- MP for Bradford West Naz Shah, attacked fellow MP Sarah Champion for writing that Britain had a 'problem with Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white girls'
- Ms Champion later quit the shadow cabinet after being given an ultimatum
- Ms Shah herself made the news in April last year, after becoming embroiled in the anti-Semitism row that continues to haunt Labour
A promising political career surely beckons for the 43-year-old mother of three.
Miss Shah, a British-born Muslim, earned yet more brownie points with the Labour leadership this week when she attacked fellow Labour MP Sarah Champion — an outspoken critic of Jeremy Corbyn — for writing in The Sun newspaper that Britain had a ‘problem with Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white girls’.
Naz Shah, MP for Bradford West, has been in Parliament for only a little over two years, but has already served on the influential House of Commons Home Affairs Committee and was appointed aide to shadow chancellor John McDonnell
These comments, in the eyes of Miss Shah, were nothing more than ‘blanket, racialised loaded statements’ which stigmatised the Pakistani community.
The article, she said, published in the wake of the latest Asian sex grooming scandal in Newcastle, was ‘irresponsible’ and was ‘setting a dangerous precedent’.
Miss Shah didn’t stop there.
She penned an open letter condemning the paper’s coverage of the ‘grooming’ controversy, including a column drawing on Sarah Champion’s remarks.
Miss Shah’s stand was singled out for praise by Jeremy Corbyn. He posted her letter on his Facebook page, accusing The Sun, and by implication Sarah Champion herself, of using ‘Nazi-like terminology about a minority community’.
‘Pleased to see the unequivocal support from @jeremycorbyn,’ a clearly delighted Miss Shah announced on social media on Tuesday night.
Miss Shah attacked fellow Labour MP Sarah Champion (pictured) — an outspoken critic of Jeremy Corbyn — for writing in The Sun newspaper that Britain had a ‘problem with Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white girls’. She was later forced to leave the shadow cabinet
Less than 24 hours later, Miss Shah received another boost. Ms Champion, a much-respected MP who has campaigned for years about child grooming in her Rotherham seat, left the shadow cabinet.
She had been given an ultimatum by the Labour leader to resign or be sacked. She quit.
Surely there are very few people, apart from the bullies and bigots on the Left, who don’t believe that Ms Champion was hounded out of office for defying political correctness to speak honestly about child sexual exploitation, not just in her own constituency but in cities across the country.
The fact Ms Champion was viewed as a traitor by Corbynistas for taking part in what turned out to be a failed coup against Corbyn last summer must have made her brutal exit all the sweeter; some have suggested it may have even been the real motive for getting rid of her.
Miss Shah made the news in April last year, after becoming embroiled in the anti-Semitism row that continues to haunt Labour
Either way, behind her humiliating departure is another story that tells us much about Labour under Corbyn, and even more about ‘rising star’ Naz Shah. For Miss Shah has faced allegations of racism herself.
She made the news in April last year, after becoming embroiled in the anti-Semitism row that continues to haunt Labour.
A ‘solution’ to the Middle East conflict, she declared on Facebook, is to ‘relocate Israel into the United States’, adding that ‘transportation costs will be less than three years of defence spending... problem solved’. The inflammatory outburst was accompanied by a map of America with a small section representing Israel shaded in.
Miss Shah later apologised in a statement to the Commons: ‘I accept and understand that the words I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community, and I deeply regret that.’
She was then stripped of the Labour whip pending an investigation.
Her suspension was lifted three months later and, like many other party members who have been accused of anti-Semitism, she was welcomed back to the Labour benches with open arms.
One doubts if Sarah Champion will be so lucky.
The role Miss Shah played in her demise has provoked a furious backlash on social media. ‘Ohhh the rank hypocrisy,’ wrote one Facebook user. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ was the verdict of another. For her outburst on Facebook was by no means the only time Miss Shah has revealed her hand on the question of Israel.
Before she became an MP, Miss Shah was an active member of Bradford Boycott, a group that calls for action against organisations that support ‘apartheid Israel’.
During a protest at a McDonald’s restaurant three years ago, members of Bradford Boycott chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great) — one of the most commonly used Islamic phrases that is uttered during prayer and also by some jihadists.
Miss Shah herself played ‘dead’ with two of her children to portray Palestinian victims of the Middle East conflict.
Those who have followed her career closely may also recall her interview with The Times shortly before she stood for parliament in the 2015 general election, when, like Sarah Champion, she openly condemned targeted sexual abuse of white girls by members of certain ethnic communities.
One of the journalists who met Miss Shah wrote: ‘She is not afraid to point the finger of blame at “Pakistani men” for grooming girls for sexual abuse.’
Miss Shah is then quoted directly: ‘They got away with it, but they’re not going to get away with it any more,’ she declared.
Where, in that revealing paragraph, is there anything that contradicts what Sarah Champion wrote in The Sun?
This disclosure will not come as a surprise to everyone; allegations of hypocrisy, ruthless behaviour and controversy run through Miss Shah’s rise from the back streets of Bradford to Westminster.
It is a narrative that contrasts dramatically with her public image as a champion of the less fortunate.
Miss Shah portrayed herself as the voice of the underdog during the 2015 election, when she saw off the Respect Party’s George Galloway.
He had taken Bradford West from Labour in a 2012 by-election that he dubbed the ‘Bradford Spring’, with a 10,000 majority.
Miss Shah turned that around — winning 19,977 votes to Galloway’s 8,557 — a victory that earned a rapturous reception at a meeting of the parliamentary party. Central to Miss Shah’s election strategy was the inspiring account of how she had overcome her own harrowing background.
Her journey battling grinding poverty, and other shocking obstacles undoubtedly struck a chord with the public.
When she was six years old, Miss Shah revealed, her father ran off with a neighbour’s daughter who had just turned 16.
His abandonment, she said, resulted in her moving 14 times in two years, each house more squalid than the last.
At 12, she was sent to Pakistan where she was forced into an arranged marriage aged 15.
She returned to Britain three years later and separated from her husband.
Yet aspects of her account have been challenged by her own family. ‘Some of her claims are very hurtful,’ her uncle, Zaf Shah, told us.
In particular, relatives we spoke to cannot remember Miss Shah moving 14 times and were at pains to point out that she, her mother and siblings were taken in by Miss Shah’s paternal grandfather.
‘Naz’s granddad provided for them for up to two years,’ says a cousin.
It does not disprove Miss Shah’s version of events, but her grandfather’s role during those traumatic early years doesn’t appear to have been touched upon.
Then there is Miss Shah’s mother, Zoora, a woman she describes as her ‘rock’, an almost saintly figure who, she says, was raped, beaten and pimped by an abusive partner for more than a decade.
Ground down by ‘helplessness and hopelessness’, according to her daughter, Zoora eventually snapped. In 1993, at Leeds Crown Court, she was convicted of murdering her married lover (a drug dealer called Mohammed Azam) by poisoning him at a family gathering — not, it emerged, because she was being abused, but out of sheer greed to steal his house.
Zoora Shah, the court heard, had already made several unsuccessful attempts to obtain the property, where she lived with the children but which was in Azam’s name, by forging legal documents.
Previously, she had even hired a hitman — with whom she was having an affair — to kill him.
Zoora, who chose not to give evidence, was jailed for life.
In 1998, the case came before the Court of Appeal, where Zoora, then 49, spoke for the first time about the ‘abuse’ that had driven her to murder. She said she did not disclose this at her trial because she did not wish to bring shame on her family. Three Appeal Court judges did not believe her.
They said in their ruling that ‘the whole theme of the appellant’s [Zoora’s] evidence was that for years she was subjected to physical and sexual abuse . . . yet no one seems to have noticed a single suspicious bruise [other than one black eye] . . . by her own admission, she has lied repeatedly in the past . . . her way of life had been such that there might not have been much honour left to salvage.’
In 2000, Jack Straw, who was then Home Secretary, reduced Zoora Shah’s tariff, and in 2006 she was released after 14 years in jail. It is not uncommon for life-terms to be commuted in this way.
The website of the Southall Black Sisters, a group that supports victims of domestic violence in the Asian and Afro-Caribbean community, has claimed that the country’s most senior judge at the time, Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham, belatedly accepted that ‘she [Shah] was suffering from some kind of depressive illness . . . and suffered some kind of abuse’.
The Home Office was unable to confirm this, and Lord Bingham has since died.
When we contacted the Southall Black Sisters, they issued a brief statement saying the ‘quotes are taken more or less verbatim from a letter that Lord Bingham had sent to Jack Straw’.
Interestingly, the extract on the website is similar to one of a feminist scholar who had been asked to produce an alternative ‘feminist judgment’ of the evidence presented to the Court of Appeal.
There is one more apparent discrepancy. Miss Shah says the reason she was sent to Pakistan in 1985 was because of the ‘persistent interest’ shown to her by the ‘abusive’ Mohammed Azam.
Maybe the dates have got blurred with the passage of time but, according to newspaper reports, Azam had begun a ten-year stretch for drug offences in 1984.
At 25, Miss Shah, who once worked in a laundry and a crisp factory, returned to college, enabling her to embark on a career as an NHS commissioner. After leaving the NHS, she set up an all-female gym in Bradford in 2012. Mother-of-two Salma Kokab, in her early 50s, worked under her.
Miss Kokab, who suffers a painful condition which causes arthritis, did not receive a penny in wages for five months. Eventually, she was forced to go to court and Miss Shah was ordered to pay her more than £27,000, including legal fees.
This week, after Sarah Champion (pictured) was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet, Equality and Human Rights Commission chief executive Rebecca Hilsenrath said it was wrong for her to have been hounded for speaking candidly about child exploitation
‘For someone who has become an MP, a champion of women’s rights, I think the way I was treated was unacceptable,’ said Miss Kokab, who finally got her money shortly before Miss Shah was unveiled as the Labour candidate for Bradford West in 2015.
The murky world of Bradford politics has been well documented down the years.
During the election campaign, Miss Shah was questioned about the problem of ‘clan politics’ in the city. The phenomenon, known colloquially as the biradari, has its origins in the ancient caste system.
Biradari powerbrokers have used bonds of kinship and other traditional allegiances to deliver bloc votes, usually for Labour, at the ballot box.
In the past, Muslim women say they have experienced misogyny and intimidation not to stand in elections, not just in Bradford, but in other places with large Asian populations.
Politics, Miss Shah insisted, should never involve individuals ‘telling you which way to vote in your own home . . . In Bradford West, I hope we can be inclusive’.
In private, however, Miss Shah was secretly recorded boasting that, even though she is a woman, she could exploit the biradari system to her own advantage.
Voters in Bradford West ‘vote the way they get told to vote’, she told an associate shortly before her inclusion on the shortlist of candidates to fight the seat for Labour.
A transcript of the conversation has been passed to this newspaper. At the very least, the episode lays Naz Shah open to accusations of hypocrisy.
A list of questions raised in this article was emailed to Miss Shah’s parliamentary aide yesterday morning. As we went to press, we had not received a response.
This week, after Sarah Champion was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet, Equality and Human Rights Commission chief executive Rebecca Hilsenrath said it was wrong for her to have been hounded for speaking candidly about child exploitation because of an ‘over-sensitivity about language’ which had resulted in a climate that had led to the ‘neglect, for so long, of the victims of these terrible crimes.’
How utterly galling, but entirely in keeping with the world we now live in, that the MP who did most to challenge that pernicious culture has been publicly vilified, while the MP who contributed to it has been lauded by the party that always claims the moral high ground.
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