Power-drunk and arrogant: if this is how Starmer’s Labour treats its MPs, what will his party be like in power?

Labour’s purge of Faiza Shaheen and Diane Abbott increases my fear about how it will behave in office

Purging women of colour on spurious grounds while handing safe parliamentary seats to apparatchiks like sweets: Keir Starmer’s Labour is high on hubris and telling us precisely how it will govern. As Tony Blair’s former director of political operations John McTernan put it, the sham investigation process into Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, was designed to “humiliate”.

The same goes for Faiza Shaheen, Labour’s former candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Shaheen is a Muslim woman of colour and the daughter of a mechanic, who defied the odds to become a successful academic and won the overwhelming backing of her local party. Starmer previously described her as a “fantastic” and a “fabulous candidate”, praising her “passion, expert understanding and insight on inequality”. Yesterday, while canvassing with enthusiastic volunteers and carrying her newborn baby, she discovered via the Times newspaper that she was to be purged. Her offence? Tweets going back ten years, one of which, she said, was about her “experience of Islamophobia in the party”. Another related to text above a clip of the American Jewish comedian Jon Stewart on the Daily Show satirising how criticism of Israel leads to online dogpiling by the country’s defenders: text that had a caption about the “Israel lobby”, which she concedes “plays into a trope,” adding: “I absolutely don’t agree with that and I’m sorry about that”.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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