National Interests and Global Politics

Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. Sign up to The Rest Is Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members' chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the rest ispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com . Welcome to the Restless Politics Leading with me Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell, and we are with Naz Shah. So before we get going, a content warning. What we're about to discuss in terms of Nas's own personal life includes references to sexual abuse, violence, rape, murder, and if you are a listener who is concerned with these issues, please be aware of that content if you choose to continue to listen to this programme. West in Yorkshire, but that is a single fact behind which lies a pretty remarkable backstory. It's really hard to know where to start. Let me just sort of a few thoughts off the top of my head. One of your earliest memories was the sight and sound of your father beating your mother, a father who then left the family for a sixteen-year-old next door neighbour, a mother then into another abusive relationship with somebody you knew as Uncle Azam, who was raping your mother and allowing other men to rape her? Age 12 sent to Pakistan , not long thereafter a forced marriage, and in a way then came back because your mother was first suspected of and then convicted of murder because she poisoned the man that had been abusing her, your so called uncle Azam. And in a way that became your first taste of politics because it was where you saw the system working against your mother being of the class that she was, the race she was, etc. And now in your political career as a Labour MP, come into Parliament via a vicious, brutal, dirty battle with the vicious brutal George Galloway, and you're still standing. So thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining us . So I obviously first came across you when we were colleagues in Parliament. So before we get back into this extraordinary backstory, in some ways you are an ordinary member of Parliament doing your job for your constituents. Tell us a little bit about the sort of more understandable ordinary part of your life and then we'll get back into this extraordinary past. Well you guys know politics, you're you're uh uh old hands at this. You know, I'm only a decade in, just over a decade in . A normal day is just getting down to London on a Monday morning or a Sunday night, being here to Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the business of the house, in between managing free kids, although they're you know, my youngest was free, Reese was free when I came in and now they're 14, 18 and 21. Twenty-one year olds at uni. She'll be the first person y uh in my family to have gone to university. My son will be starting university and it's just managing the Friday surgery as all MPs and then carrying on with the day job and struggling along? One of the things you write about very movingly in your book, which is actually a beautifully written book, is your faith. You write about going on umrah, uh you write about doing dick withh with your your brother. Talk a little bit about your faith, talk about what Islam means to you. Well I r I grew up with an a with a mixture of culture, not faith. And it was cultural s uh you know where the patriarch and the misogyny comes in. But from a faith perspective one of my managers recruited me after I'd done all this campaigning for my mum and pointed out Tupac's lyrics were I I had Tupac playing. Said can we turn it off and I said why? He said the lyrics are misogynistic and I was like, oh my god, it took a Muslim man to tell me that Tupac was misogynistic. So that kind of like opened my eyes. And then I that was the first time I met a practicing Muslim who embodied Islam as he lived and he was my boss, and then 9-11 happened. Then there was the w the awakening, and then you realise you learn more about it. And the more I learned about it, the more I realized that actually Islam was the answer to the problems that I'd had all my life. And I then used Islam to fight the patriarchy, to fight misogyny, to fight all of these things. And when you get to a place where it was a beautiful book that I've read recently, and it talks about actualization, self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When you get to that position where you sus pend your need for you as a person and do it for the sake of something bigger than you, which is what Islam teaches you, it A gives you much more power, it gives you comfort and it absolutely releases you from the press ures of the world just to be the best that you can be. For a non Muslim audience, how would you describe Islam in relation maybe to Christianity? What's are they very similar religions? Are they different? I mean what's your sense if you were trying to communicate to uh somebody who was a Christian what it's like to be a Muslim? So to me who's you know, I let school at twelve I haven't read much, I've only just started reading books um recently. I think Islam, Christianity, Judaism, all of them, they're Abrahamic faiths. And for me the, basic s of Islam are common sense. Christianity is common sense. Judaism is common sense. Any religion is common sense because it's derived from a value. And that value is steeped in human spirit, human spirituality. But I also see when you talk about values, for me it's just the basics of values. How do we behave in the world? What do we leave behind in the world? How we contribute? What is the purpose of a life of life? And to live live a life of purpose is ultimately what Islam is. This episode is brought to you by IG. If you're listening to this podcast, the chances are you're someone who thinks seriously about politics, economics, and your own financial future. You probably also understand that volatility can also mean opportunity. So rather than waiting for things to settle down, you're wondering how to invest. And that's where IG comes in. They've been trusted by British investors for over fifty years through every kind of market condition you can think of. IG offers zero commission on your investments, zero account fees, and they were just voted best low-cost ICER at the 2026 Boring Money Awards. If you've been thinking about investing or you want a new investment platform that gives you better value, search IG.com today and find out about their latest welcome offers for new customers. IG, trade, invest, progress. Your capital is at risk. Other fees may apply . This episode is brought to you by Adobe Acrobat Studio. In politics, data plays a massive and increasingly important role in influencing policy. And of course, it's not just politics, the lots of roles that rely on information on data, which is why Acrobat Studio is a must. Because if you think about it, I mean it doesn't matter whether you're a civil servant trying to get stuff together on special educational needs or whether you're trying to make a new decision on a business, you're endlessly trying to generate reports, presentations, summaries, insights, and what this does, the Adobe Acrobat Studio, is it's PDF space and it's AI powered. And it turns those documents into summaries and insights, doing the stuff which is actually the kind of backbone of what a consultant does or a civil servant does with a lot of their time. It helps you manage documents and transform insights into standout content so you can go from idea to creation in record time or within an AI powered workflow. So whatever you want to do, you can do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com. Have you ever felt given some of the things that we'll talk about and that you've you've outlined in this book that you've written, honoured. Have you ever felt your faith fundamentally challenged? Because you you write a lot about misogyny, about the patriarchy, and from somebody who's coming from outside looking in, it kind of feels almost that that's embedded into the way that men in particular view their faith. And I just wonder whether that never challenged your faith at the core. No, at the core it doesn't. At the core, if anything my faith gives me the gives me the ability to challen ge that notion because there is no patriarchy in Islam. The idea of misogyny, had there been more Muslims around my mum rather than men who lived with a culture where the patriarchy comes from, my mother would not have suffered the abuse that she did. Had Islam been in my orbit, I would have not had a forced marriage at 15 because none of that is allowed. So the idea for me is about the title honor, it's about reclaiming honour for women because in Islam a woman has much more higher status than a man. And there's a beautiful story that I talk about with the Prophet, peace be upon him, was asked, Who do I honour first? And he said, Your mother, who do you honour second? Your mother. Third , your mother, and fourth, your father. And that in for me encapsulates the status of a woman in Islam, which is absolutely miscontruned by men, and that's for the sake of power, and that's deep to misogyny. Can we come back to the whole context of the book? Because it's an extraordinary story. But part of it is a story about people moving from Azad Kashmir, particularly to Bradford, and actually in in your case, an extended family. I think your father's father and your mother's father were brothers. Yeah. So they were first cousins. So tell us a little bit about that world. Where is Azad Kashmir? Why did people from Azad Kashmir come to Bradford? How different is Azad Kas hmir from other parts of Pakistan? So Azad Kashmir was it's it's a it's administered as part part of that Kashmir is occupied by India and part uh is administered by Pakistan. The Pakistan bit is where I so I spent two and a half years there. It's very much the people came when the dam was made in post-war to help ru help build Britain back. So they were largely economic migrants, largely from working class backgrounds. So they weren't uh they didn't have education as their kind of frame and when you say working class, they presumably mostly farmers were they or is that not yet? Lots of farmers, um lots of um manual workers. So they came and worked in the mill s, and my father was one of them. My father, albeit, came a lot younger. My mum's brother came when they were younger. So he spoke broad Yorkshire accent English. You know, my uncle, I remember somebody saying he was one of the teddy boys. I remember back in the days, you know. So the young people they were they came a lot younger. My granddad and uh he came uh when I I suppose when he was in his mid midlife uh kind of era. So lots of them when they came here, Rory, they intended to go back. They were economic migrants, wanted to build here. So they held on to the culture back of the 60s and 50s of how Pakistan and Azad Kashmir was, which was very conservative, very rural. And whilst they lived here, they realised they're not going back . So they then called their families over. First lots of men came over, they used to do shifts in the same bed, you know, night shifts, day shifts, whatever they were. And then they they vent bought their families over, then they brought their wives over and the children over. So your father came when he was six, he went to a school in Bradford and you describe him very much as a in many ways a kinda young English boy, young Yorkshireman. But your mother came over when she was seventeen and arrived, I think, not speaking very good English and finds herself suddenly turning up in a completely alien culture where there's a massive culture clash, presumably between your father and your mother, even though they're first cousins. They've lived very, very different lives. So my mother was rear raised in a rural village. She was one of uh the youngest of her siblings. She didn't speak English. She speaks a lot better now. You know, she can communicate and get along, but no, at the time it was very, very different for her. Very alien. I said in the introduction that one of you earli est memories was of your father beating up your mother, and that seems to have happened a lot in pretty much all of the relationships, the key relationships in her life. And there is a kind of hope in the story when you get to the end, not least you becoming an MP, and she gets her sentence reduced and all that stuff. But it's kind of crushingly sad as a to read about the experience of this one human being. And I just wonder how you how you kind of assess it now looking back on it. And looking back on it, at the time when you're going through it, you're putting one foot in front of the other and just getting on with it, you're campaigning, you're in fight or flight. When you get to the other side, there are still conversations I dared and have with my mother. There is still we had a I had a Bradford launch literally on Sunday night here yesterday and we had, you know, it was an amazing turnout, really, really and my mum was present in the that was the first time she was present in the audience and you look at her and I tried to avoid her look looking at you know looking in her eyes because the one thing about my mum's eyes is that they pierce you you know, and the memories that I have of her , whether it was that time when he was beating her and she was looking at me to go and get help, whether it was the day she got convicted in the courtroom and you could see her eyes, or the eyes when I left her prison for the first time, it's like a child. The look in her eyes is there's nothing behind. It's really the mother and she's the child. Yes. It 's role reversal. So I've got to still look after her. I've still got to be mindful of her. She still relies on me to get her doctor's appointment because she doesn't know how to use the NH S app. You know, so there's a hollowness inside her and it pains me. So I'm if I'm being honest, I avoid having those thinking deep I I avoid deep in what my mother's how she feels. I know she feels really proud that I'm doing what I'm doing and she's very supportive of the book because she wants things to change. But actually to talk about what she's been through, apart from when we went through the appeal hearing, we don't really we don't really sit there. Even now, you know. Yeah. Because there's we don't have the language for it. In my culture, we don't have the language. There's no word for depression. I've chaired a mental health charity. There's no word for all of these things, how to unpick them. So women don't talk about them. They don't talk about trauma in the concept of trauma, how I understand it. So it's really difficult. So we we try to focus on the best things, which is laughing with the kids and reliving her life and and looking at the gratitude of what God has given her despite all the trials You describe scenes where your your mother is holding uh one of your baby siblings and is struck by another man in the house. And to what extent is your um mother's experience unusual? Or was your sense when you moved back to us at Kashmir and and lived there? Were you getting the impression that almost every woman was being uh physically assaulted by their husbands? I mean what what's happening here? I thought it was a normal thing. I just because you don't know it until you're out of it, you think domestic violence is normal because you do come across other people who do beat their wives and it happens all the time, right? So we have I know now we have two women a week that are murder ed by their partners or somebody that knows them. We know we know that women kill themselves, they're driven to suicide because of domestic violence. And it wasn't something you challenged as a child. Now when I look back at it, I think how appalling, how, you know, even as you're growing up you realise it's wrong because it hurts, right? You know, when my uncle hit me in Pakistan, it was my uncle just because he fought the buffalo deep in the soap, you know, and I got I got punched, I got winded. I was a kid Rory. You know, the the idea that you can just turn around and unleash your fist on a child or a woman, would that have happened if I was a man? No, it wouldn't happen. And I think it's way too common, much more common than we'd like to think. Presumably living in the village in Pakistan, 'cause it's very I mean, you you've gone through something which I imagine basically nobody in Parliament's been through, which is that you have experienced really extreme poverty of a different sort to the kind of poverty we have in Britain. There's real poverty in Britain, but you were living in a village in Pakistan as a twelve-year-old, thirteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old. You had no indoor toilet, you were going out into the bushes, you were looking after a buffalo, you were an extended family compound, it's a tiny village, it's seven hours drive from the nearest airport. I mean, what is that life like? I mean what's the yeah, try to explain to someone what because actually about I would say one one and a half billion people in the world live in those conditions, but we barely understand the life of people living like that. So you you're getting up in the morning. So it's on a there's a routine every day. So you're getting up early hours before dawn. You're literally going and cleaning up the buffalo crap and then moving them into another room and tying them up so they can be milked while they're eating. And whilst they're being milked you clear up that crap so you can then bring them back out into the garden to tie them up. You've got a donkey that you have to load up. You're going out into it out into you're buying an area. The family purchase an area where they can chop the wood from every year. Then you're bringing that wood back on the donkey and then you're storing it in a room for it to dry out and then you can use it for winter fuel. The kitchen is where you're you're lighting the fire from scratch. That that dung, that buffalo dung you're l using your bare hands to turn it into imagine a plate but upside down onto the roof so you're carrying it up, you're cleaning it up, the bit that's got the bit of hay in it, and it's not so clean, you take that onto the manure hump, so you're putting it in a basket, putting it on your head, walking down the the street at the end of a street as a manure dump, then you're then that gets sold to the farmer uh for fertilizer and then the rest of it you're you're drying out on the roof so that you can then bring it down on the on an evening. So once it's dry, you're straw in it and you use it. You're not long in for Bradford by then. Yeah. Oh God yes I am. But but as Alistair says you'd been at school in Bradford till you were twelve. Yeah. Oh god yeah. You were a little Yorkshire girl. Absolutely. So what is it like to I mean, my my my boy's eleven. I I can't imagine aged eleven, twelve, suddenly I pluck him out of a British school as a British boy or girl and suddenly he's moving buffalo dung. Yeah, the first few months were absolutely exciting because it's like living on a farm, right? And all of a sudden you've got these chickens and you've got the goat and you've got the donkey and you've got these buffaloes. And you don't have to go to school so much. So you don't have to when I did go to school eventually at the school, I was teaching the head teacher English because their English is very different, right? And they're very much so I was ac in my two exams that I did there, two years that I did there, because they were like m years behind us in the UK and I've got a good short term memory. So I I could learn and read and write Uddo anyway, so that was helpful. But the but the idea of the daytime, then you if you are going to school, you're washing up dishes. So here you've got a you've got a scourer, you've got fairy liquid, you've got hot water, right? That ain't happening in Pakistan. You've got a little m metal glass and in that is a some sand, and you're wiping this cloth on a soap, then dipping it in sand for it to become the abrasive to clean the dishes with. And then you're washing your clothes and next door is a big slab, not that so bigger than this uh the this desk that we're in front of, and it's a stone slab, and you've got a bucket of water, and you've got this soap and you're washing your clothes by hand, right? So you it's like all of these things. And then when you in the in in the fur when I went to my auntie's house they didn't even have water, at least we had a tank in our village, so we did have a water tank. We had a water tank which was as big as this room and you had to get in it every few months to clean out all the green stuff off it. So you had to jump in it, clean it up, you know, and then it was it was a fun, it was an exciting thing to begin with. The excitement soon wore off. And then into the mix, you're still in your mid-teens and you get married. Yes. And presumably this is not a marriage of love. Oh hell no. God no it wasn't . So tell us tell us about the marriage and tell us how that made you feel and and and how that's made you consider some of the issues that you now address as a politician. So I was um I was out walking the dog with the boys 'cause I was a bit of a tomboy and my cousin pulled me up and she said to me, You can't do that anymore and I said, Why not? She went, 'cause you're gonna marry him. That day my world absolutely changed. I was literally thirteen or fourteen. I was younger than fourteen at that point. And he was your cousin. He was my first cousin, yeah. He was my first cousin. And he was the guy that you played with with the docks. Yep, absolutely. And you just saw him as a front of the channel. Two years older than me, yep, my cousin. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're marrying him, so I can't go out and play anymore. So my playing days are over, so I've got to behave in a certain way. So that took m that ra that robbed me of my childhood. And then by the time I was fifteen, um my the family wanted me to have a Nigar and get married. I was I was I wasn't fifteen at this point. So they were negotiating with my mum. My mum didn't want me to do it, but we had a three minute phone call. The phone call Your mum's in Bradford. My mum's in Bradford. So what they do was you get a phone call. So my uncle said your mum wants you to do it. So I said only when she tells me This is Uncle Azam. This is not not Uncle Azam, Uncle Azam's in the UK. This is my mum's brother in Pakistan, yeah, whose son I I ended up marrying. And then you go to a house, so imagine a village of a few streets and there's only one street one house that has a phone. So that phone call is only three minutes long. So you've got to get out of your house, climb up and go into another house, climb up the roof, go down the roof the other side to get to the other street. And that three minute phone call you've lost forty seconds then. So you've got about 120 to 150 seconds left of his call if that, and then by the time you get to the phone call, the rest of them are catching up, right? The my auntie, my grandma, whoever it is, and you get a 20-second for a conversation with your mother and mum and my mum I just said to my mum, whatever you want me to do, I'll do. It's up to you, I'll do whatever you want. And she said, No, you do whatever, you know, I d whatever you want, I'm happy with. That was it. And then the phone was taken off me. So in that miscommunication, she never told me because she thought she was told that I wanted to get married. I was told she wanted me to get married. And actually when I came back, my mum was really angry. Why did you do it? And your your unc from your uncle's point of view, amongst other things, he wants his son to marry someone with a British passport. Yeah absolutely that that you know you've um you know you've you're British, you're gonna get your it's gonna affect your family status, it's going to affect your economic status, it's going to obviously impact on all of those things. But the bit about the bit before that, the emotional blackmail, which I only recognized the forced marriage in my 30s, was imagine so m here's my mum, she's a twenty-three year old with three kids, went to her brother, her husband leaves her, said to her her brothers turn around and say, Give up the kids and we'll look after you. She's saying, I'm not giving up my kids. So she loses two brothers. Then my cousin sits me down and says, You your mother has got one brother left. She's given up two brothers because of you before you children. If you don't remind me, how does she give up the two brothers? What did that mean? Because her brothers her brothers said, Give up the kids and we'll look after you. And she chose her kids. So she lost her effectively her two brothers' support. So here was one more brother left. She's only got three brothers. And that brother, if you do not marry his son, you will then separate them in death in their graves, the language that was used. You imagine saying that to a fifteen year old, you're responsible if your mother loses the last brother she's got. That's on you because she's given up the brothers because of you children. Am I right that you were in Pakistan in the first place in part because your mother had recognised that the man she was now with, Uncle Azam, was abusing her and potentially abusing you as well. So she thought that he had designs on me. He said the grass is greener with your daughter. So when before I hit puberty, but by twelve, when I was hitting puberty, it was like go to Pakistan and she left me there for two and a half years. And then the forced marriage happened at the same time. And she eventually killed him? Yeah. And that is I mean you go through this wave after wave of this story, then suddenly we've got a murder. Yeah. I mean just talk us through that. Well she she got arsenic from Pakistan. She visited Pakistan as a forkli for sexual drive. So she made him you know she she killed his libido for a few months because she gave him a dose that would uh stop him from his sexual demand. So he went to prison. He literally pimped her from prison for favours. So there wasn't just him. So she went through all this abuse and exploitation. She he was a neighbour's nephew and she needed a house, Rory. She wanted a house, so she sold all the jewellery and said to the the neighbours, she went to her brothers they wouldn't buy the house because she couldn't get a mortgage. So she was cleaning, she was doing voluntary work, she was doing bits and pieces of disabled children, but she couldn't get a mortgage. He bought the house in his name. That was the noose around her neck because she'd given up all this all her jewellery to have this safety of a secure home for her children, the first day took her to the house, he raped her. And that was what set her life on that trajectory of abuse and so and sexual abuse. Me and my brother both had T B. You know, we were malnourished, we were living in abject poverty. You had TB in Britain or in Yeah in Britain. In Britain. Me and my brother both had TB when we were b when we were young. So the conditions that we were living in, we had outside toilets, we only ever stayed in one room because it was too cold. We couldn't heat the house. You know, there was we we lived in even Britain at that time we lived in real poverty. So and my mum was a single parent, she didn't know the language, and Asm came along with bringing fruit for the kids. So to her he was a like a knight in shining armour. And then the neighbours said, Well, he's a businessman. He's got a warehouse. Why don't you let him buy the mortgage, get the mortgage on his name? And then you can pay him back and when your daughter turns eighteen you can transfer the the house. That was the noose that kept her in that sp space, that was a pressure, that was a leverage that he used on her. And this was a fallen woman, remember. So she was a dishonoured woman because her husband had left her. Because he gets away, she carries a burden of shame. And now, if you imagine, she can't talk about sexual abuse. We don't talk about sex anyway, we don't talk about sexual abuse. And then she's a fallen woman, and this man is a married man as well. You know, so all of this concoction comes together, there is no way she's going to tell anybody about what what' shes's actually going through. So when she did kill him, when he did die and when when she went to court she did not tell the truth at all. Out of shame. Yep, absolutely. Your definition of the truth. You th do you think if she'd told the truth , i. e. she was being raped, she was being farmed out to his friends, and he was pimping her out when he was in jail and he was drug dealing and all that stuff, you think there's a possibility that she might have been let free I I genuinely think that that is true because even the jury the foreman stepped up and it was very rare, very unusual, when when we did the campaign to go to a court of appeal, he actually came forward and went to the press and said, Had I known what I know now, I would have never found her guilty of murder. Because this was it was a huge case at the time, wasn't it? It was like all over the media and how has your mother come through that? I mean I'm fascinated by because you still describe somebody who, you know, doesn't speak English, doesn't know how to do the NHS app. Yet she's been through this experience of gets sent to kill somebody, gets sent to jail, doesn't defend herself, almost takes the punishment. And then you campaign and you persuade Jack Straw to part commute the sentence and you get a big campaign going. But I just wonder how your mother comes through it and and and what you make of your mother today. So in some ways we dragged her through it because she was still I'm not going to talk about this. She was still the concept of is it, is it, is it which is honour, I can't talk about this because of shame, because of you know what the prospects for you guys, etc. in the community. And then and then we had to literally sit her down and figuratively speaking, shake her head and say to her, look, who's Izzy trying to protect? The brothers who abandoned you, the community who abandoned you, you know, all of this we, we're serving that sentence with you. You know, we lost the house. The house went back to Uncle Azam's estate. You know, we lost all of that. We became homeless again. You know, I spent nights in a crackhouse. You know, the poverty that we had, the the psychological impact it had on my brother from A star model student went went to he was only thirteen, you know, who went to truanting, smoking, all of these things. My sister sent was sent to Pakistan just before she got arrested. My mum was sent to Pakistan. I had to get her back to stop her from having the same fate that I did of a marriage to another cousin who was lined up for her. So all of these things we had to really say to my mum, who are you trying to protect? You know, we want you home. So then she agreed to tell her story, but it was like washing your dirty linen in public. So even at the time, it was horrific for her. And even now, me writing this book, that's why it's taken me ten years from when I was first offered a book deal to actually get to it because the amount of stuff that you've got to deal with, the amount of pain that you've got to go through to write it and then to take take your family on that journey with you. Because my sister and my brother didn't they they love the inspiration of a story? My sister said to me very frankly last week, she went, It's an inspiring story, but I just wish it wasn't ours. You know, because it's painful for them. When you were uh first getting involved in politics uh ten years ago. much How of this did you talk about openly or have you become more confident talking openly about these kind of things over the last ten years? I've become more confident talking about them. I feel I've become more responsible for talking about them because you have to be res you have to you know for Islam says something beautiful which is what do you give what do God will ask you what you did with the gifts that I gave you and the gift I've got is power right it's a platform so what do I do with that platform if I'm not going to make it better for others. And even by talking about this, talking about sexual abuse, talking about uh is that an honour, because it still happens, there are still girls and boys who are forced into marriage, who are coerced into marriage. They might not even recognise it because they see it as it's a normal done thing, that's what parents do. No, it isn't. And to be able to stand up, to give them the confidence to say, look, this is not okay, and to get to get the community to move and just And do you have people from the community or indeed politically saying you you can't say any of these things because you're gonna give a bad reputation to our community? No. So so far, I I can honestly say to you, the amount of the and my if you if you'd have been in Bradford last night, um, you know, looking at the people that were there. Last night it was two nights ago, you know, it you would see all the businesses in Bradford, the Pakistani men who were proudly supporting me. And this is so interesting because your mother's fear around Is it would have been that by talking openly about this you would shame yourself. And in fact you had a great success. You've become a public figure, you've been elected, people from these communities are voting for you in Bradford. That's another side of it which is difficult to understand. So so tell us about that other side, that positive side, where you're getting men from this community instead of ostracizing you in the way that your mother feared, in fact, supporting you, voting for you, making the member of Parliament what's going on there? I mean this is another interesting thing. So there there's one member of a family who spoken to another member of the family saying why she done this, didn't she? Because I went viral. When I stood for P Parliament in two thousand fifteen, when I got selected, on International Women's Day, I put out a blog because I was against Galloway, right? And we know Galloway doesn't have reputation for uh his supporters certainly don't have a reputation for a clean, clean campaign. So I thought, well he's going to drag this up, so I might as well claim it and put it out there. So I wrote a blog inspired by Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father. Mine was Dreams for My Mother and My Daughter, because I have a daughter. And then it went viral and that's when it turned it was like a little uh by election campaign where everybody turned up and they really put their effort into it. Won the seat. So I talked about it then. And did he not try to make out that the story wasn't real? Oh yeah. So somebody paused as my dead father in Pakistan and got a copy of my second Ghanama. So the legal the law here, you cannot be married at fifteen, you can only be married at sixteen. Now it's changed to eighteen, rightfully so. And so we had to re-register the Nikar when I was sixteen. So when I went back to Pakistan at sixteen, I I had a second Nigar registered. So in the same building you had two marriage certificates. So he was so so somebody went, posed my as dead father, pulled out and in the Hustins, the first Hustins, he pulled out my Nagana Martin and said, She is lying, she wasn't fifteen and it wasn't a forced marriage 'cause her mother was there. And it was like, mate, you're so off for action,, you you know know. And he just , he carried on like that, but hey, that's a that's history as it is. But he a lot of women's rights campaigners spoke up because what he did was undid a lot of the work that we've done around forced marriage and in and uh stuff around you, know, your parents , the fact that your parent was there, your parent might have put you into his forced marriage in the first instance. So he got condemned a lot for that. But what I didn't talk about was how we got through those years, you know, what it was actually like. So the campaign is out there. My mum's story is very much out there. It's in, you know, anybody can go to the court of appeal, look through the documents and see all of that. I've got a documentary on BFI from twenty something years ago and two thousand twenty six years ago, a young me still with a cigarette in my my hand and cat, you know. But now it's like reflecting on all that, you get to a stage where pre-menopause kind of thing, and in my fifties, and it's what do I do with all of this? You know, how do you tell this story? I I wanted to tell my story in 2015. I'm glad it I didn't at the time. I'm glad I'm doing it now because I'm wiser. So, you know, it's just to influence, I suppose. And do you worry that in a way because it is such an extraordinary story and you've now put it into a book that'll be kind of th there forever as it were. Do you worry about being defined by this issue as a politician? No, because that's up to me, isn't it? It's up to what I do with it. So some people so so for me, the thing I want to be devi defined by is my fight for justice. And that is it. And that justice could be in other forms. So the idea so I did the assisted dying bill and I was on the bill committee and I was fighting around vulnerability and Sorry to explain. You were worried that some vulnerable people could be pressured into assisted I. So the the idea of coercion, because coercion is so subtle and if you n if you're not an expert in it it's really really hard to hard to pick up. So coercion and anorexia was another thing for that. So interestingly there within the lay pot you've got a colleague who's pushing hard for this bill and assisting dying and your sounding notes of caution and that's partly your experience of coercion, it's partly your faith leading you to be more cautious around these things. Absolutely Rory. I have a responsibility to safeguard and that's when because I don't want that injustice to happen. So that is what I want to be defined by. I want to be defined by leadership. I want to be defined by she's brave enough to put her head above a parapet. But that's not any issue. Although it stems from my it stems from who I what my experience and lived experience is, but the jury's bill, you know, that's coming through the the all of these things I want to be able to contribute to them. And do you worry? One worry I had reading through the book was I was sort of putting myself in the mindset of a kind of Nigel Farage or uh uh Richard Tice or one of these reform people thinking they you'll read this book and say, you know, this shows that we're right. We should we should not try to mix our cultures in the way that that that has happened and that as a re you know, that therefore mass immigration has has failed. Do you worry that this p paints a picture of your this part of Pakistan and its impact on a place like Bradford in a way that actually your political opponents would exploit and use against you. So I had to think about that. I'd be I'd be very naive and silly if I didn't think about that. But here's the thing. I give an example. When I was campaigning for my mum, people would come up to me for the petition for jock Jackstraw , saying, Naz, we c I support you, but I can't put my name to this. Now in twenty sixteen a girl was taken from went from Bradford, my constituent, was brutally raped and murdered Samiya Shahid in Pakistan. It was a clear so-called honour kill ing. Now in twenty nineteen I had an event, so I support Islamic Grief's campaign for honour her and it's a campaign to literally claim that word back. And when I did an event, twenty-five of the top Pakistani businessmen put their names on those tables and sponsored them and sponsored the campaign for honour her. So communities shift. It was only over a hundred years ago that a woman threw herself in front of a queen uh in front of in in front of the king's horse, right, to change things. You know, fifty percent of the population are women. We gave birth to the other fifty percent. We that doesn't mean to say you throw every man out with the b bath water. What you do is you change the culture and you change the mindset. So you change the culture of part of parliament and the institution itself. And that's what you did. But you do that by working with those communities, not against those communities. Okay, now that's a really quick break, then back for more And one of the things I think so wonderful about you is that you're taking a huge risk, which is that by being honest, you think you can solve the problem more clearly if you're honest about what the problem is. Whereas a lot of us feel, maybe if we don't talk about it, we don't have to confront it because it will help our enemies by talking about it. Tell us about how would you um explain maybe to an international audience, because this has become so politicised in the US, the issue around grooming gangs. What was that story? What went wrong? What should we do about it? So back in two thousand thirteen, twelve, before I had political ambitions, I worked with a guy, a really amazing guy called Ansa Ali, who set up together against groom ing in Bradford. We remember we did a sermon, Friday sermon, for all the mosques, and we we still at the time we think it was the first time it was ever done in the history of Islam. But I know it was the first time it was ever done in the UK, where we where we campaigned to get every mosque to condemn grooming, to talk about it and talk about child sexual exploitation. This was before the Robinsons and the uh the Laxley Yennons and um Rupert Law's tal ked about grooming. So we stood by the victims and the community stood by the victims. And what happened was it then got you had the selective outrage for victims from people like Tommy Robinson and others who then and then the first there were there were campaign, you know, this idea about Muslims haven't stood up against this, that is one for the birds and the bees because we have got a track record, but that never makes the press. We've got a track re I remember being on uh T V talking about this before my political career. So of effect there is there there is absolutely it is not racist to say there is a pertinent model of abuse of grooming of street grooming where the abuser is of Pakistani heritage. Very that is not racist to say. Right. What is not right is to say every Pakistani is like that. That's not okay. So what do you do? When we do the drink drink driving campaign, we didn't go to the churches on a Sunday to talk to people about not drinking on a on a Saturday night and getting drink driving home. We went to the pubs and the clubs and a public health campaign to try and shift a culture and a night mindset. And that's the same, you don't go to the right-wing press to talk about the issues, you go to work with those communities. And where I think we failed is we've not talked to them communities and we've allowed the banging of the noise to drown out what the actual communities do. So what's your what's your honest assessment of the state of first of all that issue, but also that your assessment of the relations between the Pakistani community and Bradford So my honest um opinion is that I think we have lots of lots of miscommunication. I think that is fanned and fueled through the media. I think we need to build a lot of bridges. I think we need to we need to be stronger. The Muslim community. Now when I said in Parliament not so long ago, you know, Muslims stand with victims of grooming, lots of people Whatsapp me and said thank you, finally, finally, finally. Because it's been lost because people shrink. And people shrink when you get attacked. And pr and when people shrink, it doesn't give you the confidence to talk about these things. So it's about reclaiming that space. And that's down to people in positions of leadership. And we need to do that more forcefully. So when I'm talking about Pakistanis uh against grooming, I need to claim that space back to say this is what Muslims actually stand for. That's on me and that's on the community to be more confident, but we need to give them that confidence because they've shrunk because of Islamophobia and the attacks that they get. So many different things. And I think there's another thing that Alistair was pushing towards there. But j just to connect two threads in this. Is there a connection between that culture of uh is that on a domestic abuse that you experienced with your your father and your your mother's boyfriend. Does that also create some of the background for the grooming gangs? Um so there is I'll tell you what creates the background for grooming or anything and specific ally, it's about power juxtaposed with vulnerability. And what really irks me, really irks me, is that the idea that it was because of racism that we didn't tackle it, if that is reverse racism in itself, because if you have an issue and this is it's a Rory, my my bane of my life is Bradley politics in Bradford and patriarchy, right? And that is about the Labour Party not dealing with block voting and selecting their candidates because they're Labour Party members, and that's been going on for years. When you don't deal with that issue because you're afraid of what the community says, that's racism. You wouldn't treat any other community, so don't you tell me that you're actually being racist by not dealing with it. So for me, the idea that those people in positions of power, and this has never been looked at, and this is what I'm really pleased that we're starting to look at, is what about those police officers in South Yorkshire police at the time who said no, they didn't treat them girls like humans. They did not see them. And it took a Muslim man, it took Nazir Afsal to prosecute, it took a Muslim man to see those victims as victims and human beings worthy of justice. That's what it took. So when I look at that, it irks me the idea that, you know, these liberal white people who thought, oh well we can't do this because of culture. No, no, no, no. That's not a you wouldn't do that to any of a culture, so why why do that to this culture or these members of these communities? Just broadening out to the sort of bigger picture of your political career, you've been a front bencher, but then you left the front bench because you voted in a particular way on Gaza. Um your majority was trimmed very, very substantially. Understand. Because of I I I assume largely because of Gaza. Just talk me through from your perspective what that issue has been like to deal with as an MP in in Bradford West? So my constituency, I've got the largest Muslim constituency in the UK, and it's 60%. You know, I I've born there, raised there. Palestine is something that also politicised me without a shadow of doubt. The the thing for me was what really upset me more was that I'd done so much on Palestine and it was the and but I also recognise it was difficult to recognise you were fired by Jeremy Corbyn for being more outspoken on Palestine than Jeremy Corbyn. Yes. So I was I was suspended for anti-Semitism. Right? So um and then what were you accused of doing? What was the accession? So I tweeted out during the 2014 Gaza um when the war in Gaza happened and I'd tweeted out things and then I'd um I'd this was you you put an image of Israel Israel inside of America saying transportation yeah you know why don't we just take Israel to America? It was a Finkelstein's uh meme. Yeah. And then when I was suspended, I went and did the non-political thing, which was worked with the Jewish community, and didn't do it for the tick box exercise. I genuinely I didn't understand it. And I was very, very honest about that because I didn't understand it. To me, anti-Semitism was the hatred of Jews and I don't hate Jews. My first official engagement as a member of Parliament was going to our local synagogue. And Rudy Levo, um may rest in peace, he was very, very he then came out and said, she's not anti-Semitic. I'd been to a CEDA the week before, you know, with uh r rabbi Laura Janaklaus ner and and she was like, Well no she's not anti-Semitic. So I was like, okay, so how do I I how do I apologise rather than trying to make a reason, you know, this is why. And you try what what did did you learn through that experience from sitting down with Jewish community and thinking about Israel? Well I what I bought to the to from my mind, which was from my background, was compassion, and what I got was compassion. I went into a synagogue. I I was open and honest with the syn people in the synagogue who were very angry with me, rightfully so. They thought I was a core minister. You've got to remember I didn't know left and right politics. I came into politics for fairness and justice. As naive as that sounds, I'm still in that space. So for me, it wasn't that, and they had an assumption that I was this Corbynister. I'd never met Jeremy Corbyn before he'd become before before he became the leader of a party, you know. I'd become PPS to John Macdonald. I'd never actually met him before. You know, so it was like so to me, it was about making sure that people understood that I don't have this hard-left politics. There was an assumption that because I'm from Bradford and I'm Muslim and that's where I'm going to be. And actually, my big fight was around patriarchy. And then the Jewish community were very Mark Gardner from CST came to see me the next day and actually said to me, you know, this is what it is. And then I thought, oh okay, I get it. And when I got it, I was open about getting it. I wasn't trying to do the political spin over who you know, this is the reason why. What had you not understood about anti Semitism before? So what I didn't understand, Rory, was the narratives. I understand it in the context of Islamophobia because of my experiences. I didn't understand that when you talk about Jews as a collective and use the tropes that you use, it creates that hatred, it creates that division and it targets the community. And that Jews here are not responsible for the actions of Netanyahu, albeit it wasn't our time, the Jew Jews here had not, you know, the the idea that we lump people together and hold them responsible. And that is what, you know, I'd I'd learnt about Anne Frank when I was at school, but I left at twelve, but I didn't understand the Holocaust in all its horrors. You know, I knew the horrors of people dying. I knew the, you know, I'd I'd learnt about the shoes and the hair and all of these things I understood from Anne Frank's diary, but I was very, very young. But I didn't understand how that manifested like it does and I I see it as Muslims now, how Muslims are are treated in the press, how we talk about Muslims. It makes more sense. And one once Mark made that analogy to me, it clicked and it dropped and I'm like, okay, so it's not about just hating people , it's more than that. It's how it is structured and manifests. And that understanding was what I was missing. So there's somebody coming from the Jewish community and somebody who's charged with protecting the Jewish community. Explains something and and you get it. But I wonder how you feel about the issue of Gaza like now, today. Rory and I've been pointing out on the on the podcast that the there's a real risk that with all the stuff that Trump does, and particularly in recent weeks Iran, that Gaza just keeps dropping further down the agenda. And I just wonder whether what you've just described, which is an incredibly reasonable approach to something, whether there's a danger you you lose a bit of the fire or whether that fire's still burning . Oh God, that fire still burns. That fire still burns. On the Palestinian issue, I just saw Hussam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador, last night. I'm really, really pleased that we've recognized Palestine. I'm really, really pleased. I'm not happy with this board of peace that's trying to you know, I'm not convinced that it's going to achieve anything um where it's going and the the actors that are on that, you know, the the right wing kind of uh uh bad faith actors. I'm not convinced that Trump's going to resolve that. I think it needs more leadership. But you know I am I am very, very much about peace in the Middle East and I just I what's happening at the moment is it is painful. It's painful because the the one when I came into politics I remember the day that um Trump moved in his last term moved the the American embassy to Jerusalem and I I was literally in tears and one of my mentors said to me, God doesn't ask you to you're not responsible for that. God asked you to do the best that you can do. That's all you have to do. So I realized actually yes, because I couldn't have stopped it. I couldn't have done anything. But that did did damage to the Palestinian cause. You know, where we need to get back to I think we're lacking leadership on these issues now. I feel we have like it 's kind of like a b you know bankruptcy of intellectual thought and leadership um on these issues and that worries me. So I'm very, very much, very, very much in that space of peace in the Middle East, but I understand a lot more in depth now of how geopolitics works. Tell us a little bit then about how you analyze uh Israel's position, its military strength, what it's doing in Iran, what it's doing in Gaza, what it's My sense of Netanyahu's government is it's not brilliant it's not brilliant, it's not good for Israel, it's not good for peace in the region. Um his right wing rhetoric is very concerning. It's not just his rhetoric, the idea of the previous uh guy, I forget his name, saying that, you know, uh Turkey is the next Iran, that kind of yeah. That's that's a worry. I think anywhere across the world that the idea of how we're moving into that right wing space, I think we need to go back to the centre. I think that needs uh uh that needs some real effort by other people and I and I'm genuinely really pleased with the position we took in the last week. And and on um your constituents in Bradford, presumably they would be a little bit blunter and more outspoken on this issue than you are. I'm listening to you. It's it's it's become quite sort of you y it's the only time you sounded more like a politician at the moment. Yes, I do. So one of the things that I realised, Rory, is you come in here and I had a conversation today with this morning I had a meeting, my first one was the National Police Chiefs Council, Chair of a National Police Chief's Council on the issue of Islamophobia and the definition and how we need to work on it. And I said to Gavin this morning, I said, look, I said if you come in here and you you want to change the world. And then you realize it's not by bashing and saying it publicly that the change happens. The change happens in conversations behind the doors and it happens when you convene people and you find allies in your issues. It's not about, you know, grandstanding and looking out in the chamber and being able to say it forcefully will that change anything will that you know that's I said this to the independence after the bruising election that I had by you know I held on by seven hundred and seven votes the only reason they didn't win was because they were cra p at campaigning. If they were as half as good as me, trust me I wouldn't been here. You know, so one of the things I realised with that campaign is yes, you get it off your chest. You say what you need to say, but what then? What next? What have you achieved because you felt better? But you we do not have we do not have the moral authority to be outraged whilst there's still things to be done on Palestine. And that does not take me shouting. That takes me having conversations like politicians to convince people and make the case. And we need to do more of that. My last question, bringing it closer to home. What's your analysis of how Labour ' gsone from three-figure majority landslide to a place now where people are openly speculating that Nigel Farage could be Prime Minister, that Keir Starmer probably won't last the cause, that the we're below the greens in the polls. Two questions: how have we got there? And can we get out of there sufficient for you with your 707 majority to get back in? Okay, so my majority I'm less concerned about. And and the reason I'm less concerned about that is because I know my community was upset with the Labour Party, not me, right? So I that's not my that's my f m my responsibility to convince them I'm the best MP for them, right? So that I'm less worried about. And I'm being really honest, I'm less worried about Farage simply because I know that in the elections, local elections, when they take over more councils, as they've been doing, and making a crap of it and not knowing how it works because they want to you know, shooting from the hip, they've not got leadership. Once you scratch the surface of Faraj's talking points, there isn't any depth there. Once that becomes apparent and the election isn't till twenty twenty nine, I think it will be really, really it it will be be we'll able to take a stronger case to the electorate. That's what I genuinely think. Call me naive, but I genuinely am an optimist. In terms of where we got to, I think we scored some serious home goals, you know, with the winter fuel allowance, with the child cap benefit. You know, I gave one of the things when you get into politics and you realise that when you get into government, you know, it was a new thing for us as after nine years in opposition. Am I going to vote against the government who I've just been elected with? Or am I just going to make my position clear by not voting with it but I'm not going to vote against it? And those are difficult you know conversations you have to have. And then you'll know this better than anybody guys, you know, is it the hill that you die on? Because there might be a bigger hill around the corner and you've got to make them assessments. So for me, for the child to child cap issue, you've cut the the party committed to a a a um you know a review and and to be honest, they didn't need that to tell them. They should have just done it in the first place. You know, the winter fuel allowance again home gold. Um how I think we've got there, I just think I I were we ready for government. We had so much crap in the nine years before, and it was swallowed up in your time, remember with party gate and all of these things, that we didn't have the kind of robust political debates that we should have been having because at parliamentary time was concerned it became culture wars and it became all of them things. And I think we should have been more prepared. And I think, you know, and and I'm glad as much as I liked Morgan as a person, I think the factionalism was not healthy for us. That was not healthy for us at all because you have to have differences of opinions and we didn't create the space for that. And I and I and since Morgan's gone, I think that has already shifted. So do you think Keir will be the leader at the next election and can win it? I don't know if he'll be the leader of a Labour Party in the next election. I genuinely don't know but but but how he's behaved in the last few weeks has been there has been a marked shift. I was in the PLP when he walked in the day before, day after Morgan left and the standard innovation he got because the one thing that we need to as Labour MPs we, need to understand is what we can't have is the chaos of the last government. And that was after Prime Minister, after Prime Minister, and after Prime Minister. We can't have that. But equally, how do you balance it? And I'm, and it's, you know, it's not something that I'm thinking I am thinking about it, but it's not my ultimate decision. It's down to the whole of a PLP. Do we want to get to that chaos? But then how do we respond to people not liking care? And there has been a shift in the last two weeks that I've seen and I'm just like, okay, I'm gonna rethink this now. You know, that's genuinely where I'm at. But you know, I'm one of those fifty signatories to the letter which said we should have let Andy Burnham back in. Because even if it wasn't to challenge him, if it if it was to bring if you've got the best, you've you've got you've got your best horse outside, you bring him into the you know, you bring him on the track, y he helps you change that, shift that narrative, and we should have done that. And I don't think I I think that was bad optics of us from Kia from a leadership perspective because it you don't run away from challenges. When you lead you put your foot your foot your foot foot forward not back. I guess returning to the question of the baraderie, which is I guess the these broad You were talking about Andy Burnham, and of course that was relevant because of a by election, it's a by election that the Green Party just won. And they won it partly through leaflets and Urdu statements about Modi appealing to the Bradtery. I mean, what's going on there? What's what's the Green Party up to? And do you think that's the right way to campaign? Okay, I think that's uh all parties are guilty of that one, Rory. You know, I d I remember the Torsies putting out leaflet in uh Hindi not so long ago. So there's no there's no And then tell us about that 'cause I don't know about that. So Okay so the Tories put out leaflets about um in certain areas where there was a Hindu majority communities in uh Hindi language. And that was just in the last general election. You know, people communicate. So appealing in that case to Hindu communities against Muslim and Sikh communities. Yes. So there's there's a the culture politics and it comes back to the idea of where we've gone wrong in the last ten years even. We've gone down this road where we've allowed culture politics and culture wars to in in infest our politics. What didn't happen in Denton, which I really, really do take issue with, it wasn't sectarian voting. That was not the case. And it wasn't Bradley politics. It was people who with the young Muslim community, just like the ones in Bradford West, who did not like the leadership, you know, didn't uh use me. Didn't the Labour leadership for what reason? Why did young Muslims not like the Labour leadership? Well, because on Gaza and where the way the economy's going and the home goals goals that we've made haven't exactly covered is in glory. So we've got a lot of not just young Muslims, the white working class communities as well, don't exactly love us at the moment, do they? L'ets be honest. So we've got a lot of work to do. And here was a fresh person, local, working class, saying, do you know what I'm going to go? And I remember speaking to one guy in Gotham, because I went in Don ald and he said, and he actually said to me, he said, oh, she's been to all the Palestinian rallies and she said he said this to me. And I said, Yeah, but you know, it was our government that gave recognition and he said to me and I actually went into his house to pray 'cause I was fasting and um and he said I think he still voted the green candidate to be fair. You know, but he was he was like I'm just fed up of uh mainstream politicians and that's a narrative across the board right now. cautious of putting out leaflets, Tories appealing to Hindus against Higgs and Muslims or or Labour appealing to Muslims against Higgs. I mean i it it's begins to feel a bit like Northern Ireland when you start and and the problem is that you're you're you're reinforcing division, you're reinforcing community tension, you're reinforcing tensions between people. I'm not sure I agree with that. So here's the thing, right? I remember Nigel Fowage attacking me when the that last election happened and I put out a uh video in Uddu, right? I've got a language skill set and I've got older people like my mother doesn't understand fluent English, right? But she's not divided. She's very much part of a community. You know, she gets a train up and down London and she goes to you know she, knows how to w make her way around all the charity shops and then no issues. Okay, maybe not language. Okay, I I'm I'm very happy you're communicating in a different language, but I I guess if the messages are deepening divisions between Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities or between white communities and non-white communities. That's not a good thing, right? Yeah, that isn't a good thing. I completely agree with you a hundred percent on that. When we're going out to be electorate and when we're talking in a different language to be able to communicate those who don't necessarily have English as their first language or as fluent English and we're talking about policies, we should be the language should be equal across the board. Translated, it shouldn't be that as Muslims. But having said that, one thing I will caveat that with is when I'm talking to my lecturer in Bradford and the Tories have been have a problem with Islamophobia. If you think I'm not going to talk about it, you've got a different thing coming. Because the Tories would not give us a definition. In two thousand seventeen we were looking for a defin ition of Islamophobia. I am going to use that where they failed that community and they've targeted that community. So I am going to be saying reform is this is what reform thinks about, this is a narrative that reform uses, this is it it it it um absolutely divides that I won't apologize for but ultimately it's about the policies and you will find I promise you in my constituency the I I had a text from uh you know when the when the business stuff was happening from one of my leading business guys who will still vote for me, but it was like your Labour government, no, and he sent me an article. I get that all the time. But so so you've still got the policies affect the communities. And you know, Bradford has got more startups than anywhere outside of London. I can promise you, every person wants to be a businessman, wants to be self-employed, and they want to create wealth, right? Wealth creation is not a bad thing. Progressive politics for me and progressive socialism is not a bad thing. How do you instill that? That comes back to our policies. That doesn't come back to whether you like the Muslims or not. That comes back to wealth creation is wealth creation. And poverty ain't asking you whether you're white or black or brown. Poverty affects you all. The the kid the b the Laddin Bradford to the lad in Barnsley, white working class, Asian Muslim working class, the same issues affect them all. That's what we need to be talking about. That's what we need to take to our electorate and that's what we're not doing well enough. Well said. Including Kirstama, your leader. Because it it just felt to me like the Greens had put together a very effective bi-electric campaign and they targeted key demographics. I I don't mind I don't mind targeting demographics. What I mind is if you're increasing community tension by putting people against each other. Yeah, and and and you know we've had you've definitely had it in Bradford at times, you've had it in Leicester at times where essentially conflicts that are happening in other parts of the world come in and and really affect the local politics. And I also I also get a bit nervous when people start taking on the batt les from abroad. So, you know, I d I and I I'm gonna equally offend all the parties here, right? You've got I have conservative colleagues literally taking Modi 's line on Kashmir and Hammerick through the House of Commons. I'm afraid largely because his voter base and Harrow wants him to do that. I have uh Labour colleagues speaking in Urdu to Pakistani television, taking Pakistani lines. It got Banglades And you've got reform taking Donald Trump's lines. Right. anti-Semitic trope to talk about people taking Israeli lines. But I'm trying to say that it isn't actually just about that happening with Israel. It's happening with Cyprus, it's happening with Kashmir, happening across I at some level one's got to say you're a British Member of Parliament. What we've got to think about is the British national interest, not the question of what's somebody's relatives back home. this is global Britain. This is what this is what was created by your government. I went in and spoke, yes, we can celebrate the part that was delivered , but there was a part that wasn't delivered, mate. And we need to, as Britain, we have an obligation. So we have to. Kashmir is exactly the same stuff. Now people of heritage, of Kashmir heritage, and there's a whole generation still, you know, very, very knock everything that happened every time that something happens in Kashmir, the Kashmir groups go to their MPs, have lots of pictures, and you know, and what worries me is that there's not not the younger generation involved in that conversation. I want to start that conversation up more because it's an injusti ce and it's an inequality and we have a responsibility for that. And I think we abdicate our responsibility at the time because we are big button. But we also have to accept that sometimes communities have to be challenged because they can be too close to the conflict. They're too embedded in a particular view. And you know, I I I'm an equal offender. I want to challenge pro Israeli, pro Palestinian, pro Indian, pro Pakistani, pro Turkish, pro Greek. I want to challenge them all. 'Ca 'cause I don't I 'cause people are not objective. They can't look at these things cleanly. They come from where they come. And somebody needs to step back and say what is the UK national interest here, not what does this particular community think from their particular view about the community? So I would be uh you know, when everybody turns up and I have said this to the community at times, you know, when everybody turns up for a Kashmir photo and I said, guys, you know, if you did this when we have an education policy or something else that the Tories did, it'd be really, really helpful. You know, you have that and you have that in a humorous way. And with Pakistan, you know, I I get frustrated with what's happening at the moment in Pakistan with uh Imran Khan and m my constituents, no matter where they're from, they have a belonging, a sense of belonging to their home country, to immigrants, right? And then that that some sense of belonging isn't just about race and where you've come from. It is that kind of farage and Trump belonging of values that are aligned, you know? How do you how do you then separate the it's the same thing with right wing politics, whether it whether it's Victor Orborn, whether it's you know, all of these right-wing people who are coming together and talking about things. So for me, what really worries me and keeps me up at night is we don't have that kind of leadership in politics anymore. So we had this layer of the last kind of leader, I mean um Mamdani kind of books a trend, but the last kind of leader was the Obama-esque type. And after that, all we've got is the Trumps and the Farajes and the all the rest of it. Where's the next tier of leadership? Where's the leadership that steps up? And Zach Plansky, I don't think, is the answer. Uh, you know, v you know, I don't think all of them carries the the problem is you've got the charisma on social media, which is two minutes of an ice speech and all airy fairy, but the detail of that, and you know, you guys have been in government, you know what it's like. The detail of how it actually works at the petrol pump, at the dining table, when it costs you your bananas cost more or your milk costs more or your bread costs more and it costs you more for your shoes and all of these things and taxes and all of these things. They've got a clue about that stuff. They ain't got a clue. Farage hasn't got a clue and it is Tory two point naught the way he's carrying on, let's be honest, right? And then you've got Plansky, who talks a good talk, but where does it, where's the actual detail of how to run institutions? How do you where's that leadership? And for me, pushing against Farage is about offering, making an offer to the electorate. Because, you know, there is and and like I said, poverty ain't looking at what race you belong to. It ain't looking at whether you're white working class or whether you're brown working class. It is it is just poverty. Certainly not looking at Nazar Farage. No, definitely not hell. Anyway, listen, lovely to talk to you. Well done with the book. It's an amazing read, it really is. And uh yeah, I think about your mum quite a lot. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Well, she is quite a woman and it's quite a story. It's an incredible story. And as you say, I know very few people who communicate as accurately and clearly the sort of Warts and all story of some of the things that are happening within the community in Bradford, for example. I mean, actually it slightly reminds me of um when we interviewed Anthony Rayner, who I thought was far better communitator , more relaxed, more funny, more open about her own child of extreme poverty than most kind of sociologists or politicians talk about it. I thought the moment that really revealed her as a communicator , was just the naturalness and the detail with which she talked about her life in the village in Azad Kashmir. Every detail of exactly how you move the buffalo dung around for the roof, for the fertilizer, for the yeah. It's also the reason I was inter ested in her being defined by this, because it is an extraordinary book, and anybody who reads it will just think this, you know, it's even some somebody like me, I it's very hard to compute that here's an MP that sits in Parliament And this is the life that she led and this is where her politics have have come from. But she is a great communicator, she really is, and I I thought it was fascinating as well the way she you know, because as you pointed out, to get to get done by Jeremy Corbyn of anti-Semitism when he was leader of the Labour Party, you've got to be kind of out there. And yet she unlike a lot of the Corbyn Easters who I think went away and basically said, oh, we're the victims of this You'll see in the um y you you you know but I mean if in feeds into a far-right narrative where she was portrayed as profoundly anti-Semitic, defense agreement gangs. But what becomes clear when she talks is that isn't her position at all. In fact, she I think is genuine in trying to really put effort into understanding the position and Jewish community, and she is brutal in her criticism of the grooming gangs and the failure to act on them. I mean, you your point is it's got to be the big point underlying all this, which is it's a bit like w you know, in a tiny way, people often say to me, you know, how can you be so rude about parliament and policy as you're gonna put people off? You know, how can she be so rude about her own community without worrying that you know the far right is going to exploit that. Yeah. Yeah. Because I guess if you're from the right listening to this, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, as you said, this can sort of confirm people's preaches. Sent away at twelve, forced marriage with a cousin, boyfriend s farming out women for rape. I mean it it sort of plays into that that agenda. What she was trying to say, I think, is that that unless people like her stand up against it and challenge it and define it in a different way, then it won't change. She was I think she was trying to tell us that things are changing. I I think yeah, and also that unless you describe the problem you can't solve it. And thirdly I thought very moving how much the Muslim community coming behind her and the Bradford community comes behind us that she uh rather than being ostracized, she's been voted in and celebrated. She quite liked her her confidence about her own position sitting on a majority of seven hundred and seven, uh saying I'm in a better place than the government as a whole. And I've got to say anybody who beats George Galloway is uh is to be commended. There's also things she didn't put in the book 'cause she's almost too modest to mention them. She uh fostered uh young Afghan when he was fourteen, and so she's almost an honorary grandmother, he's now got children. She was herself in foster care, she doesn't talk much about that either. I mean I do think there's something amazing and she left formal education at twelve. Yeah. She just she's said right at the start, you know, she's really just only started reading books again. But she's bloody bright and I'll tell you what, they should listen to some of the stuff she's saying about Farage as well. Because I think there's far there just isn't enough confidence to my mind in the way that Labour attack Farage and she's got it. I could have gone going forever. And one of the only things that I would love to talk to her about more is the many positive aspects of Pakistani culture and even Pakistani male culture. I mean and I think it would have been nice to hear on that because I think she'd be the first to accept that yes, Izat and honour have horrible um aspects. They also have things which are very positive. And you know, it would be nice if we ever got a back to to talk about um Well as we know, Roy, from a recent episode, you're very much in the Shia Muslim We didn't get onto that either. I think she also comes from a Sayyid family. I think she's descended from the uh the family of the the Prophet Muhammad. Well look, I thought wonderful. Thank you for pushing us to interfere Nas and uh incredible story. And also a very, very different story. We we've interviewed Sadiq Khan, we've interviewed uh Sajajavid. They also have stories about parents coming from Pakistan. Uh Saj's mother also struggles with NHS apps, has to be translated for by Sagittarius . But they've not gone with buffalo dung on their heads. And and I I would have been interested in see what she feels she has in common and doesn't have in common with with that whole experience and everybody's different trajectories. Anyway, we're lucky to have her in parliament. Lucky to have her on the show. Thank you. See you soon . Hi, it's Steph McGovern here from The Rest Is Money. Now, obviously there, are big economic consequences to all the geopolitical turmoil. Listen to us to find out how investors are reacting and whether we're heading to a financial Armageddon. I'm talking to Karen Ward, a chief Market Stratisteg at J P Morgan Asset Management. Listen to the rest is money to get her take.