In late July, Keir Starmer announced that a Labour government would bring in a number of measures aimed at addressing domestic violence and increasing the prosecution rate for domestic abusers. This commitment to supporting victims of domestic abuse rang hollow to those following the reselection taking place in Poplar and Limehouse, where Apsana Begum was ‘triggered’ in a process which the MP said was ‘particularly painful and difficult’ to her as a survivor of domestic abuse and has had ‘a significant effect on [her] physical and mental health.’

A year ago, Apsana Begum was acquitted of housing fraud following a court case prosecuted by Tower Hamlets council, then controlled by Labour. Serious questions were raised at the time of her acquittal about the council’s decision to prosecute. A Freedom of Information request later showed that the legal costs incurred by Tower Hamlets Council over the course of the trial were over £88,000—considerably more than the amount Begum had been accused of defrauding.

Serious questions were raised about the knowledge and involvement of former Labour Mayor John Biggs and Begum’s ex-husband Ehtasham Haque, former chair of Tower Hamlets Housing Committee. Those questions remain unanswered, and Begum’s team have repeatedly complained to the Labour Party about the continuing involvement of Haque in local Labour politics, despite his suspension in September 2021 after the jury in Begum’s trial heard allegations that he had a history of emotional abuse and financial coercion. These allegations were denied by Haque following the verdict.

The trigger process is the initial stage in selecting or reselecting Labour candidates for election. Supposedly intended to facilitate a fast and easy confirmation process when the local members are content with their representatives, it involves a vote by every Labour Party branch and every affiliate (trade unions and socialist societies). If more than half of the branches and affiliated bodies vote to open selections, the Constituency Labour Party proceeds to an open selection process. The incumbent MP is automatically shortlisted, but challengers may apply and be shortlisted for the final selection, in which every local member gets a vote.

Begum’s trigger started in late May. Her campaign team say they are aware of at least fifty procedural complaints that have been submitted to the Labour Party, including allegations of intimidation, misuse of data, membership irregularities, fraud, and even bribery. No justification has been given as to why some branch trigger meetings were held online and some in person, and every meeting that has taken place has been the subject of complaints. Nor was Begum supplied with a complete list of affiliated unions and socialist societies, as required in the rules for trigger ballots, and the party have refused to give a breakdown of the results of each trigger meeting. During the trigger process, Begum’s team repeatedly complained about what was described as ‘a sustained campaign of misogynistic abuse and harassment’, including her home address being circulated without her permission to Labour members.

Begum has been frank about her experiences of domestic abuse, speaking in Parliament during scrutiny of the Domestic Abuse Act and identifying herself as a survivor. The Independent Domestic Violence Advocate supporting Begum described the trigger process as ‘a further extension of the abuse she has already suffered’, and domestic violence charity Women’s Aid tweeted that ‘all parties need to ensure that survivors of domestic abuse are not exposed to further harassment in their roles, and understand the impact that ongoing abuse can have.’

On 12 June, Begum attended hospital and was shortly thereafter signed off from work by her GP. Even this was not accepted by the Labour Party as a reason to pause or halt the trigger process.

Existing party guidelines waive the need for trigger ballots when MPs are pregnant, taking parental leave, or for a year after returning from parental leave. In her report of Labour’s July NEC meeting, NEC member Ann Black commented: ‘I think that members were sympathetic to extending this [exemption over pregnancy and paternal leave] to MPs who become ill before or during their trigger process, and this could be done through amending the NEC guidelines as exemptions are not defined in the rulebook’—but the NEC declined to do this on this occasion.

It’s worth noting that the guidelines were amended at short notice under Jeremy Corbyn. Until Ellie Reeves faced a trigger ballot in 2019, while twenty weeks pregnant, exemption only applied to MPs on maternity leave, but the NEC agreed at that point to extend them to apply to pregnant MPs as well. (In the current shameful episode it is particularly difficult to see how union representatives on the NEC can justify continuing trigger ballots in cases of medical unfitness.)

Even where there is no history of misogynistic abuse and harassment, procedural problems have been repeated in other contentious trigger ballots of MPs on the left. Down the road from Poplar and Limehouse in Ilford South, Sam Tarry’s trigger ballot was upheld despite an admission by the general secretary that electoral fraud had taken place. There are questions around the trigger process for Ian Byrne in West Derby, who in July released a statement saying that he ‘shared the serious concerns raised by members about the procedures followed and the many members who were unable to cast their vote.’

In the cases of both Begum and Tarry, their historical support for open selections has been highlighted by right-wing critics as a reason they should not expect support. It’s a misguided (not to say deliberately misleading) argument: one good reason for universal open selection of Labour candidates would be to depersonalise the experience of reselection. The Corbyn-era reduction in the threshold for triggering a candidate, since reversed under Starmer, was an ill-judged compromise. Open selections ahead of every election, in which the incumbent MP was automatically shortlisted, would be the fairest and most democratic way for local parties to choose candidates: in the absence of that, the least that Labour MPs should be able to expect is a fair, consistent, and properly conducted selection process.

Of course, the trigger process was only the first stage of the selection process, now to be followed by an open selection process. In 2019—to a flurry of outraged media coverage completely absent this time around—a handful of MPs were triggered by their local parties. But only Birmingham MP Roger Godsiff was deselected in favour of local councillor Tahir Ali—a result not of factional manoeuvring, but of Godsiff’s widespread unpopularity with local members given his regressive stance on LGBT+ issues and repeated habit of voting with the Conservatives over Brexit.

Apsana Begum returns to work today. In her statement posted on social media, she writes that ‘the recent trigger process was used to further the domestic abuse and harassment’ she has already endured. There is still every possibility that an open selection—in which every member in Poplar and Limehouse gets a vote—will result in her reselection. But the events that has led to this is a clear demonstration of the Labour Party’s continuing failure to accept their duty of care to an MP caught in a toxic melange of misogyny, racism, and factionalism.