Reeves’s new business adviser linked to criminal vote-rigging investigation

Right-wing Labour Party Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s new business adviser is linked to a criminal investigation over alleged vote-rigging.

Reeves: another scandal for the Chancellor

The Met Police have passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) about Labour’s then-London regional director Pearleen Sangha’s alleged involvement in the parliamentary candidate selection for Croydon East, which was suspended over suspicious tampering with members’ contact details likely to have materially impacted the selection outcome. Contact details provided to some prospective candidates had allegedly been ‘systematically’ changed, according to the Telegraph, with phone numbers wrong by a single digit, fake email addresses created to be very close to the real ones and home addresses with wrong street names. These changes meant that some candidates could not approach members to try to secure their votes, stitching up the process in favour of a particular candidate favoured by the Starmer regime. Some members have also said that electronic votes were lodged in their name that they had not cast.

The paper does not allege that Sangha is personally under investigation, but as its political editor said on Friday evening:

as the party’s regional director, she was in charge of overseeing the selection Labour rules say regional directors set selection timings, hand-pick two people to help run the race and decide who can attend hustings

This is not Sangha’s first connection to anti-democratic activity. In 2023, as London director, she was accused by furious Hackney members of blocking elected officers in Hackney from accessing member communication systems and threatened members with sanction after members, particularly women members, insisted they needed to discuss safeguarding issues after favoured right-wing former councillor Thomas Dewey was convicted for possession of the most serious and sadistic category of child rape images. Dewey had been allowed by the Labour regime to stand in the borough’s council elections despite his arrest.

Protesting in “strongest terms”

In a statement on the manoeuvres, local members said:

We must also highlight and protest in the strongest terms at the London Regional Labour Party’s treatment of Hackney North & Stoke Newington Constituency Labour Party (CLP) against the backdrop of the Tom Dewey scandal.

After Executive Committee members raised safeguarding issues at the Executive Committee’s 13 July 2023 meeting, we were silenced by the London Regional Director, Pearleen Sangha, who suddenly joined the Zoom call. Within 24 hours she moved to “pause” the CLP’s access to Organise, the email network which facilitates communication with members. This move was a form of collective punishment for the CLP for raising entirely legitimate concerns…

…the three senior Hackney North CLP officers (chair, secretary and treasurer) have [now] been ousted and replaced by three unelected individuals, one of whom is not currently a Hackney North member.

Mish Rahman, a long-time (now former) elected member of Labour’s national executive posted the email he had sent to the party about the Croydon rigging and linked the police investigation to a broad pattern of alleged tampering and rigging by Starmer’s agents – and the party’s attempt to deselect left-wing Liverpool MP Ian Byrne:

Labour selections overseen by [Starmer’s donation-hiding chief of staff Morgan] McSweeney, [right-wing former staffer and now Labour MP Alex] Barros-Curtis and [former Labour general secretary David] Evans were dodgy as fck [sic]. Sangha drove a bus full of people to Liverpool to deselect Ian Byrne in his trigger. On Croydon East I sent this email. Evans never replied.

Starmer’s war on democracy and selections in the party – which he conducted despite promising members during the Labour leadership election that he would empower their democracy and end interference in selections – means that the parliamentary Labour party is even more stacked with Brylcreem-oozing mini-Starmer right-wingers than it was previously.

Featured image via the Canary