It was like a scene from the Blair government: a minister admits inmates are being released before their sentence ends, to free up space. The opposition is furious, saying that ‘never in this country has a government ever been forced to release prisoners over two months early’. But in this instance, the minister is Tory and the opposition comes from Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood and the shadow justice secretary.
When we meet in The Spectator’s offices, the 43-year-old seems to be channelling her inner Michael Howard. ‘Prisons are overcrowded, we just don’t have enough places,’ she says. ‘This country hasn’t built enough prison places for a long time and certainly not for the last 14 years.’ Labour would remedy this, she says, by building more prisons and locking more people up. ‘If you break our rules, you do have to be punished. Prison has a place.’
But Mahmood is no red Tory. Her last assignment was running Labour’s political campaign machine. By the time she handed the job over to Pat McFadden, the party had a 20-point lead over the Tories. She joked to him that ‘if it all goes well, I’m taking credit because the foundations are all me’.
The former barrister says the Tories should be very concerned about prisons. ‘You could have a big system failure on any day,’ she says. ‘I’m sure Alex Chalk [the Justice Secretary] is losing sleep over it. I’m sure if we win, I’ll be losing sleep over it.’
While she is now prepared to talk, Mahmood has been quiet in recent months. She is the only Muslim shadow cabinet member and was reported to be unhappy about Keir Starmer’s delay in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Until recently, Muslims had been the single most likely group to vote Labour, but Muslim councillors have been resigning from Labour in protest over Gaza. Some have stood as independents and won by a significant margin in the local elections in places like Oldham. The concern within Labour is that this particular movement could grow during a general election campaign.
‘The situation in Gaza, the perception of our position… things that have happened, have obviously led to a loss of trust between us and large numbers of people,’ Mahmood says. ‘These are Labour voters who we want to work with and earn their trust back. We have heard the message that they have sent.’ How will Labour respond? ‘Our policy position has changed,’ she says. But the rift may be deeper. ‘When you have a schism, it is very hard to win that trust back. But that’s what we have to do. It is individual conversations. House by house, street by street.’
Is religion important to her? ‘My religion, my faith, my belief in God is the absolute centre point of who I am,’ she says. ‘It’s the thing from which I draw my purpose in life and also my sense of identity.’ Her faith doesn’t come in and out ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns’ as David Cameron once put it when discussing his own Christian beliefs: for Mahmood, religion is a driving force.
Born in Birmingham, Mahmood spent much of her early life abroad as her father worked on engineering projects in Nigeria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. ‘We spent most of our weekends either in Mecca at the main mosque or at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, which as a family of Muslims was a really special experience,’ she says. She went to an expat school until the age of seven and ‘came back with a very, very posh Home Counties accent’. She credits ITV’s Kavanagh QC for encouraging her interest in law.
She went on to study law at Oxford. Her time at Lincoln College was, she says, ‘the very first time where I was meeting people for whom I was literally the first Muslim they’d ever met in their life. That was very odd. Everyone used to ask about arranged marriages. I used to think: God, I can’t answer this just as myself. I have to answer for about a billion people.’ I had to google a lot about what Shias think about XY and Z because it got a bit complicated!’
Her father had been a Labour activist in Birmingham. She ran for president of the Junior Common Room at Oxford and persuaded the young Rishi Sunak to vote for her (‘I was mobilising the geek vote’). She started a legal career but was offered the chance to become an MP in 2010. Sunak followed five years later.
The Prime Minister describes Britain as a multi-faith rather than secular democracy and Mahmood agrees. She says Kate Forbes, a Presbyterian with traditional views on gender and marriage, suffered ‘disgraceful’ abuse in her campaign to be SNP leader. ‘I think the way that some people reacted to Kate Forbes’s first campaign and then also the second-time round, that’s disgraceful frankly,’ she says. ‘Would you really say that the people who are from orthodox traditions of Christianity or the Free Church… that they are not allowed to have any political representation? ‘She’s explained where her religious beliefs would and would not affect her decision on policy issues. What more can you do than be honest? I think the way people reacted to that was really out of order. It’s not British.’
Mahmood refused to serve under Jeremy Corbyn. ‘You could say I am a bit to the right of the Labour party,’ she says. ‘On social issues and broader society, I’d probably be described as a small-c conservative.’
While many of her colleagues have struggled to answer what makes a woman Mahmood is clear. ‘I believe in the importance of recognising biological sex, it’s immutable and it is fundamental to how the vast majority of women understand their existence.’ She would have opposed a bill on self-ID on demand, she says, or indeed, any loosening of time limits on abortion.
If Starmer holds a free vote on assisted dying, as he has suggested, Mahmood says she’ll oppose it. ‘I don’t intend to support it in the future,’ she says. ‘I know some of the MPs who vocally support this issue think, “For God’s sake, we’re not a nation of granny killers, what’s wrong with you”… I feel that once you cross that line, you’ve crossed it forever. If it just becomes the norm that at a certain age or with certain diseases, you are now a bit of a burden… that’s a really dangerous position to be in.’
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