Official portrait of Zarah Sultana MP,
Roger Harris – Licence CC BY-SA 2.0
Appropriately born on Halloween 1993 in Lozells, Birmingham, to a Muslim family of Pakistani heritage, Zarah Sultana is one of four sisters, her grandfather having emigrated from Maipur in the 1960s. Sultana attended Holte School and later King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar for sixth form, before studying International Relations and Economics at the University of Birmingham.
While at university, she joined the Labour Party (in 2011) and became a member of the Executive Councils of both Young Labour and the National Union of Students. Ms Sultana campaigned in support of the BDS movement and was involved in the University of Birmingham Students for Justice in Palestine group. BDS refers to the boycotting of, disinvestment from, and imposition of sanctions on Israel.
After completing her education, Zarah was a paid Labour staffer and West Midlands regional campaigner, rising to be the party’s 26-year-old candidate for Coventry South in a controversial selection process leading up to the December 2019 general election. Coventry is a Labour “rotten borough”, having been controlled by the party for the past six decades. As Boris Johnson’s snap “Get Brexit Done” vote approached, outgoing Coventry North West MP Geoffrey Robinson called the candidate selection process “shambolic and underhand”.
The national leadership in Islington stood accused of attempting to install Corbyn allies in Coventry seats. With local members excluded from voting, candidates were parachuted in via an NEC “stitch-up”. (This is the same Robinson who, in 1998, resigned his post as Paymaster General after it emerged he secretly loaned colleague Peter Mandelson over £300,000 to buy a house.)
At the election, Coventry returned three female Labour MPs, two of them new to the House of Commons and all with reduced majorities. Colleen Fletcher represented Coventry North East, and Taiwo Owatemi, parachuted in from London’s Putney, became MP for Coventry North West. The third was Zarah Sultana of Coventry South, selected under Labour’s snap-election rules, which circumvented the local party and permitted a shortlist of only two candidates.
Returned with a majority of 401, Ms Sultana’s new status brought scrutiny of her social media activity. A tweet emerged in which she said she would celebrate the deaths of Blair, Netanyahu and Bush. She expressed support for “violent resistance” by Palestinians in their never-ending conflict with Israel.
Sultana told a Jewish student that it was “privilege” which allowed them to argue for a peaceful solution to the conflict. She claimed students who “go to Zionist conferences and trips should be ashamed of themselves” because they are advocating “racist ideology”. She also stated that “those who lobby for Israel” would “in the near future feel the same shame and regret as South African Apartheid supporters”.
In another message, she suggested to supporters of Israel that it was “not progressive to champion a state created through ethnic cleansing, sustained occupation, apartheid and war crimes”. In a further post, referring to year-long courses offered by Israeli tour groups, Ms Sultana claimed (wrongly) that Jewish students at Birmingham University served in the IDF “on a gap-year sort of initiative”.
During her maiden speech in the House of Commons, Zarah delivered a critique of “Fatcha”, despite not being born until three years after Mrs Thatcher left office. The Momentum-backed MP condemned what she described as “40 years of Thatcherism”.
Once in Parliament, Zarah Sultana joined the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group and served as its chairperson from 2020 to 2025. A committed Corbynite, she became Parliamentary Private Secretary to Dan Carden, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, in January 2020. However, she was replaced under Keir Starmer’s new leadership in April of that year.
In October 2020, Ms Sultana voted against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill, which formalised allowing intelligence officers and informants to participate in criminal activity if it yielded proportionate and necessary evidence. During the Commons debate, she referenced “troubling acts of state agents,” citing the case of Mr Pat Finucane, shot dead in his home on 12 February 1989. Finucane was a senior Sinn Féin/IRA lawyer and a member of a well-known republican family, whose legal work shielded paramilitaries from prosecution leaving them free to murder.
Sultana has also called for the scrapping of UK anti-terror laws. She once claimed British police detain and question ‘suspicious-looking’ people at airports either because their name includes ‘Muhammad’, or they have a beard, or they are wearing a turban. The suspicion being that her focus on the Troubles is a proxy for defending extremists among her own co-religionists.
Popular in left-wing circles, she became Young People’s MP of the Year in 2022, according to the Patchwork Foundation, and ranked 47th on the New Statesman’s Left Power List in 2023.
At the July 2024 general election, Sultana returned to parliament with an increased majority of 10,200. Her published election expenses draw attention. According to They Work For You, she received £34,000 in donations. She claimed that none came from private individuals: £19,000 came from trade unions and £15,339 from a “company”. The trade union donations were as follows: £3,000 from the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, £3,000 from the Communications Workers Union (CWU), £3,000 from ASLEF, and a generous £10,000 from the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).
However, Ms Sultana failed to declare that, at the time she received that £10,000 donation, she was living with Craig Lloyd, a senior policy officer at the union. The couple were to marry in August 2024. The relationship remained undeclared when she spoke on behalf of the FBU in Commons debates and when serving as chair of the FBU’s Parliamentary Group.
The company that contributed the £15,339 to her campaign turned out to be Zarah Sultana Campaigns Ltd. According to Companies House, the company has one director, Zarah Sultana, one employee, and one shareholder, also Zarah Sultana. Despite donating £19,000 to herself, she laughingly lists her role as “unpaid” in the Register of Members’ Interests.
As of the latest available accounts (dated 30 November 2023), the company has assets of £32,000, but the sources of those funds are not disclosed. Her website promises any donation over £500 will be “checked by us”. Donations over £1,500 will be declared on Parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests. But no such private donations have been made public. Therefore, Sultana’s claim that no private individuals donated to her campaign should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Following the election, Sultana was one of seven Labour MPs to have the party whip withdrawn. In her case, not for her social media history, funding issues or undeclared personal interests, but for voting against the government in opposition to the two-child benefit cap. Although described as a six-month suspension, as of July 2025, the whip remained withdrawn.
More recently she accepted hospitality in the form of a free trip to the Netherlands from The Hague Group. This coalition of nine nations was formed in January 2025 with the stated aim of upholding international law and defending Palestinian rights, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The participating countries are law-abiding and human rights-loving Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa. Ms Sultana has also declared further hospitality from, and spoken on behalf of, The Bloody Sunday Trust.
Burning her bridges with Labour, she recently announced the founding of her own, thus far unnamed, extreme, ultra-left political party. Perhaps it should be called ‘Avoid’?
© Always Worth Saying 2025
