Mick Hartley

What went wrong in Birmingham? Fiona Hamilton in the Times talks to Shabina Bano, a Muslim woman who was approached by Labour’s Birmingham power brokers to run for the city council. Initially excited and honoured, she soon saw what was really going on:

Bano now believes that, as a British Muslim of Pakistani-Kashmiri heritage, she was picked as someone leaders including Waseem Zaffar, a councillor and a prominent figure in the Asian community, thought they could control. When she did not toe the line, she said — including by refusing to vote Zaffar in as council leader — she was ostracised and bullied by his supporters.

“This was not ordinary political disagreement,” she said. “It was a deliberate and targeted campaign, rooted in misogyny and hostility towards a woman who chose to speak out.”…

After she was approached to run for the council in 2022 in Small Heath, a deprived inner city area with a majority Muslim population, Bano’s excitement quickly turned into concern. Male activists did not want her campaigning alone and, she says, told her husband that she was “speaking to men. You don’t know what they’re doing to her. Do you trust her?”

She said: “They wanted to control me from the start. I was speaking to the women [on doorsteps], not the men. What normally happens is the men make the decision. They didn’t like that.”…

Bano, 47, a mother of five, says that after she was elected she was visited by local Labour activists and told that, as a Muslim, she was expected to vote for Zaffar in a leadership contest against the incumbent, Ian Ward.

One local figure allegedly told her “you’re going to vote with us, the Pakistanis and Muslims”, and another supporter is said to have urged her to think of a future in which she could take the MP Liam Byrne’s seat. She alleged that that supporter gave her “the sense that we need a Muslim takeover” and directly told her “we need to smash glass ceilings”….

She was targeted by a “powerful cabal” of Asian men, she says, who were not challenged thanks to the local “biradari”, mostly male networks that operate in the British Kashmiri-Pakistani community. According to Bano, these networks means that family and friendship, rather than the quality of candidates, are behind political selections.

A grim read. This is precisely the kind of tribal politics that campaigners against cousin marriage, for instance, have been warning about….