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Labour’s decision to shortlist Salma Yaqoob has sparked anger over her toxic past
I was on a train by myself on a warm summer day, wearing a knee-length skirt. An Asian male guard in his 50s was walking down the train. “You shouldn’t sit like that, I can see everything,” he hissed at me. The implication was that I was some kind of hussy for sitting in a skirt, legs bare and uncrossed. It’s far from my only run-in with rank misogyny, but I bawled when I got home. I knew the guard wouldn’t have said that to me had I been white, that he felt he had the right to police me because of our shared skin colour. It made my sense of disgust at his behaviour more acute.
I was reminded of this last week when I read Labour MP Naz Shah’s powerful account of Salma Yaqoob’s complicity in the toxic misogyny directed at her by a vocal minority of Muslim men in the 2017 Bradford West election. Yaqoob, the former leader of the Respect party, has just been shortlisted by Labour as a candidate for West Midlands mayor. “Her campaign created a platform which allowed men to literally slut shame me,” Shah says, leaving her feeling suicidal. Continue reading...