Suspended MP says Labour blackmailed her over ‘abusive ex-husband’

Suspended MP Apsana Begum told Sky News that Labour Party officials conditioned Keir Starmer’s party’s support for domestic abuse legislation on her voting against the SNP’s amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap.

She said:

I was shocked in the way that I was treated. Because that element of supporting me in being able to tackle the situation in my abusive ex husband and domestic abuse was actually put into the context of the whipping operation itself

Apsana Begum: blackmailed by Labour?

Keir Starmer’s Labour suspended Apsana Begum and six other Labour MPs for voting to scrap the cap. A Labour spokesperson said the party does not recognise Begum’s allegation.

Begum said Labour officials were well aware of her alleged history of facing domestic abuse. Her husband Ehtasham Haque is a former Labour councillor who ran against her as an independent in the general election.

In 2022, Begum accused Labour of “facilitating” her ex husband:

[They are] us[ing] my ex-husband and empowering him to continue his abuse and harassment to get rid of me for factional purposes.

In the same interview, she told Novara Media Labour was targeting her:

I’m being targeted by the Labour party… because I’m a socialist, because of my politics, because I’m a Muslim woman of Bangladeshi origin, and [because I’m] working class. They don’t want us to represent people that are like us in parliament.

Begum said the way Starmer’s Labour handled the vote was “draconian”.

Starmer: more authoritarian than Blair?

Indeed, Starmer’s response to the rebellion puts him on a more authoritarian footing than Tony Blair. In 1997, when 47 Labour MPs voted against Blair’s legislation to cut benefits for single parents, he didn’t suspend them.

And Starmer is taking such a position over a policy that’s basically eugenics, according to Michael Marmot, a professor of public health at UCL. He told LBC:

These children can’t wait and it also bothers me of what it says about us as a society. It’s almost a form of eugenics saying if poor families choose to have extra children, we’re going to clobber them. If you consign something like 1.6 million children to further hardship, that’s going to affect their trajectory for the rest of their lives.

Starmer’s Labour claims that there isn’t enough money to axe the two-child benefit cap. But Zarah Sultana, another MP Labour suspended for voting to scrap the cap, challenged this:

In fact, under the Tory’s austerity programme, which decimated our public services… the wealthy really made an absolute killing… their wealth tripled under the Tories… total wealth of UK billionaires is just shy of £700bn.

So there are policies that… could fund this policy. One of them is a two percent wealth tax on assets over £10m that would raise £24bn. If you have a policy that equalises capital gains with income rate thresholds you would raise £16bn.

Removing the cap, which the Conservatives introduced in 2017, would cost £3bn.

Featured image via Saul Staniforth – X