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Naz Shah: Bradford West's Labour candidate pens emotional open letter explaining why she wants to be an MP Naz Shah: Bradford West's Labour candidate pens emotional open letter explaining why she wants to be an MP
(35 minutes later)
The woman hoping to win a seat for Labour in the Bradford West constituency this May has penned a candid open letter, explaining what motivated her to pursue a career in politics. People who believe that politicians are all the same cannot yet have heard of Naz Shah.
Naz Shah, who is hoping to oust Respect party MP George Galloway, published the letter in local newspaper Urban Echo, explaining that her difficult early life had laid the foundations for her political vocation. The women’s rights campaigner, who was selected as Labour’s candidate in Bradford West only last week, has suddenly found herself thrust into the public eye after publishing a remarkable account of how her life has been defined by extreme poverty and violence.
Shah, who was selected as a candidate in her hometown following the withdrawal of Amina Ali, wrote that she had ultimately been inspired by the "dreams of my mother"- who was jailed for killing the man that abused her.  Ms Shah, who is hoping to unseat Respect’s George Galloway at May’s general election, was born and raised in Bradford. At the age of six, her father abandoned the family to elope with their neighbour’s 16-year-old daughter, leaving them destitute.
"So you see for me to be selected as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate is not really about me, it’s the dream of my mother," Shah wrote. “I remember been thrown into the back of a taxi with black bin liners full of our belongings and packed off from the family home,” she wrote. “We never really saw the end of black bin liners over the next few years as we moved from squalor to squalor, 14 times in less than two years, from back-to-back houses where the toilet was outside, to rat-infested damp houses where we lived and slept in just one room.”
"I remember my mum saying Naseem I would be so happy if you became a prison governor as you could help women like me. When I expressed my interest last year for politics, as it's where I can influence change, my mother understood that her story from 22 years ago would resurface, it would open up wounds but she blessed me as she knew it’s what made me this way. My siblings struggled but they knew it is who I am." Ms Shah was sent to Pakistan at the age of 12 to escape her mother’s violent drug-dealing partner, only to be forced into an arranged marriage. Her mother, who remained in the UK, eventually decided to take the law into her own hands and poisoned her abuser’s food, serving 14 years in prison for murder.
Shah wrote that her father left her pregnant mother and his two children when Shah was just six. “Following years of antidepressants, failed suicide attempts and feeling desperate and destitute, she snapped,” Ms Shah wrote. “I remember the first day I visited my mother at New Hall Prison. When I left it was like leaving a crying child at nursery for the first time – I now became a mother to my mother. We lost the house, we lost everything and the moving around started all over again.”
"We never really saw the end of black bin liners over the next few years as we moved from squalor to squalor, 14 times in less than two years, from back to back houses where the toilet was outside to rat infested damp houses where we lived and slept in just one room," she said. With the help of local charities, Ms Shah successfully campaigned for her mother’s sentence to be reduced. She was released from prison in 2000.
When the family eventually moved into a new home it was under the name of a man called Azam – who went on to abuse Shah’s mother. In her account, published by the website Urban Echo, Ms Shah recalled how she returned to Britain after leaving her own husband, who she claimed had also become abusive “used his fists to communicate”, to become “a mother to my two siblings”. She worked a variety of jobs, first at a hospital laundry service and then in a factory packing crisps before joining the Samaritans and later the NHS.
Shah herself was sent to Pakistan at the age of 12 to protect her. But it wasn’t a safe haven, as she was forced into an unwanted marriage at the age of 15 and beaten by her husband, whom she left in 1992. Now the chair of mental health charity Sharing Voices Bradford, Ms Shah said her selection as a Labour candidate was about “the recognition of inequality in society” and that she wanted to succeed for the sake of her mother and her own three children.
But just a year later her mother was in prison, having been sentenced to 20 years. “It’s my way of making things right, because if I’ve learnt anything, I have learnt that through compassion we can change the world,” she wrote. “We cannot change things through just complaining, we must be part of the solutions and we must have conversations – real, meaningful and honest conversations not only with ourselves but with our families, our communities and beyond.”
"She killed the man who abused her," Shah wrote. Ms Shah was not Labour’s first choice to contest Bradford West. She replaced Amina Ali, a councillor in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, who said the campaign would cause “massive disruption” to her family life. Labour faces a difficult task to unseat Mr Galloway, who won a by-election in 2012 and holds a majority of more than 10,000.
Despite the family’s best efforts to reduce the sentence, Shah’s mother still spent 14 years in jail. Although she was only selected a week ago and is virtually unknown in the political world, Ms Shah said she had already started receiving online abuse. “I had not reached home following my selection and I had at least two new fake Twitter accounts set up in my name,” she wrote.
It was this scarring experience, Shah wrote, that propelled her forward – the desire to bring about real change. “Already my ‘character’ has been attacked and desecrated through social media and trolling. The smear campaign that has started has been some of the most vicious and disgusting I have seen. But it does not scare me, will not change me, and it in fact fuels my passion for change more.”
Over the years she has worked with women’s rights groups and the Samaritans but she wanted to get to the heart of the problem.
"I didn’t realise how much anger I carried inside me towards the 'systems' that failed me and my family because I had turned it into this force to change people’s lives. I would get emotional about the families I was helping and angry if they weren’t getting the right services, until one day my mentor pulled me to one side and asked me why was I so upset when families didn’t get the services they needed , how much of this is really about the failure you experienced? That conversation was a game changer for me."
Shah later became an NHS commissioner before being selected as a PPC.
And the future looks brighter.
"When I did finally get home that night I was selected, my mother sat up in her bed and held me close whilst I cried," Shah wrote.
"We cried together knowing that whilst my past and my present are the dreams of my mother and her inspiration for me, my future is about the dreams I have for my own daughter, she is my inspiration to bring change and equality for the world in which she is growing up in, the community we live in and the wider society."