It was 12 December 2019; the first December general election in Britain since 1923. Faiza Shaheen walked into Waltham Forest town hall in north-east London. The academic, economist, self-described inequality geek and Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green was about to find out if she had pulled off a feat so close to impossible that the odds were one in 10m. Had she – a working-class, Muslim, British-Pakistani-Fijian daughter of a car mechanic – toppled the former leader of the Conservative party, Iain Duncan Smith, in a seat that he had held for 27 years? A seat in which Tory values were so enshrined, it was previously held – albeit the boundaries had changed over the years – by Norman Tebbit and Winston Churchill. It was the perfect David versus Goliath battle. And then David lost.
“It was crushing,” says Shaheen. “One of those out-of-body experiences. They show you the results just before you go on stage and I was like: ‘Oh my God, we’ve lost.’ I could see my party, all these young people with so much hope on their faces, and I couldn’t look at them. When I saw Iain Duncan Smith go up, I just thought: ‘How can this be the outcome?’”
In her new book, Know Your Place, in which she analyses the social inequality she has experienced first-hand, she writes that as she watched Smith give his victory speech, all she could say, over and over again, was: “There is no justice.”
The loss was deeply personal. For years, Shaheen had watched her mother, who had heart failure and was unable to work, battle an increasingly inhumane and broken benefits system of which Smith had been the architect. “I will not forget the extra pain my mum went through,” she says. In 2017, three months after a successful heart transplant, her mother died unexpectedly in the local “completely falling apart” hospital, one of the 40 the Tories later pledged to rebuild. “We went to see her on Christmas Day and all of a sudden she was on a ventilator,” says Shaheen. “The infection had gone to her brain. She died of brain damage; her new heart was great. That was one of the hardest things about it.” She takes a deep breath. “So, yeah, it’s very personal.”
We meet at the Guardian’s London office on a warm spring afternoon. Shaheen is articulate but wary, and not as outspoken as I expected from reading her book and watching her campaigning. Her cautiousness, however, is less a reflection of the politician’s tendency to deflect and more to do with the level of abuse she has encountered – from left and right – since entering politics. The first words of Know Your Place are “terrorist sympathiser”, which two men shouted at her as she ran into the polling station to put a cross beside her own name. During the 2019 campaign, she was called the Chingford Corbynite, a nod to Tebbit’s 1970s nickname, the Chingford skinhead. When I ask whether she has more or less faith in Labour now than she did in 2019 – because, yes, despite the odds, Shaheen is running again – the longest pause of the interview ensues.
“I think any kind of wholesale faith in a political party is a bad idea,” she says eventually. “But what I can say is that I think people like me could push them on things in a way that we cannot right now with a Conservative government. We have to work with what we have. It’s worth going all in at this point.”
Is she more nervous running again? “The first time I didn’t know what I was getting into,” she says. “Going back into it, I definitely have much more anxiety because I know there’s a whole lot of stuff that comes with it. I just focus on all the wonderful people who come and support me. Despite the machinery quite honestly not wanting me to run again, I have a responsibility.” She laughs. “We’ll see how it goes.”
Losing in 2019 was, in the end, instructive. Shaheen lost by just 1,262 votes and Chingford and Woodford Green was one of only six seats in the country to see a swing to Labour. In the days, weeks and months that followed, she started to reassess what had happened. She found that while the odds of going to Oxford University – which she did – and then on to become an MP were one in 10m for her, they were closer to one in 10,000 for David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The question was less why she had lost, and more why she had ever thought she could win.
Out of all this has come Know Your Place, a powerful interrogation of social mobility or, as successive prime ministers on both sides have called it over the decades, trickle-down economics, meritocracy, levelling up. Using examples, statistics and her own experiences, Shaheen argues that the pervasive idea that “anyone can make it with hard work” results in the precise opposite: everyone’s failure except the rich and powerful. She analyses factors including race, class, education, housing and income to reveal how Britain has become less mobile over generations. It is a damning indictment of our system and is guaranteed to enrage all but those at the very top, whom it will enrage for different reasons. As for the shining examples of the one black judge or the self-made millionaire routinely held up as proof of social mobility, these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. “Social mobility is a fairytale,” Shaheen concludes. “In simple statistical terms, it is a lie.”
She is, of course, one of these shining examples herself. She grew up in a working-class, low-income household. Her family moved often, and in one place she had to share a bed with her sister to keep warm in a room in which there were snail trails on the floor in the morning. Racism was a regular threat: her Fijian father, who died of bone cancer not long after her mother’s death, would tell Shaheen how the men he worked with at the garage would set his newspaper alight as he was reading it, and how he once punched a racist skinhead who was threatening her pregnant mum.
As she describes him in Know Your Place, her father was “dodgy with money, dodgy with women and dodgy with his fists”. Shaheen’s mother, whom he met while on the run from the police, eventually divorced him. Her dad tried to make her mum and sister homeless (Shaheen, by this point, had left home) and they ended up having to represent themselves in court. However, he taught Shaheen to be proud of her Pakistani-Fijian and working-class roots.
“There was an end-of-year award ceremony at my school when we were kids,” Shaheen recalls, “and they got Norman Tebbit in to give out prizes. Me and my brother had won loads of them, and so had lots of the children of immigrants. Every time they read out the prize, another black or brown person came up to receive it. My dad couldn’t stop laughing. He said: ‘This is the best revenge … that he has to give my children prizes.’ I think my attitude comes from him. You know, why shouldn’t I take these people on?”
Shaheen got into Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), did a PhD in applied economics and became the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, a leftwing thinktank originating in the trade union movement. She is now a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and one of her recent policy reports was launched by the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. “So often people say to me, ‘You did it, so others can do it,’” she says. “I’m invited all the time to local schools where parents will ask me to speak to their daughters. We hold up exceptions to show that everyone can do it. It’s a false story. We live in a society where most people stay in their place.”
Though there is some discomfort in embodying the myth she seeks to dismantle – in her 2019 campaign, she cannily harnessed it with leaflets bearing the aspirational slogan “from Greggs to parliament” – Shaheen thinks it is a question of how we tell our stories to ourselves and others. Yes, it is true that, when she was four, her mother told her in Urdu that one day she would go to “Oxford, the best university in the world”. But if she had been born in Pakistan rather than the UK in the 1980s, she also would have been 12 times more likely to die in the first month of her life. Luck plays a huge part: the lottery of where you are born and when. Then there is the welfare state that enabled her ascent, and the random pieces of luck, such as the fact that there happened to be a race expert in the room the day of Shaheen’s Oxford interview.
She wants to use her privileged position to expose what she has witnessed as “someone who was never meant to be in those rooms”. As she writes in Know Your Place: “Think of me as a mole.” On her experience of studying PPE at Oxford – the degree of prime ministers – she is unequivocal. “I hated Oxford with a passion,” she says. “I don’t think I was able to articulate that I was a socialist until I went there.” In her book, she writes: “I can tell you that in my experience, many of the people who studied PPE are among the worst, most arrogant and entitled people around. I would go as far as saying that reading PPE at Oxford should be seen as a red flag.”
What Oxford did give her was a class education. “I heard what they think of us when they’re drunk,” she says. “It was atrocious. Like the way they would treat my friends when they came up, and not sit next to us, especially if they were black. A friend of mine put on a play about Stephen Lawrence and a guy put his hand up afterwards and said: ‘But isn’t it true that black people cause crime?’ I just thought, oh my God, these people are going to have so much power. If I’ve been so lucky to have this privileged education, I need to use it to counter some of this.”
She is particularly good on the rightwing weaponisation of the white working class as a separate racial category. “Since when did the working class become white? It’s a mythology. It’s as if you’re not allowed to be working class if you’re brown or black … because in this country, the working class is at once pathologised and seen as a badge of honour. There’s been a clear effort to divide these groups, though the material reality, and how you’re judged by society, is in a lot of ways very similar. We need to tell these stories of solidarity and convergence of experience. Otherwise, it’s just going to be more division.”
She is regularly asked to comment on what the increase in racial diversity in the Conservative party represents. That Rishi Sunak – the richest British PM in history, who followed the standard route of elite private school, Oxbridge then parliament that more than half our prime ministers have taken – is venerated as a symbol of social mobility enrages her. “Rishi Sunak is an example of the ability of class and wealth to propel people to the top, and to override race,” she says. “He proves my point about the fiction of social mobility. This is the problem when you separate race and class. What I would say about the Conservative party is that they’ve been very clever about using identity politics, the thing they’re always blaming the left for doing. You will never see the Conservative frontbench without women and people of colour, even more than Labour, unfortunately. But it’s superficial. The message is: ‘We’ll let you in, but only if you play by our rules,’ It’s no coincidence that none of them are even vague proponents of anti-racism. Quite the opposite.”
Know Your Place offers a bleak assessment of inequality, but Shaheen believes change is possible if we reconsider what we are valuing. “I don’t think aspiration should be limited to this idea of going to Oxford and getting a high-paying job,” she replies. “The whole idea needs flipping.” She wants to bin the idea of “the top”. The final section of the book lists the ways in which she believes the system can be changed. These range from valuing collective social impact over economic wealth, and a solidarity tax to pay for the policies she will fight for if she wins in the next general election. “The book is called Know Your Place,” she says, “but what I want people to do with that knowledge is get angry and collectively say: ‘We are not going to be put in our place any more.’
“When I started writing it, I didn’t think I would run again,” Shaheen says. By the time she finished it, she had changed her mind. Why? “It’s not something I can give up on,” she says. “I just couldn’t let it go. I don’t know if it’s hope or a sense that we don’t have any choice. We either accept this world or we try to do something.” She laughs mirthlessly. “And how can you accept this?”
• This article was amended on 31 May 2023. The 2019 UK general election was the first to be held in December since 1923, but not the first winter election since that year, as an earlier version said.
• Know Your Place is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• Faiza Shaheen will be discussing Know Your Place with John Harris in a livestreamed Guardian Live event at 8pm on Thursday 8 June. Tickets are available here
