On Friday 30 July, Apsana Begum was acquitted of three charges of housing fraud, ending an eighteen-month legal ordeal for the Poplar and Limehouse MP. Elected in December 2019, Begum has fought a long battle to clear her name in a case which says much about the deep class and racial injustices in Britain today.

Begum is the first MP to wear a hijab, and a cursory glance at social media or comments sections in the gutter press reveals how much of the abuse she has endured throughout the case is viciously racist. The details of the case show that there are more questions to be asked about how this prosecution came about.

As a 21-year-old, Begum made an application for social housing. At the time, she was sharing a council house with her mother, father, brother, sister and aunt—all adults—and her father was suffering from dementia.

After her application was approved, she made bids on council properties (the bidding system is how applicants for council housing register their interest in a specific property) and the council’s record of bids made showed that, like all those familiar with the social housing system in Tower Hamlets, she made regular bids on a Friday morning, when new vacancies are made available on the system.

After she met her husband-to-be Ehtasham Haque, her relations with her family deteriorated. She married Haque and moved in with him in June 2013. She notified the council she had done this. From this date, bids on her account were no longer made with any regularity, or on a Friday; in December 2013 they ceased abruptly. This cessation shortly followed the date on which Haque himself notified the council that his wife was living with him, in November 2013.

The jury heard that Haque had been emotionally abusive and financially coercive; that he had asked Begum to make a loan application on his behalf only months after meeting her; that he had sought to control her behaviour; and that Begum suspected him of being unfaithful. Haque subsequently denied ‘that he had behaved inappropriately’ in a statement.

The council have never contested that Begum was the victim of domestic abuse, but argued that this had no bearing on the case. The cross examination of Begum was excruciating, with the prosecution trying to either downplay her husband’s alleged abusive behaviour or argue that it was irrelevant.

In 2015, according to Begum, she left her husband and returned to her parental home following worsening abuse. She contacted the council to revive her housing application, and they sent her a review form. Some months later she was housed in a studio flat.

Of the charges against Begum, the first hinged on the question of whether she had been sharing a bedroom at the time of making the original application. Tower Hamlets Council, who owned the house and had access to the floorplan, accepted that the house was overcrowded. But the court was treated to a lengthy, unedifying cross examination on the question of which rooms contained beds and which did not.

The second and third counts concerned whether Begum had notified the council when she left her family home to live with her husband, and notified them again when she moved back in with the family after escaping her marital home.

The original complaint received by Tower Hamlets Council, however, did not concern any of the dates around which the prosecution centred, but the November 2013 date on which her ex-husband Haque had notified the council that Begum had moved in with him, five months after the date on which Begum herself had notified the council.

The jury in Begum’s trial heard that Tower Hamlets Council’s ‘rooms policy’—where the council identifies how many bedrooms are in a property—was ‘a nightmare’ which council officers could not themselves agree on.

The council also had a record of Begum’s notification of her move to her husband’s house for the purposes of council tax, but not of her contact with the housing department. Perhaps members of the jury had real-world experience trying to access local authority services, because clearly the failure of the council to accurately record every phone call was not proof of calculated fraud on Begum’s part.

There are wider questions about the decision to prosecute this case – a prosecution undertaken by the local authority, not the Crown Prosecution Service. The 1972 Local Government Act which gives authorities the right to prosecute criminal proceedings where these are in the ‘interests of the inhabitants of their area’. The decision of whether to prosecute is in the hands of the council’s lawyers, in contrast to the Court of Appeal’s view that ‘It is in the public interest that major prosecutions such as this are handled by the single prosecuting agency established by statute to conduct them.’

It is difficult to see why a prosecution on such flimsy grounds, years after the incidents in question, was approved by the local authority’s solicitors – usually a risk-averse breed. The legal action must have cost the council tens of thousands of pounds.

Following Begum’s exoneration, as social media messages of congratulation and solidarity flowed in from the left of the Labour party, Keir Starmer was noticeably silent. Tower Hamlets Council issued a brief statement saying that they accepted the verdict, and Begum’s ex-husband put out the aforementioned statement denying the allegations of abuse.

Why did the local authority’s solicitors believe this case could be justified on public interest grounds? Did they really think that such thin evidence would convince a jury? Was Tower Hamlets Mayor John Biggs—who refused to congratulate Begum on her selection in November 2019—involved in the decision to prosecute, or aware of it? Did Begum’s ex-husband Haque, who chaired the Tower Hamlets housing committee, have any involvement in these decisions?

Despite Tower Hamlets already being synonymous with intense Labour factionalism, if internal rivalry has gone as far as abusing municipal resources to pursue factional manoeuvring, there are serious questions hanging over Labour. How will the working-class Bangladeshi community of Tower Hamlets interpret the Labour-run council’s attempt to criminalise their MP? Perhaps the recent council by-election result, in which Weavers ward in Tower Hamlets was gained by former Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s party Aspire, gives some indication.

Apsana Begum has endured an eighteen-month legal battle and emerged with her dignity and integrity intact. But the case cannot end here. A petition has been initiated calling for an investigation into the background of this prosecution. We need to understand how it came about that a working-class Muslim MP was subjected to this completely avoidable ordeal.