LyrArc Article Gist
After the loss of a crucial UK byelection by Labour under Keir Starmer (May 2021 Hartlepool) Shabana Mahmood says she brought out her inner-Kashmiri and steadied the party with wins in other byelections over the Tories. Shabana is the daughter of a teenager from Kashmir who came to Britain in the sixties, studied to be an engineer and settled in Birmingham. She is the Shadow Secretary of Justice and as a Oxford trained barrister she wants to put Britain's justice system on a good footing by remaking prisons and making the system work.  Shabana is a special kind of person simply because she has kept her values and religious beliefs and still taken the best of British thought and culture and the scieintific mind even as Britain faces real challenges. One is struck by the sheer broadness of her mind- 

“I don’t like anything that smells of fundamentalism in any way, religious or political or ideological, it doesn’t really matter what it is, in the end.

“It’s quite authoritarian in nature, and in my own life experience of people that are most intransigent and the most prescriptive about what everyone else can say and think and do tend not to be the best of people themselves.”