Labour’s landlord MP
JVL Introduction
Tenants in Jas Athwal’s mouldy, ant-infested flats are far from being the only victims of the newly elected Labour MP’s behaviour over the years. He has long been a central figure in a clique dominating the Redbridge community where his Ilford South constituency is located, closely allied with fellow Labour right-wingers around Ilford North MP Wes Streeting.
Former Constituency Labour Party secretary Syed Siddiqi stood for the Green Party in the July 2024 general election, having been hounded out of Labour in a relentless bullying campaign dating back to 2017. In January this year Siddiqi, a left-wing NHS trade unionist whose case featured prominently in the famous leaked report into Labour’s internal factional battles, tweeted that the Met had dropped investigations into “false, malicious & fictitious allegations” that Athwal had made against him.
Local councillor Rosa Gomez, like Siddiqi, a Corbyn-supporting left winger with a strong local support base, resigned from Labour in June in despair at the treatment she faced from the Athwal-led council.
Athwal’s most high-profile victim is the man he has replaced as Ilford South MP, Sam Tarry, whose campaign Syed Siddiqi ran until his ejection from the Labour Party. The story of how Athwal pulled off this coup is told in detail in the Labour Hub article we produce below.
How this individual, identified by the Financial Times as “the biggest landlord in the Commons”, is allowed to remain a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party while Sam Tarry has been driven out and seven principled socialist MPs are suspended, is a question that Keir Starmer should be obliged to address. Meanwhile in Redbridge, one local resident told this editor, “the Council, almost all of whom are handpicked supporters of Jas, are in turmoil.” And rightly so.
NWI
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Mon 2 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
How the Labour apparatus’s search for ‘high quality candidates’ saw Jas Athwal elected
Alleged slum landlord Jas Athwal – the biggest landlord in Parliament – has hit the headlines for his atrocious treatment of his tenants. But how did he become an MP in the first place? Angus Satow investigates.
Loading article text…
The result in Birkenhead is also worth looking at.
Left wing incumbent MP over all but one ward defeated by rightwing challenger who was the incumbent MP over just one of the wards.
Hmm. Sounds familiar. Here in Rochdale one of our landlord councillors voted twice in an election, once from his home ward, and again from another address. Although folk objected nothing was done. The poor man had ‘made a mistake, he thought it okay to do it’.