Halima Begum

Begum was born in Sylhet, Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Liberation War.[4] Her parents were working-class migrants who experienced homelessness during Begum's early childhood in London. Due to discriminatory restrictions on Commonwealth British citizens accessing public services including housing, the family joined the British-Bangladeshi squatter movement and lived in a series of derelict buildings in the East End of London, one condemned for demolition as a result of bomb damage caused by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz.[5][6][7][8][9] With her parents eventually offered permanent public housing in the late 1970s, Begum was raised on Brick Lane in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. She attended Thomas Buxton Primary School and Central Foundation Girls School.[10] As a teenager, Begum co-founded Women Unite Against Racism to combat the rising incidence of racial discrimination and Islamophobia in East London, including Millwall and the Isle of Dogs.[11][12] In the early 1990s, she was active in the fight against the extreme rightwing National Front and Derek Beackon, the party's first elected councillor; she was physically assaulted several times.[12][13] She took her undergraduate degree in Government and History, and her master's degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics, before completing her PhD at Queen Mary University of London.[14]

As a young child Begum had a rare and debilitating medical condition that led to the surgical removal of her left eye. In an episode of the BBC World Service series Emotional Baggage, dedicated to her life and experiences of migration, Begum recounted to host Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones how the NHS initially refused to offer her parents access to treatment for their child, despite the family's status as British citizens.[12] At the time, this was explained by a misplaced but relatively widespread hesitancy to allow immigrant British citizens from the Commonwealth access to public services, like healthcare, as a result of ostensibly restrictive reforms in the law emanating from the Immigration Act 1971 and other legislation.[15] Begum described to the BBC how her father, a textile factory worker, felt he had no choice left but to hand custody of his two-year-old daughter to the Imam of Brick Lane Mosque. The Imam, the mosque congregation and a still relatively small London Bangladeshi community immediately organised a campaign to secure Begum the treatment she required. Though surgeons at St Bartholomew's hospital were unable to save her left eye, Begum retains some residual vision on her right side and to this day remains under the care of the Moorfields Eye Hospital.[9]

In 1998 Begum was appointed a Policy Analyst with the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.[16] Chaired by Lord Parekh, the Commission offered the UK government 130 recommendations to challenge persistent racial inequalities in the UK.[17] She went on to work for Action Aid, helping set up the Global Campaign for Education, and authored the Social Capital in Action report for the LSE Centre for Civil Society.[18] In 2003 Begum joined the UK Department for International Development. Among her portfolio of responsibilities, she coordinated the Sino-British Action Plan on Food Insecurity, working with the Chinese Government under then premier Wen Jiabao, and supported the post-conflict reconstruction of Nepal as the civil war wound down from 2006.[19] In Pakistan she led the United Kingdom's £600 million education programme.[20] In 2012 Begum was appointed Director for Education at the British Council, responsible for shaping education strategies across East Asia.[21][22] In 2017 she was recruited to the role of Vice President of the LEGO Foundation and in 2020 was appointed Chief Executive of the Runnymede Trust.[23][24][25]

Through the COVID-19 pandemic Begum advocated for the expansion of public health measures to support ethnic minority and working class communities.[26][27] This was a result of the significant and disproportionate number of Covid deaths among those cohorts.[28] Begum's recommendations included increased Covid testing, vaccination priority and a targeted vaccine rollout for BAME groups.[29][30] She also offered extensive support to government messaging around the vaccination programme amid early hesitancy and a low uptake among Black and Asian communities.[31] Her research interests during the pandemic extended to an examination of the impact of Covid on Muslim patients fasting during the month of Ramadan,[32] and the necessity of including ethnicity as an independent Covid risk factor in the shaping of public health policies.[33] In February 2021, Chief Medical Officer Chris Witty confirmed Begum's position and it was finally announced that ethnicity would be considered a Covid risk factor in the UK, along with social deprivation and body mass index. This step saw two million more British citizens encouraged to shield and a further 800,000 fast-tracked for vaccination.[34][35] In September 2020, Begum was called before Parliament to give expert testimony about the adverse impact of Covid on ethnic minority school children, including inequalities around access to IT and remote learning.[36] In the New York Times in March 2021 Begum questioned proposals for the adoption of digital Covid vaccine passports by the US, UK and EU. Addressing the potential for Covid passports to cause "discrimination, prejudice and stigma", she referenced the experience of young ethnic minority men in the UK who were already suffering a disproportionate incidence of stop and search by police officers as a result of strict lockdown regulations imposed early in the pandemic. As the UK government began to consider an end to the lockdown in late 2021, Begum continued to advocate for the introduction of a national door-to-door vaccination programme to ensure disadvantaged groups were protected from Covid, particularly in the inner-cities.[37]

In 2021, Begum authorised the Runnymede Trust to file legal proceedings with the Queen's Bench in the High Court of Justice against Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock. The judicial review was lodged with co-plaintiff the Good Law Project to address underlying race and disability discrimination in the government's closed-door appointment of unqualified personnel to key posts in the UK emergency public health apparatus, set up in response to the Covid pandemic.[38] The principal appointment challenged for being insufficiently fair and transparent was that of Baroness Dido Harding to lead what would become the UK Health Security Agency, in particular its work on the national vaccination programme as well as testing and tracing for the disease.[39] Those appointed were referred to in the national media, including the right-wing pro-Johnson press, as members of the government “chumocracy”.[40] In contrast to EU and US peers like Dr Anthony Fauci, Harding possessed no medical or public health qualifications. However, it was publicly acknowledged that the former telecoms executive, under whose watch the TalkTalk hacking scandal had occurred,[41][42] was a personal friend of the health secretary, and her family had longstanding ties to both the serving prime minister Boris Johnson and former prime minister David Cameron.[43][44] In her evidence to the court, Begum argued that the appointment of such individuals was not only a breach of the public interest, particularly during a pandemic, but also a breach of the presumptive legal obligation found in section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 that would ensure appropriately qualified ethnic minority and disabled candidates could not simply be overlooked by the government in its public appointment processes.[45] In February 2022, the High Court conclusively ruled that the UK government had in fact acted unlawfully in appointing Harding as well as her deputy at Covid Test and Trace, former Sainsbury's supermarket boss Mike Coupe.[46] As a result of this litigation, the High Court judgment enshrined in UK law an unequivocal legal obligation for the government to give due consideration to qualified ethnic minority and disabled candidates in the public appointments process.[47][48]  

Begum is an advisor to various organisations including the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation, the Office for National Statistics, ITV and the Scottish Government.[49] She sits on the Board of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, and Toynbee Hall. Alongside former President of the Supreme Court Baroness Hale and former Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, Begum is an expert advisor to the British Constitutional Review convened by the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University.[50][51]

Begum grew up on Brick Lane in a large Bangladeshi community, the third of six children.[10] Her mother is a home maker. Her father, Mohammed Abdul Kadir, was an East End textile worker who fought in the Bangladeshi resistance during the Liberation War.[52] Kadir's name is believed to be among the original signatories on the lease of the Brick Lane Mosque, a historical landmark formerly known as the Jamme Masjid Mosque and, in previous incarnations from its construction in 1743, both a church and synagogue.[12] Begum has spoken publicly about her parents' homelessness during her early childhood and their subsequent involvement in the Bangladeshi squatter movement in 1970s London. In a BBC interview with Robert Carlyle, Begum described the considerable racial and physical abuse to which she was subjected as a child by the National Front, which maintained a bookstand outside her parents' home on Brick Lane.[13] In various discussions on BBC Radio 4 with interviewers including Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones and Samira Ahmed, Begum has described being taken to school with her mother and siblings, dressed in a saree and having to push through the Neo-nazi extremists outside the family home. She called this journey, "A daily act of resistance by four little British-Bangladeshi children".[12][52] As well as English, Begum also speaks Bengali-Sylheti, Hindi and Urdu.