand up for myself? How do I send a message to these bullies that they can’t treat me or anyone else this way? I’m trying to figure out what avenues I have – but please be assured that they have chosen the wrong person. In the meantime, I hope the backlash will give Labor pause: to think about how they want to win and what values ​​they are willing to sacrifice on the way to power.

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