‘This is a community that suffers a lot of hate and lives in poverty’

Andrew Murray catches up with Leicester East MP CLAUDIA WEBBE, who will be standing as an independent in a city stricken by rapacious fashion-brand employers, sectarian frictions and urban decay – a city where principled socialism is more valuable than ever

ZARAH definitely wants her picture taken with her local MP.

The 11-year old, standing in Green Lanes Road, a centre of Leicester’s Muslim community, supports her plea with an irresistible smile.

“I wrote you a letter, and you wrote back,” she reminds Claudia Webbe. “Was it about Gaza?” the MP asks. “Yes it was.”

Photo taken, with the assistance of the Morning Star’s reporter, Webbe is stopped again 10 seconds later, this time by a constituent who moves without missing a beat from knife crime — particularly deplorable during Ramadan, he feels — and local parking problems.

A short taxi ride through Victorian and Edwardian terraces and we are on Leicester’s Golden Mile — Belgrave Road, the centre of Indian culture and commerce in the city.

There the MP is immediately recognised by a disabled man with housing problems and then a Sri Lankan translator from Arabic to English who she refers to as “the professor,” although his exact academic status is never ascertained.

The “professor” is an enthusiast for his parliamentary representative, and pledges resolute support from his community.

Webbe, Leicester born and raised, is on a roll. Her home city — well, not so much.

A few months out from an election which Webbe will fight as an independent socialist in the Leicester East constituency, its citizens seem to have little to thank politics for.

Since the last election the city has been doubly bruised. It has been abandoned by the super-exploitative fashion brands which offered low-wage employment to thousands of garment workers; and riven by attempts to mobilise around sectarian identities.

A day with the MP is a window into this world. Leicester represents a diversity perhaps unique to Britain today — every branch of the people of south Asia, whether you slice and dice them by nationality, region or religion has a substantial presence.

And it is a working-class presence. Median income in Leicester East is £10,000 below the national average and the rows of terraces stretching between Green Lanes and Belgrave Road don’t discriminate.

The Imperial Typewriters factory stands as a testament to a history of class struggle — it was the site of a 1974 strike by Asian workers against the effects of discrimination, a dispute shamefully not supported by the union.

The building still stands, although no typewriter has been made there for decades. Instead it subsists in a state of industrial semi-dereliction, divided into a mass of small sweatshops making this or that or, too often now, nothing at all judging by the number of padlocked doors.

Broken pipes drip water, wiring is strung higgledy-piggledy, rubbish congeals in stairway corners and workers apparently prefer to enter and exit via rusting fire escapes.

Their undaunted MP marches up the stairs, ringing on doorbells and greeting those toiling in this dilapidation cheerfully.

Sam tells us that his kitchen manufacturing business has “good days, bad days” as an employee flings a huge number of faulty metal shelves into a skip while Bill chats cheerfully at the door of his premises, his affability not really obscuring his determination that we will not proceed further across the threshold even though he is satisfied we are not from the tax authorities.

“The rag trade in Leicester is finished,” he opines, looking forward to an imminent retirement.

Yet a lot of money has been made from the ruins of this iconic building. A landlord in Scotland hoovers up the rent and, by the look of things, spends not a penny on improvements.

And the monopolists of the fashion industry squeezed a fortune from the small businesses here before deciding the squeezing was better in other parts.

Their wretched role in driving down wages throughout the industry in Leicester exposed during the pandemic, the brands are now taking their business to Morocco and Pakistan.

But not without a passing PR gesture. We proceed to another barren industrial site, not iconic but surely symbolic.

That is the Boohoo operation on the edge of the city, set up to great fanfare as a token of the company’s “investment in Leicester” and then shut down, all in the space of two years, after a BBC probe.

The shiny new building was, it turns out, home to the same shoddy old practices and was full of people renegotiating contracts downwards with suppliers.

It rebadged clothing rather than making it. Thus rumbled, Boohoo was gone again. There was no-one in to greet the MP.

“It’s a lie to say they are putting anything back into Leicester,” says Webbe. “Entirely phony.” Leicester is where monopolies go to make money, not spend it.

Add in Tory-driven austerity nationally and an ineffective Labour-run mayoral-led local authority in the city, the tinder was piling up for trouble like rubbish in an Imperial stairwell.

“Deprivation, poverty, unemployment and a lack of hope” pervaded the city, Webbe argues. The lack of youth provision, in particular, opened the door to the religious right.

“Youth centres were the place where community cohesion developed locally, but that is all shut,” leaving a vacuum others were all too keen to fill.

And those “others” come from a variety of directions. Hindu chauvinism, and messages sent from India at the height of the disturbances, have been fingered.

But it’s not hard to find people anxious to blame recent migrants from southern India, allegedly backward and uneducated, for the trouble.

“This is a community that suffers a lot of hate and lives in poverty,” Webbe says.

“A lot of that community has now been captured by the Tories,” she adds, a shift made easier by the disempowerment of local councillors through the mayoral system in place in Leicester.

“Councillors have no power, not even in their own ward,” Webbe says, making it harder to stay attuned to discontent on the ground.

The disturbances that rocked Leicester in October 2022 had nothing to do with religion, neither Hindu nor Muslim, she believes. Rather, social problems were inflamed by external actors, some of them indeed driven by the Hindu chauvinist ideology of India’s ruling BJP party.

Unusually, the events were accompanied by symmetrical statements issued by the Indian and Pakistani diplomatic missions in Britain, each demanding that the British government act to protect their co-religionists from outrage.

Azur, meanwhile, is outraged but not about his religion or anyone else’s. His garment manufacturing company went under via the failure of fashion retailer Missguided.

Its rapacious approach to driving down contracts and indifference to paying its suppliers left him with over £600,000 in unpaid bills.

Now he owns a well-tended care home, visited by Webbe as part of an Easter recess programme of dropping in on such establishments across her constituency.

“The brands have abused Leicester,” Azur asserts incontrovertibly. “The brands have gone, and only dust is left.”

Warming to his point, he claims “nobody has done anything for Leicester,” exempting only the MP on the other side of his desk from the sweep of his anger.

His solution is tariffs on imported clothing which he believes would force the major brands to reshore manufacturing to Britain.

Immediately, he has to worry about the dysfunctional social care system, presently leaving his new enterprise operating well below break-even point.

Webbe seems to have his vote, but she will have to fight for others as an independent candidate. She was excluded from the Labour Party — without appeal, of course — following a court case involving her private life.

In her place, Labour has chosen London’s deputy mayor for business, Rajesh Agrawal, as its standard bearer. He paid an immediate courtesy call on the East Midlands Chamber of Commerce and also took himself off on a trip to India.

Hopefully, a Labour candidate would stand against the importation of Hindu extremism. We shall see.

The contest is complicated by the looming presence — literally, he is on billboards across Leicester — of Webbe’s long-time predecessor Keith Vaz.

Vaz’s parliamentary career was terminated in 2019 after a sex and drugs scandal but he is neither out of sight nor out of mind. His leaflets are in wide circulation and he doesn’t appear short of funds.

He has not declared that he will try to regain his seat at the election, but it is hard to see what all the high visibility is for otherwise. Electoral cards hardly come much wilder.

And Labour is in additional chaos after an ill-judged purge of sitting councillors before last year’s local elections alienated large numbers of power brokers and ordinary voters. The target was the left, it seems, but a number of Vaz supporters fell under the Starmerite tumbrils too.

Consequently, the party lost substantial ground in the council chamber in a context where it was winning big nearly everywhere else.

So, Leicester politics feel volatile. Shaukat Patel, brother of Friends of al-Aqsa leader Ismael, will oppose Jonathan Ashworth in the neighbouring Leicester South seat as one of the Gaza-driven independents mushrooming across the country.

Nevertheless, with Labour enjoying Himalayan national polling leads winning traditional Labour seats from the left this year is an even more than usually mountainous task.

Webbe has to hope that virtue is rewarded. To end at the beginning, the Star’s interview with her was slightly delayed by the unscheduled arrival at her constituency office of a delegation of dignified Indian men.

They had turned up to thank the MP for resolving the residency status of one of their number, who had lived in the country 21 years. Webbe was given a cake in gratitude for doing battle with the bureaucratic barbarism of the Home Office.

Their votes seem in the bag. Leicester East voters are well-served by their representative.

Hopefully they will retain her. Claudia Webbe is a courageous and principled socialist — moreover she stands between her constituents and being dragged into the dungheap of sectarian and communal recrimination. Surely a cause worth fighting for.

Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe