When the UK finally goes to the polls, the British-Pakistani-Fijian daughter of a car mechanic could win the seat that Iain Duncan Smith has held for more than 30 years. Some would see that as proof that anyone can succeed – but not Shaheen
t was 12 December 2019; the first winter general election in Britain since 1923. Faiza Shaheen walked into Waltham Forest town hall in north-east London. The academic, economist, self-described inequality geek andparliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green was about to find out if she had pulled off a feat so close to impossible that the odds were one in 10m.
We meet at the Guardian’s London office on a warm spring afternoon. Shaheen is articulate but wary, and not as outspoken as I expected from reading her book and watching her campaigning. Her cautiousness, however, is less a reflection of the politician’s tendency to deflect and more to do with the level of abuse she has encountered – from left and right – since entering politics.
Losing in 2019 was, in the end, instructive. Shaheen lost by just 1,262 votes and Chingford and Woodford Green was one of only six seats in the country to see a swing to Labour. In the days, weeks and months that followed, she started to reassess what had happened. She found that while the odds of going to Oxford University – which she did – and then on to become an MP were one in 10m for her, they were closer to one in 10,000 for David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
As she describes him in Know Your Place, her father was “dodgy with money, dodgy with women and dodgy with his fists”. Shaheen’s mother, whom he met while on the run from the police, eventually divorced him. Her dad tried to make her mum and sister homeless and they ended up having to represent themselves in court. However, he taught Shaheen to be proud of her Pakistani-Fijian and working-class roots.
Though there is some discomfort in embodying the myth she seeks to dismantle – in her 2019 campaign, she cannily harnessed it with leaflets bearing the aspirational slogan “from Greggs to parliament” – Shaheen thinks it is a question of how we tell our stories to ourselves and others. Yes, it is true that, when she was four, her mother told her in Urdu that one day she would go to “Oxford, the best university in the world”.
She is particularly good on the rightwing weaponisation of the white working class as a separate racial category. “Since when did the working class become white? It’s a mythology. It’s as if you’re not allowed to be working class if you’re brown or black … because in this country, the working class is at once pathologised and seen as a badge of honour.
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