Shabana Mahmood: Palestine Action, Faith and What I Told Starmer

Shabana Mahmood (0:01)

If you know I'm a Muslim, and you know I'm immigrant working class, second generation, and you know that I'm a Brummie, you know everything there is to know about my politics from those three things.

Rory Stewart (0:09)

The EU-Turkey deal, which was essentially to stop the migration across the Mediterranean, I mean, stopped it almost overnight.

Shabana Mahmood (0:15)

The reason the EU-Turkey deal worked is because Turkey was willing to take those people back. I'm afraid we don't just get to say, France take them back and they just take them back. That doesn't work.

Alastair Campbell (0:24)

The number one issue that we were asked about was the ban on Palestine Action.

Shabana Mahmood (0:27)

Was it lawful? Yes, it was. Does it meet the legal test? Yes, it does. Has something else gone awry that shouldn't have happened? No. I support the cause of the Palestinian people, but you don't have to show your support for the Palestinian people by also supporting a proscribed organisation.

Alastair Campbell (0:42)

You were identified as one of the people that very clear to Keir it's got to be a change.

Shabana Mahmood (0:47)

We were living as a government day by day. He had lost his authority and he could not govern. I think what Andy has given us, the Labour government, is a second chance at making a first impression.

Alastair Campbell (0:59)

How much are you comfortable with the fact that actually you do have people on the far right, who say, well, you know, thank God for Shabana Mahmood. She's the only one who gets it.

Rory Stewart (1:17)

Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, Leading with me, Rory Stewart.

Alastair Campbell (1:20)

And with me, Alastair Campbell. And we're with Shabana Mahmood. And Shabana Mahmood has one of the toughest jobs in British politics. She's the Home Secretary. And it's therefore quite fitting that she has a reputation for being a pretty tough personality herself. She is a working class Brummie, raised above a corner shop by Kashmiri Pakistani parents. She's a Muslim who says that her faith is the most important thing in her life. She got to Oxford University. She became a barrister, but politics was always, I think, calling. MP since 2010

She had a number of front bench roles under Ed Miliband. None under Jeremy Corbyn, that was her choice. But when Keir Starmer became leader, she rose to the Shadow Cabinet, became Justice Secretary when Labour won power, and then moved to the Home Office.

That's a position she's retained under Andy Burnham. So with crime, policing, asylum and immigration to deal with, she's going to need all of that toughness and all of that faith to deal with all the problems. But Shabana, thank you very much for being here.

Shabana Mahmood (2:24)

Thank you for having me.

Rory Stewart (2:25)

Thank you for coming. So, Home Secretary, just to begin, tell us a little bit about faith. We're very interested in faith.

And how important it is in your life. And is it literally more important than anything else?

Shabana Mahmood (2:41)

Yes, it is.

I was born to Muslim parents, and I was raised in a very religious household. The practice of our faith, prayer, fasting, all of those things have been a part of my life since I was born.

Rory Stewart (2:56)

Was that true of all your relatives and other neighbours? When you were growing up in Birmingham, were there families from outside Kashmir who were more religious, less religious, some people praying five times a day, other people not?

Shabana Mahmood (3:08)

The community I grew up in, Small Heath in Birmingham, at the point at which my family came to live there, became a very Kashmiri-Pakistani dominated area of the city. And lots of my own relatives basically live on the same street as ours. So my mum's sister lived across the road from us. My dad's mum and siblings lived just up the road, like two minutes away. So the family was very closely situated to one another, the extended family.

And I would say, almost all of my extended family are as religious as my own parents.

They're all raised in very practising, very faith-conscious households, where faith is the thing around which the rest of life is organised. And that was the environment I was in. The first six years of my life, though, I spent in Saudi Arabia, because my dad's a civil engineer, and there was a lot of work for British civil engineers out in the Middle East. In the 80s, they were building desalination plants. They were getting water out of the desert. So he had good work opportunities in Saudi.