My deselection was cruel: Faiza Shaheen

Former Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green Faiza Shaheen said she decided to contest as an independent following an outpouring of support from her followers.

Faiza announced her new campaign on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday (5) afternoon.

She quit the Labour Party the previous day following her deselection as its candidate for the east London constituency.

Faiza was deselected by Labour on May 29 for liking a series of posts nearly a decade ago on X, formerly Twitter.

She was summoned to an interview with three members of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) to answer for a series of tweets dating back to 2014, which they said damaged the party’s electoral chances.

"They decided my fate, on a 40-minute Zoom meeting," she told The Guardian. She said her deselection was "cruel and devastating".

The problematic tweets included one that congratulated an old colleague who had decided to stand as a Green councillor.

Another was liking a tweet that called for a boycott of Israeli goods, during the 2014 Gaza war.

A second “like” was for a tweet that included a sketch from the US comedy show The Daily Show. In the tweet, the commentator who posted the sketch described the methods of the “Israel lobby” in the US.

The move to deselect her stunned her local supporters and reverberated beyond her constituency.

She said she decided to contest as an independent after she received hundreds of messages from supporters, who said there are no options left for them.

"They are tired of the Tories but now feel they can’t trust Labour," she said.

She said she had been "penalised for describing my experiences of Islamophobia" and claimed there was a "hierarchy of racism" in the Labour Party.

Faiza was born in Leytonstone in 1982 and grew up in Chingford. Her father was a car mechanic from Fiji and mother a lab technician from Pakistan.

She went to Chingford Foundation school, before studying PPE at Oxford. She was a post-grad (MSc and a PhD) at Manchester and now teaches at the London School of Economics.