Naz Shah has been the Labour MP for Bradford West since 2015 being reelected in 2019 with a majority of 27,019.
She served as Shadow Minister for Crime Reduction, having been appointed to the role in Keir Starmer’s September 2023 reshuffle.
However, she resigned from the Labour frontbench over leader Keir Starmer’s stance on Gaza, after voting in the House of Commons for a Scottish National Party amendment calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Shah has previously served as the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion from 2020 to 2023, having also been Shadow Minister for Equalities between 2018 and 2020.
Shah’s West Yorkshire constituency of Bradford West contains a large part of the centre of Bradford as well as the communities of Clayton, Heaton, Manningham,Thornton and Toller. This seat has a very young population and contains some notable pockets of deprivation where half of all children are said to live in poverty. One of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the UK, some 50,000 of the population are said to be of Pakistani descent, and the seat contains one of the highest proportions of Muslim voters in the country.
Although George Galloway won this seat for the Respect Party between 2012 and 2015 following a by-election, this is traditionally a very safe Labour seat, one where the party secured a massive 76.2% of the vote in the 2019 General Election.
Born in 1973, Shah had an arranged marriage in Pakistan when she was 15. She previously campaigned with domestic violence charities for the release of her mother, who had been imprisoned for the murder of a man who had raped her.
Before being elected as an MP, Shah was the chair of mental health charity, Sharing Voices Bradford. She previously worked as a carer for disabled people, as an NHS Commissioner and a director for a regional association supporting local councils. When she was younger Shah also reportedly worked in a hospital laundry service and in a factory packing crisps.
Shah supported Emily Thornberry in the 2020 Labour leadership election. She has three children.
In 2022, a woman whose death threats led to Naz Shah and her children fleeing the home in the middle of the night, was jailed for three and a half years.
Naz Shah is Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Groups on Islamic Finance; and Muslim Women. She is Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Groups on British Muslims; Hajj and Umrah; Race and Community; Religion in the Media; and Bangladesh.
Email: naz.shah.mp@parliament.uk
Website – https://www.nazshahmp.org.uk/
Twitter: twitter.com/NazShahBfd
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Naz-Shah
