Faiza Shaheen


Faiza Shaheen is a British economist and left-wing activist. She is the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies. In the 2019 general election she was unsuccessful in her attempted to unseat Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the incumbent MP for Chingford and Woodford Green, by contesting his constituency for the Labour Party.

Early life and education

Faiza Shaheen was born in Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, east London. Her father was a car mechanic from Fiji and her mother was a Pakistani lab technician. She was brought up in Chingford and attended Chingford School,A levels at Sir George Monoux 6th form College followed by St John's College, Oxford University, where she read philosophy, politics and economics. Shaheen also holds an MSc in Research Methods & Statistics and a PhD from the University of Manchester.

Career

She has been the head of inequality and sustainable development at Save the Children UK and a senior researcher on economic inequality at the New Economics Foundation. She is the director of a left-wing policy think tank, the Centre for Labour & Social Studies.
Shaheen is a regular contributor to debates on television news programmes, including Newsnight and Channel 4 News, and has worked with Channel 4 and the BBC to develop documentaries on inequality.

Politics

She is a longtime Labour voter and was politicised from an early age. She joined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015.
In 2017, The Guardian identified her as a "rising star". In 2017, Shaheen was also nominated for Asian Woman of the Year at the Asian Achievers Awards and included in the Top 100 Influencers on the Left list.
In July 2018, she was selected to be the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party for Chingford and Woodford Green. Her campaign was the subject of a six-minute video report in the Guardian which emphasised her local origin and working-class background, contrasting these with the incumbent, Iain Duncan Smith.
She narrowly lost the 2019 General Election to Iain Duncan Smith by 1,262 votes, one of only two London constituencies to increase Labour's percentage vote share..

Personal life

Shaheen is married to the actor Akin Gazi.