‘The Mistreatment of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen Speaks to Hierarchy of Racism in Starmer’s Labour Party’

The deselection of Faiza Shaheen as a Labour candidate in this year’s General Election dominated campaign coverage in the past week.

The social justice campaigner and economist – who has since resigned from the Labour Party and will now stand as an independent – achieved the highest ever vote for Labour in the constituency of former Conservative Leader Iain Duncan Smith, Chingford and Woodford Green, in the 2019 General Election. It was widely thought she would unseat the Tories in the north-east London seat this year – an area in which she was born and raised.

But a shock email from Labour’s National Executive Committee informed Shaheen that she had been deselected. Why?

If you only read the headlines, because of 14 ‘liked’ tweets, one of which was allegedly antisemitic. But if you read beyond the headlines, it went far deeper than tweets which were ‘liked’ over the course of a decade. It was, in Shaheen’s words, “a systematic campaign of racism, Islamophobia, and bullying”.

“Racism is never about individuals,” journalist, equality campaigner, and ex-Labour councillor Shaista Aziz told this week’s Media Storm podcast. “It’s about systems of power.”

Applying the famous Toni Morrison quote to Shaheen’s situation, she recited: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being – that is pretty much what Faiza Shaheen has had to do.”

Shaista Aziz was one of first two Labour councillors in the country to resign over Keir Starmer’s position on Israel and Gaza last October, which posited that “Israel has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians. It is a position the Labour Leader later backtracked on, claiming that he meant only that the country had a right to self-defence.

“I had no option [but to resign],” Aziz said. “It was a red line. And I think what we’re seeing now is a red line for lots of other people. The mistreatment of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen really do speak to the hierarchy of racism that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is overseeing.”

Indeed, mere days ago, seven councillors in Slough resigned from the opposition party, citing ‘institutional racism’ in Labour.

Claims that it is ‘purging’ left-wing and minority candidates are being batted off by opposition spokespeople. But Shaheen’s determination to speak out has given a face to the fight.

Speaking to the power of listening to first-hand lived experience to demonstrate that minorities are not a monolith, Media Storm guest host and journalist Coco Khan referenced Shaheen’s BBC Newsnight interview, which took place one hour after she received the email informing her of her deselection.

“[The public] know nothing about her except she’s got a brown face and a Muslim name… and then they see her on the screen,” Khan said. “And what you see is someone who is not this one-note character that’s been drawn in a racist cartoon, but a mother. A human… someone you get on with, someone you’d have a cup of tea with. But actually, [people of colour] often don’t get the opportunities to show [their] humanity.”

We are currently witnessing the dehumanisation of people of colour across the media, through the almost daily images of unthinkable violence against the people of Palestine, which has become a regular feature of scrolling through our social feeds.

“We have to wonder,” Khan said, “why we aren’t all downing tools right now and doing something about it.” A possible answer? Because Palestinians are largely non-white and Muslim. 

“Look at images of poverty porn from charities,” founder of South Asian magazine Burnt Roti, Sharan Dhaliwal, told Media Storm. “We’ve seen these images on the tube, on the TV, forever… it’s saying that non-white people are always in need. And so when you see it [in Palestine], it feels like you’ve seen it before… you do become desensitised.”

Indeed, it is hard to imagine the scenes of suffering and starvation on the scale we have seen happening to white people – and if we could, it would arguably have us ‘downing tools’ immediately.

Some may point to the number of British Asians who have held the highest positions of power in our political system and cry ‘representation!’ and ‘progress!’. Rishi Sunak is our Prime Minister, while Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, and Sajid Javid all held high-profile roles in the Cabinet. “They are one of us,” Dhaliwal said, “but they do not represent us. This isn’t a TV show. This is our lives.” 

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Aziz spoke to Media Storm about the “dangerous narrative” surrounding representation as the solution to racism.

“To have a room full of people who are brown is not a win, if they are going to help cement the most horrific policies that disproportionately devastate and implicate people of colour… for example, those from the Windrush generation, those who have been standing up with the Black Lives Matter movement, those who are standing with the Palestinians. A call on all people of colour to celebrate them [is] a form of tokenism, and is very racist.”  

So what can we do beyond ‘representation’?

Dhaliwal calls on the media, and the public, to name the problem and use accurate terminology (“we get scared sometimes to say ‘racist’”). Beyond that, she identifies system change in newsrooms: “Every time I’d pitch something that was ethnic, because that’s my experience, I would hear back from an editor saying ‘it’s not for us’.” Statistics show only 6% of editors are non-white. “So I created Burnt Roti to propel people to move into the mainstream media and take space there.”

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Media Racism: Faiza Shaheen, Palestine coverage, and the Limits of Representation’ is available now