Naz Shah

Naz Shah is a British Labour politician, born Naseem Shah in Bradford on 13 November 1973. She has been the Member of Parliament for Bradford West since 2015, defeating George Galloway at her first election, and served on the Opposition frontbench from 2018 to 2023, most recently as Shadow Minister for Crime Reduction. ¹

Shah was born in Bradford. Her father left the family when she was six; at twelve her mother sent her to Pakistan to escape an abusive partner, and there she entered an arranged marriage. ¹ When she was twenty, her mother Zoora Shah was convicted of murdering that partner after more than a decade of abuse, and Shah later campaigned alongside Southall Black Sisters for her mother's release; her mother served nearly fourteen years. ¹ Before Parliament she worked as a carer for disabled people, chaired the mental health charity Sharing Voices Bradford, and served as an NHS commissioner. ¹ A hit-and-run collision in the early 2010s left her with periodic severe nerve pain requiring hospital treatment. ¹ The English article never states a religion for her in its text — it files her under "English Muslims" as a category, and Wikidata gives a bare Islam statement — and no source names a school or order for her, so her faith is recorded as unknown. ^{1 2}

Selected by Labour's National Executive after the original candidate stood down, Shah won Bradford West in 2015 with 49.6 per cent of the vote. ¹ She became a Parliamentary Private Secretary to John McDonnell in February 2016, then stepped down and was suspended from the party that April over Facebook posts from 2014 about Israel; she apologised, said the posts were antisemitic but that she was not, and was reinstated in July with a formal warning. ¹ Re-elected in 2017, 2019 and 2024, she served as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities from 2018 and later as Shadow Minister for Crime Reduction until 2023. ¹ In 2020 Leave.EU apologised and paid her damages for wrongly calling her a "grooming gangs apologist", acknowledging her record as a campaigner for victims. ¹

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