Remona Aly
Sunday 15 September 2024 The i Paper

‘Death threats are routine’: The MP who says ‘pure hatred’ is poisoning politics

‘Death threats are routine’: The MP who says ‘pure hatred’ is poisoning politics

“When somebody’s shouting at you, it’s not the words that you hear. All you hear is the aggression.”

It was the moment that Naz Shah saw her general election campaign take a “nosedive”, a turning point that also crystalised for the Labour MP how British politics is becoming “much more dangerous”.

While out canvassing in Bradford, Shah was confronted in the street by a man who filmed her as he poured out five minutes of continuous abuse towards her.

“You dirty, dirty, dirty Zionist,” he says in the video that went viral after it was posted online in June. “I’m going to follow you around until you get the f**k out of this area. I’ll just keep following you love, I’ll keep following you.” 

Shah can be seen smiling slightly nervously as she delivers leaflets amid the intimidation. “My natural response to an aggressor was to smile,” she explains. “I was just trying to manage my emotional response.” 

But “it affected me” the MP admits. “Because the next day, I just couldn’t function.”

Shah was eventually able to resume campaigning and went on to win and hold Bradford West – but only just. And she had to endure death threats and fears for the safety of her own family to get there.

Now, in an exclusive i interview, Shah has opened up about the attacks she has received from both sides of a hugely polarised debate, and how they are part of a deeper undercurrent of misogyny and aggression that she thinks is poisoning politics and will “discourage other people from coming in”.

“My family said: ‘We don’t even want you to win this election this time’,” he MP says. My kids were like: ‘You’re not doing this again.’ Because of Tiktok, Snapchat, all the rest of it, it becomes a real issue. So your kids are impacted.”

‘Vile and threatening abuse’

It was Gaza and Labour’s stance on the conflict there that was the lightning rod for much of what Shah experienced during the election campaign.

In Bradford West – a seat with the second highest percentage of Muslims in the country (59 per cent) – Sir Keir Starmer’s infamous LBC interview last year had not been forgotten. The Labour leader was asked about a siege in Gaza with power and water being withheld and answered: “Israel does have that right.” 

Shah’s decision to defy her party’s whip and step down from the Labour front bench, so she could vote for an immediate Gaza ceasefire in November, earned the MP some “vile” and “threatening Islamophobic abuse” at the time. 

‘Zero conflict between British values and Islamic values’

The riots that swept the UK this summer saw mosques attacked and left many Muslims shaken. But Naz Shah takes some comfort from the response – citing Keir Starmer’s “robust” clampdown and the way the community rallied round in Southport to help repair the mosque damaged during the disturbances.

She also saw positives in her home city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, which escaped the disturbances. “After the riots, people went out their way to actually smile, especially at girls in hijabs,” the MP says.

“Just to reassure them, and especially white young men, just to say, ‘we are with you, in solidarity’. There were stories, and anecdotally, I can tell you loads of those kind of stories which were really, really heartwarming, really wonderful.”

Shah takes a defiant tone against the growing campaign against Islam in the UK from the far right. “You won’t frighten us out of our own country,” she says. 

“This is my country. This is our country. It has no place for people who are bigots and racist. And there’s zero conflict between British values and Islamic values, zero conflict… We don’t have a loyalty test to pass to say whether this is our country or not. You know, it bloody well is.”

But when the general election arrived that did not stop her from being targeted with a stream of vitriolic abuse from the opposite direction, for supposedly supporting Israel over Gaza.

And, despite voting for a ceasefire, she became another victim of the wave of pro-Gaza independent candidates who defeated four sitting Labour MPs in July. Shah’s majority was slashed by more than 26,000 votes to just 707. She faced two separate independent candidates, who would have beaten her by around 4,000 if their votes had been combined.

Shah has spent a lifetime overcoming adversity and violence. But she admits to being shaken by what she experienced this summer.

“I have had seriously tough elections, but I never had to worry about my physical safety before,” the MP tells i.

“This time I did. I had to worry about my team. My youngest child is 12, I’ve never taken them out [campaigning] once. My older two are 17 and 20, they went out with me but only in the last few days, when I got some of my confidence back.”

“I’ve had people say, well ‘You chose this career’,” she adds. “I didn’t choose to be abused… I didn’t make that choice. You’d never accept that in a workplace to routinely get hatred and death threats. I have personal security to do public events now, nine out of 10 times I’ll have somebody with me, which started this general election.”

Terrible start in life that led to a political career

Shah was born in Bradford in 1973 into an unstable household, with little money. Her mother, who had married Shah’s father when she was still a teenager, came from Mirpur, Pakistan. He walked out of the family home, when Shah was just six, to marry a 16 year-old neighbour. He had beaten Shah’s mother and left her, when she was pregnant, to look after two young children.

Shah’s mother was then befriended by another man, who turned out to be a local drug dealer and gangster. She was jailed in 1993 for killing him – her minimum 20-year sentence was eventually reduced when evidence of the abuse she suffered during the relationship was taken into consideration.

But her mother’s time in prison left Shah having to bring up her young sister and brother. She was then forced into the marriage as a teenager, with a husband she later left (her three children are from a second marriage). It was this terrible start in life that pushed Shah towards campaigning, activism and a political career that has at times been its own endurance test.

She first won Bradford West in 2015, when she defeated the seat’s incumbent MP George Galloway by more than 11,000 votes. But it was a bruising campaign that saw the then Respect Party candidate accuse her of lying about her age and claiming she was 16 rather than 15 when her forced marriage took place – an allegation Shah refuted. She nearly doubled her majority in 2017 but had to put up with being compared to a dog, whose pedigree needed to be checked, at a rival’s campaign rally.

But the 2024 campaign soon shaped up to be the worst yet and not just because she was followed, filmed and abused while out canvassing. Shah cites a “promotion of violence” against her in the comments that appeared underneath that video on social media, and a campaign poster being slashed outside her own office.

 “I knew it was going downhill because people who would normally be very supportive were saying ‘We can support you in the background, but we’re not prepared to openly support you because of the aggressive nature of people’,” she says.

 “At [one] point there were up to 10 men in cars, in the last week before the election, telling our door knockers to ‘get out of the area or we’ll set the dogs on you’, and we’re going to call the boys and there’s going to be 100 men here.”

Raw anger and a huge element of misogyny

Shah stresses that she is happy to be criticised and engage in debate. “Legitimate, robust questioning is fine,” she says. “I love hustings. I don’t mind people even having a camera and asking legitimate questions on the street.

“But I had language like, ‘you dirty, dirty Zionist’. There was a huge element of misogyny, it was bitchy, it was pure hatred. There were campaigns against me, using the Palestine banner, but then support for the Labour candidate [in Bradford East] who happens to be a man. There was raw anger, but the added ingredient to that was the underlying efforts to try and unseat me because I’m a woman.”

Shah also found it particularly “disheartening” that such attacks were coming from members of her own Muslim community.

“I already get death threats putting my head above the parapet,” she says. “I’m already at risk. When the far right rally happened in London [in June], there were only two MPs that were name checked. One was Kim Leadbeater [MP for Spen Valley and sister of murdered MP Jo Cox], and the other was Naz Shah.

“So when you have that incoming, because you’re standing up for your community, and then somebody from your community does that to you, it cuts much, much deeper. It cuts to your soul.”

Shah stresses that the “pain and anger” caused by Starmer’s LBC interview is “very legitimate”. “What’s not legitimate is somebody slashing my banners,” she says. “What’s not legitimate is somebody giving death threats, what’s not legitimate is the idea that a vote for me is a vote for genocide.”

She believes that much of the opposition she faced in Bradford was disingenuous about its real motivation.

“It’s not about representation of Palestine – because you have that. You want representation on Muslims, you have that. A journalist even pointed out to them that they have strong advocates on these issues with Labour MPs in Bradford, including the male Muslim MP, and the guy turned around and said to the journalist: ‘I’m not talking about him. He can stay. We just want her out’.”

‘My biggest ever victory’

Yet Shah has remained to take on the fight. And sometimes the tactics used against her, backfired and worked in her favour.

“My sister wears a hijab, and she went out knocking on doors with a team of around 10-15 people,” Shah says recalling another incident from the campaign. “As she’s knocking, three cars pull up. [There were] men in hoodies, walking up straight behind her and interrupting her to talk to the constituent.

“And my sister was trying to convince the constituent, who didn’t want to vote Labour, and she said: ‘Look, that’s the alternative choice.’ He was horrified with the way the guy walked up behind her and with the intimidation tactics, and said to her: ‘Your sister has my vote’.”

“Despite the misogyny I had, the vitriol I got in Bradford West, and with the campaign, the amount of support that I got was really heartening,” Shah adds.

The opposition she received because of what was perceived as her party’s stance on Gaza, means the MP is clear that she, personally, deserves the credit for coming through and holding onto to her seat. “This was my biggest ever victory because Labour didn’t win me this,” she tells i.

So, bearing that in mind, could her stance on Palestine, and her passion to eradicate child poverty – lead her to follow in the footsteps of seven MPs – including Bradford East colleague Imran Hussain – suspended from Labour following their rebellion over the two-child cap benefit? Could she defy her own party whip again?

“Never, say never,” she smiles. But she adds: “I am also hugely, hugely party loyal. The Labour party is home, it’s my family. Like any family, you have people with differences of opinion. Does that rule out me having disagreements? No, it doesn’t… [But] I’m not going to be the person that does not support my party in trying to get to where it needs to get to.”

And she sees plenty of hope and opportunity under the new Labour government.

“I want Britain to be the best that it can be, I’m very patriotic like that,” she says. “I felt really overwhelmed in the chamber [Parliament], because on one hand you had Shabana Mahmood as Lord Chancellor, and on the other you had Nus Ghani as a Deputy Speaker. Both women of Kashmiri heritage, and it was an amazing thing to see.”

Shah is also clearly proud of her own achievement in emerging victorious from such a gruelling campaign.

“For me, this is my most successful election win, because, from a statistical perspective, I should not have won,” she says. “So that restores my faith. It gives me hope.”

 

This article was originally published in The i Paper on 15th August 2024. To view it click here.