A former Ken Livingstone adviser, an anti-Transatlantic trade treaty activist, Lewisham’s deputy mayor and a former mayoral candidate have been shortlisted by Labour for the election to succeed Heidi Alexander in Lewisham East.
Labour’s national executive committee has shortlisted Claudia Webbe, Brenda Dacres, Janet Daby and Sakina Sheikh as its four candidates who will be put to a members’ vote at a hustings this weekend.
Webbe is the most senior figure in the party of the four candidates, a current member of the NEC and a former adviser to Livingstone at City Hall. The Islington councillor is a vocal supporter of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and was previously the chair of Operation Trident, which tackled the effects of gun crime on black communities.
Sheikh, a former member of Students Against TTIP, is a newly elected Labour councillor in Lewisham, the borough where she grew up. Momentum’s national coordinating group will interview both Webbe and Sheikh to discuss which candidate to endorse.
Councillor Brenda Dacres, who stood unsuccessfully to be Lewisham mayor earlier this year, said she was motivated to stand by the Windrush scandal, as a single mother whose parents were from the Windrush generation. The final candidate is Janet Daby, Lewisham’s deputy mayor, a former social worker who founded a local food project.
Labour is near certain to win the seat at the byelection in June. The selection is set to be a fierce battle between Momentum activists, trade unionists and Labour centrists, who control the local party’s executive, though Lewisham Momentum is currently rife with internal divisions.
A Momentum source said the seat could be “a real tough battle” for the left in the local party.
The shortlist means, whatever the outcome, Lewisham East will have an ethnic minority woman as its Labour candidate. Labour has drawn some criticism in recent months for its parliamentary selections in marginal seats, where no ethnic minority women have been selected at all, despite more than 60 selections taking place since the June election.
Labour MPs David Lammy and Tulip Siddiq and Operation Black Vote’s Simon Woolley are among those who have called for the party to step up efforts to choose BAME candidates.
The speed of the selection process had drawn anger from some local activists in Lewisham East. The constituency party met overnight to draw up their own unofficial shortlist – an attempt to put pressure on the NEC panel to select some of their preferred candidates for the final hustings.
The local party chair, Ian McKenzie, who had accused party bosses of a “stitch-up”, told the Guardian both Daby and Dacres had also made the shortlist drawn up by local activists.
The Labour leadership and the leftwing grassroots group Momentum are widely reported to prefer Webbe and Sheikh.
Leftwing figures in the party are thought to be cautious about selecting Webbe, the former chair of Operation Trident, because she is a member of Labour’s NEC. Were she to resign from the finely balanced committee, her replacement could be a Corbyn-sceptic candidate.
PCS equalities representative Phyll Opoku-Gyimah was widely seen as the frontrunner for the seat but unexpectedly dropped out of the race on Sunday, citing personal circumstances. Comments by Opoku-Gyimah comparing the Israel-Palestinian conflict to the Holocaust were unearthed by the Guido Fawkes blog at the weekend.
Alexander, the former shadow health secretary who quit Corbyn’s frontbench during the string of resignations over his leadership in 2016, has resigned her seat to take up a role as deputy mayor for transport under the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, at City Hall.