Christine Shawcroft faces disciplinary procedures after defending former Tower Hamlets mayor kicked out of office last month

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A member of Labour’s national executive committee has been suspended from the party for publicly supporting the disgraced former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman.

Christine Shawcroft, a left-leaning Labour veteran who has been on the party’s ruling body for 15 years, is facing disciplinary procedures after defending Rahman both before and after he was found guilty of electoral fraud.

The move shows that party officials have taken a hard line against members supporting the independent mayor, who was kicked out of office by an election court ruling last month.

Another NEC member, the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has also supported Rahman, said he is not subject to any disciplinary procedures.

Livingstone told the Guardian that the decision to suspend Shawcroft was “outrageous” and unconstitutional, and will be raised by him at an NEC meeting on Wednesday.

He said: “All she said was that this was a highly political judgment. It is quite bizarre that she has been suspended by the NEC and I haven’t. She said what a lot of other people think – that there has been a witch-hunt against Britain’s first directly elected Muslim mayor.”

Richard Mawrey QC found Rahman guilty of seven counts of electoral fraud, including wrongly smearing his Labour rival for the mayorship, John Biggs, as a racist.



Biggs is due to stand again, in a re-run of the election on 11 June, against a candidate supported by Rahman.

Shawcroft, a former leader of the Tower Hamlets Labour group and ex-officio on the party’s national policy forum, gave evidence to the election court in March during which she accused Biggs of making racially insensitive remarks about the Bengali community – a claim that was dismissed by the judge.

She also supplied the court with a detailed memo of an NEC meeting in 2010 which was accepted as accurate by Mawrey. It said that Rahman was suspended from the party following allegations of electoral fraud without a proper hearing or even allowing him to see the allegations against him.

Mawrey said: “His [Rahman’s] treatment by the NEC was, by any standards, utterly shameful and wholly unworthy of the party which, rightly, prides itself on having passed the Human Rights Act.”



Shawcroft also appeared at a rally two weeks ago in support of Rahman following Mawrey’s judgment, which left the former mayor unable to stand again for office and with a legal bill of at least £250,000.



She said she was acting as trustee of Rahman’s defence fund and launched an attack on the judgment.



Addressing hundreds of his supporters, Shawcroft said: “The lack of a sound evidence base, the factual inaccuracies, the dangerous claims made about British Muslims and the powers given to the state to intervene in elections set a disturbing precedent.”



Livingstone sent a recorded message of support for Rahman and Len McCluskey, the leader of Britain’s biggest union, Unite, also offered a message of solidarity.



The mayoral election will be re-run after Rahman and his supporters were found to have used religious intimidation through local imams, and vote-rigging, to gain power. Rahman also allocated local grants to buy votes.

A Labour source said: “The suspension is related to events in Tower Hamlets. We will take seriously any case of a member breaching the rules.”

Shawcroft did not respond to emails on Monday.