My grandparents were emigrants from India to Pakistan. My parents were emigrants from Pakistan to London, but I always knew this is where I would stay.
I have six brothers and a sister, and I am bang in the middle. I wasn’t the strongest, but I was the smoothest negotiator. There were only three TV channels. I learned a lot about diplomacy growing up.
I can’t think of another city in the world where the LGBT community would happily organise a fundraiser for me, a Muslim candidate. That is the joy of this city. The rest of the world looks on us with envy.
My dad was a bus driver, my mum made clothes on a sewing machine, but we had the security and affordability of a council house. They knew the rent wasn’t going up suddenly. Today a bus driver would be moving property every year with private landlords forcing up rent. That old sense of stable community is lost.
I didn’t study the theory of politics by reading books. I did it by living it. When I was 14 my dad’s bus garage was threatened with closure because of Margaret Thatcher’s policies. On the streets my friends, my brothers and I were stopped and searched [by police]. When I decided to be a lawyer I wanted to help people in difficult situations, not make money in the city.
A golden thread runs through all the great religions. Treat others as you want to be treated. Don’t walk by on the other side of the road. Those things aren’t unique to Islam.
Nobody in my family is political in terms of party politics. It was one of Neil Kinnock’s speeches that articulated how I felt, about him and Glenys being the first in a thousand generations to go to university. When I was elected MP in 2005 I met Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and wasn’t overawed. But when I met Neil Kinnock I couldn’t get a word out.
One of the reasons why the vast majority of British Muslims don’t get diverted down a path of radicalisation is that they really know their faith. If you try to tell me that the route to heaven is down some nihilistic pathway, as some charismatic preachers do, I know you are talking rubbish. I know what true Islam is.
Of course politics is about compromise. You can’t do anything as a politician unless you win elections. Heroic failure doesn’t appeal to me.
My dad passed away in September 2003, so he never saw me in Parliament. But I think he would have been proud that his community in Tooting voted me in as their MP. When he and my mum first came to this country there were signs up where they lived: “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” He saw his children being racially abused and getting into fights. His 25 grandchildren have never experienced that. That’s why I’m an optimist.
