Shabana Mahmood, 44. Left: at the High Court in July for her swearing-in ceremony - Richard Pohle, Dan Kennedy for The Times Magazine

 

Shabana Mahmood: ‘The First Time I Was Racially Abused I Was Seven’
By Rachel Sylvester

 

(The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Shabana Mahmood grew up helping in her parents’ corner shop in Birmingham. In July, she became the first Muslim lord chancellor. Her job? Getting to grips with a criminal justice system on the brink)

When she was sworn in as lord chancellor earlier this year, Shabana Mahmood described her amazement that the “little girl from Small Heath, one of the poorest areas in Birmingham, who worked behind the till in her parents’ corner shop” had risen to hold one of the grandest and most ancient roles in government. Although she had been inspired to become a lawyer by watching Kavanagh QC, the television drama about a brilliant barrister “with working-class roots”, she never dreamt that she would one day be justice secretary, the cabinet minister who oversees prisons, courts and the judiciary, responsible for upholding the rule of law, and be the custodian of the Great Seal of the Realm.

She could hear her parents, who emigrated to Britain from Pakistan, sobbing their way through the ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice. “I couldn’t look at them because I was trying not to get choked up myself,” she says. “I felt really powerfully as I was making my speech what a huge journey it had been. My dad came in the Sixties, my mum in the Seventies. For them to be there and watch me become the lord chancellor was a huge leap from where we started to where we are today. I’m going to sound very idealistic but that made me feel really proud of being British. I felt that was a very British sort of story.”

Having been the first Muslim woman to be elected to parliament, in 2010, she is now the first Muslim lord chancellor as well as the first Brummie and the first Urdu speaker to hold the 1,400-year-old position. She is the only lord chancellor who has sworn the oath of allegiance on the Qur’an. The moment was so historic that the King gave her the copy to keep. Mahmood found it both inspiring and intimidating. “When I was taking my oath, it was the first time that I thought I’ve broken through a barrier and my success or failure sets the terms of what chances others might have,” she says.

She is also one of the tiniest lord chancellors in history, which caused problems when it came to being fitted for the ceremonial garb. She cannot help laughing as she tells me the story. “The gown is very heavy and my predecessor, Alex Chalk, was a lot taller than me. I’m 5ft 1in; he is 6ft 3in. It has been tailored but, sadly for me, it’s still too long. They can’t take it up any more because that would mean they’d have to mess about with the gold that’s on the side, so my robe has to be very discreetly pinned up with safety pins all along the back to hold it up high enough so that I can walk in it without toppling over.”

The traditional wig was also an issue. “In addition to being short, it turns out I also have a small head. In [the robe-maker] Ede & Ravenscroft, where we went for my fitting, every wig I tried on slipped off. They had to go down to the basement and we were down to the last one. They were stressed because they thought, ‘Gosh, we haven’t got a single wig that fits the new lord chancellor,’ and I was feeling pretty bad too, thinking, ‘Can I put something else on my head that would help the wig to fit?’ Then the final one was brought out, which apparently is some sort of antique number, and we put it on and it fitted. I thought, ‘Thank goodness for that.’ It was a cross between Mr Ollivander in the Harry Potter wand shop and Cinderella.”

We meet in her bright, modern office at the Ministry of Justice rather than a Pugin-wallpapered room in the Palace of Westminster. Instead of her traditional lord chancellor’s outfit, Mahmood is wearing a loose green dress, a neat black jacket and a necklace that reads “Allah”. The Great Seal of the Realm is nowhere to be seen — “It’s so heavy that it’s kept in the palace,” she explains — but she shows me the King’s Qur’an, kissing it respectfully as she unwraps it from a pink scarf. On the shelves around the room there are photographs of the three holiest sites in Islam, a framed declaration of faith in Qur’anic Arabic, a hand-drawn map of Birmingham and an enormous Union Jack. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, famously said, “We don’t do God,” but the justice secretary insists, “My faith is the core of who I am. It is the part of me that remains when all else is gone. I would see it as the central truth of who I am as a person.”

Mahmood, 44, says she inherited “the fierceness of many generations of small but mighty Kashmiri women” from her mother and a “dogged determination” from her father, “who came to this country to make a new life for his family”. She will need both these qualities if she is going to do the job she now has in government successfully. With rats and sewage running through overcrowded jails and court backlogs leading to lengthy trial delays, the criminal justice system is close to breaking point. Already the justice secretary has been forced to introduce an early release scheme, which means that prisoners can come out of jail after serving 40 per cent rather than half of their sentence. This week she announced a sweeping review of sentencing, chaired by the former Conservative lord chancellor David Gauke.

The status quo is not an option, she says. “When I first walked into this department, it became clear that we were on the brink of disaster as far as the prisons are concerned. I needed to make a very difficult decision very early [to release thousands of prisoners], but the crisis in our prisons is so acute that even that won’t resolve the underlying issue.”

The prison population has doubled over the past 30 years and now stands at more than 88,000 in England and Wales. This is mainly because sentences have risen, driven up by politicians imposing minimum tariffs for certain crimes. The government projects that, if nothing is done to reverse the trend, there will soon be more than 100,000 in jail.

“Demand for places is going up at a rate of about 4,500 extra prisoners every year. That is the equivalent of three mega-prisons. It’s not physically possible to build fast enough to resolve this crisis and so we have to find a way to get the system away from being on the verge of keeling over,” Mahmood says. “I don’t want to compromise on people who need to be locked up for reasons of public protection. That’s non-negotiable. But for everybody else, we have to think about how much of the sentence is [served] in prison and how much of it is out of prison. If it’s outside, how do we make sure it’s proper punishment that can give confidence to the public?”

At the moment, she says, Britain’s jails are simply producing “better criminals” and, “We have to find a way to incentivise prisoners to try to become better citizens.” Punishment and rehabilitation are “two sides of the same coin”, she insists. “Sometimes it’s presented as a choice between one or the other. You’re either a hardliner on punishment or you’re seen as being a bit softer and therefore more for rehabilitation. I think the only choice to make is both, because 80 per cent of offenders are reoffenders and so many people are just on the revolving door in and out of prison. People have to be punished, but it’s also in our collective interest that more of those people who’ve broken our laws succeed in turning their lives around.”

She is interested in  a Texan scheme  that allows inmates to earn time off their sentence for good behaviour. “In Texas they were ultimately able to close prisons and cut crime, which feels like a big win, and if we can achieve something similar that’s exactly what we would want to do.” She also wants to expand community sentences using technology. “At the moment we have a system that’s called home detention curfew. It’s like a modern version of house arrest. People have a tag, sensors in the home and we can track their movements.”

Sobriety tags — which can tell when people are breaching their conditions by drinking alcohol — “have a 97 per cent compliance rate. They’re almost as teetotal as I am when they’re on the sobriety tag and I think that there is much more that we could do in that space. The end point should be that we have a system of punishment outside prisons that looks and feels an awful lot like being in a prison.”

The “appalling” state of Britain’s jails “shows the futility of thinking, ‘You’re locked up and that’s it,’ because the environment in most of our prisons is not conducive to helping people make better life choices and to cut crime”, she suggests. “When people are locked up for 23 hours a day, there’s hardly any good work you can do for the one hour that they’re not locked up. You can’t run a regime that enables people to get onto a better trajectory.”

Lord Timpson, the prisons minister, says only a third of the people in prison should be there. Does she agree? “I wouldn’t put a number on it,” Mahmood says. “I think that prison has a place. I believe in punishment. I think it’s important that people know that there are consequences to breaking our law. But clearly at the moment things are not working.” There are in her view too many women in prison. Dealing with problems around alcohol, drugs and mental health “is going to be a key part of the solution”.

“I believe in punishment, but also rehabilitation. They’re two sides of the same coin”

She wants to encourage more businesses to hire former prisoners. “It is essential that when an offender has made a choice to try to be a better citizen, when they’ve invested in literacy classes, learning new skills while in the prison estate, you want to be able to reward that with knowing that there’s a job at the end of it.”

But she is sceptical about banning the criminal convictions tick box from application forms as some campaigners suggest. “When you’re hiring somebody who’s had difficulties, made bad choices and is making a choice to turn their life around, you’re banking on that part of them being what they bring to work. I’m not sure that banning the box necessarily helps, because nobody ever really wipes the slate clean. You are a product of all the experiences you had before. What we’re trying to do is persuade people that the bad experiences from before can be turned to good.”

Born in Birmingham in 1980, Mahmood spent part of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked as an engineer. She describes her parents as “stereotypical” Asian immigrants, who valued education and wanted their children to have professional jobs. Her twin brother is a software developer, her sister works as an NHS manager and her younger brother is a finance director. She failed the 11-plus but went to grammar school in the sixth form before going on to Oxford, where she read law and became president of the junior common room at Lincoln College. Rishi Sunak (a fellow student) voted for her.

After working as a barrister, specialising in professional indemnity, Mahmood was elected as MP for Birmingham Ladywood in 2010. She refused to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet because she hates any form of “fundamentalism”. Although she is a devout Muslim, she does not wear a veil. “I did for a bit when all my friends at school were wearing it and then I decided for myself that I wasn’t going to. The thing I’ve always supported is you have to make your own decision about whether modesty in person and dress requires a headscarf or a burqa or a niqab or whatever, and for me, it does not.”

Mahmood insists she would never seek to “impose my religious beliefs on other people” but she says Islam does inform her politics. “It shapes my life and my views and how I think about the world and my role and my place in it. My faith calls me to public service. The fundamental values of my faith around decency and fairness, not wanting to live in a society where there’s conflict, those fundamental drivers I get from my faith. Others would get them from other places but for me, they’re shaped by the fact that I’m a Muslim.”

She is opposed to proposals to change the law on assisted dying. “I voted against the bill when it was last introduced in 2015. I’ll be voting against it again. As a Muslim, I have an unshakeable belief in the sanctity and the value of human life,” she says. “I don’t think that death is a service that the state should be offering.”

Mahmood says she has faced racism throughout her life. “The first time I was called a Paki was in the playground at junior school. I was about seven years old, and I did not know what the word meant. I knew the boy who said it to me was saying it to be horrible but I had to ask my best friend, who was one of the only black children in the school, what the word meant. And that was the first time I found out what the n-word was as well, because she said, ‘Well, it’s like the brown version of the n-word.’ ” Mahmood realised to her surprise that “Some people hate youbecause of how you look. There were quite shocking experiences that you can’t really process easily when you’re a child, but it does make you feel insecure. I remember my twin brother one day was chased home from school by a gang of young white boys and I felt pretty terrified for quite a long time afterwards. After that my parents made sure that we were dropped off at and picked up from school every day, so you start to learn that this sort of hatred that you can’t really get your head around has proper consequences for how you live your life.”

It unsettles her that this prejudice has become increasingly focused on her religion. “You always see the uptick when something terrible happens. After 9/11 there was a long period of insecurity. In our family, we would all check in on each other to make sure we’d got to places that we were going safely, that we knew how we were coming home. It was a similar experience after 7/7 and the summer riots. It was shocking to me how much that sense of insecurity has really come back in a big way. Being attacked because you’re a Muslim looms larger than just being a different colour skin. I think the debate around Muslims and Islam over the past few years has been particularly toxic. There’s a reason the far right decided to lie that the attacker in Southport was a Muslim. They see Muslims as the group it’s almost OK to hate or be suspicious of.”

Her own experiences may have been of Islamophobia, but she is equally appalled by the rise in antisemitism. “They’re both as bad. If you’re feeling insecure and unsafe in your home as a Jew, it’s not that different to feeling insecure and unsafe in your home as a Muslim. I would like to see a debate that does not pit minorities against each other. It’s almost as if the majority only have bandwidth to deal with one of these problems at a time, so you are in a competition for showing your victimhood is worse than the victimhood of others, which is a terrible cesspit to be in.”

The Gaza conflict has had a powerful impact on domestic politics. Several Labour MPs lost their seats and Mahmood’s own majority was cut from more than 28,500 in 2019 to under 3,500 votes this year after Akhmed Yakoob, a pro-Palestine independent backed by the leftwinger George Galloway, stood against her. “I think there was a loss of trust between Muslim voters and the Labour Party. It’s obviously for us to make our case and to try to win that trust back.”

Does she think Israel is in breach of international law? “I think there are some real concerns,” she replies. “It’s not for me to get ahead of future findings that might be made in international courts; that would be improper. But those courts have to be allowed to do their job and it is incumbent on all parties to stand by international law.”

The election in Birmingham Ladywood was brutal. “I genuinely felt democracy was on the ballot paper,” Mahmood says. “I was worried for my safety and that of my family throughout the campaign. At one community meeting, there was an attempt by some masked men to throw fireworks into the building to scare us out. My supporters who were out campaigning for me were regularly abused on the street and harassed. The abuse would go on not for 1 or 2 minutes, but 40 minutes or 1 hour. They would be followed and sometimes chased by thugs screaming and shouting at them.”

It frightens her that politics has become so toxic. “I think that there’s a lot of anger. And that anger for some people has taken them to a much more extreme position where there’s no ability to engage in good faith with what others are thinking. It’s fine to say, ‘I really disagree with the Labour Party. I’m not going to vote for them.’ It’s quite another to think it’s fine to make death threats or threats of violence, and for a politician’s ability to move around their own city to be significantly curtailed.”

Her parents lived through the partition of India and come from the disputed region of Kashmir. Mahmood thinks that background explains why her family has always placed a high value on order and security. “I was raised in a household where the sense of Britishness was very connected to the rule of law,” she says. “Both my parents would say, my dad in particular, that the benefit of this country is there’s a proper system of rules and laws and you can rely on the courts and other institutions to abide by that.” She thinks it is dangerous to attack the judges as the “enemies of the people” or rail against an “activist judiciary”. “My oath is about upholding the rule of law and defending the independence of the judiciary. I have sworn that oath on the Qur’an. There’s no way I’m going to do anything other than what I have sworn to do, because that is above and beyond politics.”

“At one community meeting, masked men tried to throw fireworks into the building to scare us out”

As lord chancellor she is going into battle with the Treasury to get more money for the courts. The Lady Chief Justice says that  at least 5,500 more judicial sitting days are needed  to bring the record backlog of crown court cases under control. “I can’t get ahead of budget or spending review negotiations because they are live discussions as we speak, but it is important,” Mahmood says. “Dealing with the backlog is a key priority. Courts, prisons, probation — you can’t just carve off one and deal with one problem; you have to conceive of the system as a whole.”

As the first Muslim lord chancellor, Mahmood embodies a break with tradition. Will she also be the justice secretary who presides over a radical shake-up of the criminal justice system? “Things can’t carry on as they are, so they have to change,” she replies. “Crisis resolution isn’t enough. We have to do things fundamentally differently. I’m determined that this narrow path to a different system in which we can all have confidence is the one I have to tread. What I want to deliver at the end of it is a justice system that lives up to that ideal of justice. I’m going to have to go big. There’s no other option, and I’m determined to make a success of it.”
(Rachel Sylvester is chairwoman of the  Times Crime and Justice Commission . The Times)