Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: Faiza Shaheen, the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been ...
Faiza Shaheen, the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been suddenly deselected after the election was called.
Shaheen is an economist specialising in economic inequality, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, and widely regarded as a leading specialist in the field. She is just the kind of person Labour needs in its ranks given the widening wealth-poverty divide in Britain. Instead, she is out, and the circumstances of her deselection have caused much local controversy, with many local people resigning from the Labour Party as a result.
The added problem for Starmer is that the unease among many Labour supporters extends beyond the response to the carnage in Gaza to the many examples of Labour changing its policies. Most prominent are the watering down of previous climate commitments and the refusal to recognise the fundamental injustices of neoliberalism as we move even further into the era of runaway wealth.
Much of the election rhetoric so far has been about avoiding tax increases, despite independent analysts repeatedly pointing to the multiple crises across the public sector. There are issues in health, education, housing, child poverty and many other elements of life that would cost tens of billions of pounds a year to deal with adequately.
This seems a huge figure but isn’t when compared with the levels of wealth accumulated over the 40 years of the neoliberal transition. Last month’s Sunday Times Rich List is a salutary reminder, with the top five wealthiest people in the UK alone possessing £135bn. The richest 350 individuals and families together have £795bn, greater than the total GDP of Poland.
Given the appallingly bad performance of the Tory party in the campaign so far, these issues may not matter much. Labour may well still be on course for a majority of 150 seats or more. If that is achieved, though, there will be many hundreds of thousands if not millions of dissatisfied supporters after the election who no longer see the party as relevant to them.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-left-wing-purges-affect-government-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn-faiza-shaheen/
Shaheen is an economist specialising in economic inequality, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, and widely regarded as a leading specialist in the field. She is just the kind of person Labour needs in its ranks given the widening wealth-poverty divide in Britain. Instead, she is out, and the circumstances of her deselection have caused much local controversy, with many local people resigning from the Labour Party as a result.
The added problem for Starmer is that the unease among many Labour supporters extends beyond the response to the carnage in Gaza to the many examples of Labour changing its policies. Most prominent are the watering down of previous climate commitments and the refusal to recognise the fundamental injustices of neoliberalism as we move even further into the era of runaway wealth.
Much of the election rhetoric so far has been about avoiding tax increases, despite independent analysts repeatedly pointing to the multiple crises across the public sector. There are issues in health, education, housing, child poverty and many other elements of life that would cost tens of billions of pounds a year to deal with adequately.
This seems a huge figure but isn’t when compared with the levels of wealth accumulated over the 40 years of the neoliberal transition. Last month’s Sunday Times Rich List is a salutary reminder, with the top five wealthiest people in the UK alone possessing £135bn. The richest 350 individuals and families together have £795bn, greater than the total GDP of Poland.
Given the appallingly bad performance of the Tory party in the campaign so far, these issues may not matter much. Labour may well still be on course for a majority of 150 seats or more. If that is achieved, though, there will be many hundreds of thousands if not millions of dissatisfied supporters after the election who no longer see the party as relevant to them.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-left-wing-purges-affect-government-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn-faiza-shaheen/