Shahid Malik (born 24 November 1967) is a British Labour politician, who has been the Member of Parliament for Dewsbury since 2005. He is currently a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Shahid Malik is on the Board of Trustees for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust^[1].

His Dewsbury constituency houses the home of the lead 7/7 bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan involved in the terrorist atrocities in London in July 2005.

Shahid Malik was born in Burnley, Lancashire. He attended Durham University, studied Business Studies at the South Bank Polytechnic in South London and later worked with the East Lancashire Training and Enterprise Council in a business development capacity.

His other main area of work has been in regeneration and the voluntary sector. He was National Chair of the Voluntary sector body Urban Forum (1999-2002); chief group executive of the Pakistan Muslim Centre (PMC), Sheffield and Chief Executive of Haringey Regeneration Agency, managing a £150 million development programme. He also served as Vice-Chair of UK UNESCO.

Following the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 he was appointed as Great British Commissioner to the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (1999-2002). From 1998-2002 he also served as a Commissioner for the Commission for Racial Equality.

He has also been a Fellow of the Institute of Management (FIMgt) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

In 2000 Shahid Malik was elected as the first ever non-white person on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. He was re-elected each year until 2005 when he stood down after being elected as an MP.

In June 2001, Malik first hit the national media headlines as a Labour party member when a picture of his face covered in blood was shown on TV and newspapers following civil riots in Burnley ^[2].

In 2002 Malik failed to secure the Labour nomination for Burnley where Peter Pike had indicated he was standing down. The Labour Party National Executive Committee decided that this Constituency Labour Party should have an all-women shortlist^[3]. Malik also failed to secure Labour selection in Brent East during the 2003 by-election where is lost out Yasmin Qureshi.

In 2004 Malik was eventually selected in Dewbsury and was elected as the Member of Parliament in May 2005. At the 2005 House Magazine Awards, his Maiden Speech was awarded the best among the 2005 intake.

Malik served as an international monitor for the Palestinian Presidential elections in 2005 and Parliamentary elections in January 2006.

After the General Election Malik was appointed to the Home Affairs Select Committee. He also served on the Environmental Audit Select Committee until the cabinet reshuffle of May 2006 when he was appointed as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Minister of State for Schools Jim Knight.

In August 2006, he signed an open letter to the Prime Minister criticising the UK's policy towards Israel after the 2006 Lebanon War. Later in 2006, he visited the bombed areas of Lebanon and returned to ask questions in Parliament.

In June 2007 Malik became Britain's first Muslim Minister after Gordon Brown appointed him as a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for International Development.^{[citation needed]}

In 25 October 2007, Shahid Malik, while serving as a Minister, was pulled aside by United States airport security staff at Dulles Airport in Washington, detained and searched^[4]. Malik expressed his annoyance at the incident in an interview, which was the second time he had been treated that way.

In October 2008, Malik was appointed as a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice and in March 2009 was subsequently appointed into a dual role as a Home Office Minister.

Malik was forced to step down from both Ministerial posts in May 2009 by the Prime Minister following reports by The Telegraph newspaper about his expenses claims and second home arrangements.

In June 2009, Malik was appointed in a more junior capacity as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government.

In the forthcoming UK 2010 General Election, following considerable boundary changes, Shahid Malik, will be defending a notional majority of 3,999 and polsters are classing it as a marginal seat, based on the Rallings and Thrasher figures^[5].

On 15 May 2009, Malik stepped down as justice minister to allow the prime minister's independent adviser on ministerial interests, Sir Philip Mawer, to investigate his financial arrangements.

Malik had nominated his home in Dewsbury as his main home, and then claimed the maximum allowance each year for a second home in London to be able to claim a total of £66,827 over 3 years from taxpayers. The landlord in Dewsbury said Malik was only paying a discounted £100 per week rent, whereas The Telegraph newspaper found he had been claiming in excess of £440 per week for his London home. The discounted rent had also not been declared in the Register of Members interests. The Prime Minister ruled he could not remain in his position while compliance with the Ministerial Code was investigated. Sir Philip Mawer, an advisor to the Prime Minister, was asked to investigate Malik's conduct. This was the first time such an investigation was ordered against a Minister and due to the seriousness Malik was suspended from his ministerial duties.

The Telegraph newspaper also reported that in his first year, Malik made 13 separate claims for furniture and electrical appliances, including an IPoD, totalling more than £7,000. The fees office blocked several items and he eventually received only £6,147. He was also reported to have regularly claimed the maximum allowable £400 a month for food. ^[6] Malik had regularly made claims for dry cleaning of upto £94 in some months, £1900 for new doors and windows, £189 for a dishwasher and a TV wall bracked for £49 all from public money.

Sir Philip Mawer's report ran into 71-pages. His investigation raised a number of questions regarding Malik's affairs. First, Mr Malik had nominated his second home as his property in London to claim the maximum allowance there, however, on the reduced £100 per week rent on his Dewsbury home, it emerged he had been separately claiming £200 from taxpayers for use of the ground floor of his home as an office possibly in breach of Green Book. Second, he was unable to provide any documentation relation to rental agreement of his larger Dewsbury home for which he claimed to have been paying £620 per month from his own pocket. Thirdly, he was unable to explain why after he moved to his larger home after getting married, why his rent payments by direct debit remained at £320. Malik told Sir Philip he had been paying the balance in cash every month to the landlord. However, he was unable to satisfy Sir Philip from his bank statements of any regular cash withdrawals for that purpose or show any receipts from the landlord.

Malik also claimed that his arrangement to pay cash was because his Muslim landlord preferred not to use the Western banking statement. He was however unable to explain why half of the rent was still paid by direct debit through the same banking system.

Sir Phillip Mawer said in his report "So I am left with the question, not whether the rent Mr Malik says he was charged was preferential, but whether Mr Malik actually paid the rent he and [name of the manager of the property company] say he was charged.”

With many questions still remaining over Mr Malik's expense claims, on 16 June 2009, John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, decided to launch a formal inquiry into Mr Malik’s expenses claims.^[7]

Malik had already publicly committed to repaying the overclaim of his council tax and of his other expense claims promised to pay £1,050 to charity. In October 2009, Sir Thomas Legg who was looking into all MP's expenses wrote to all MPs. Malik advised he was told he had nothing further to pay back .^[8]

John Lyon's report into Malik's expenses will be passed to the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee.

Malik's eventual success at securing a Parliamentary seat is attributed to the growing confidence of British Muslims in politics following the Iraq and Afghanistan invasion. He campaigned with his support on Muslim issues in Brent East where he sought to be nominated for the Labour seat, and then later capitalised on this amongst Dewsbury's sizeable Muslim population. Issues of concern to mainstream Muslims are known to be foreign policy, Israeli occupation of Palestine, the erosion of civil liberties stemming from anti-terror legislation and the continuing effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasion.

Malik has relatively strained relations with leading umbrella organisation the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) which represents over 500 UK Muslim organisations. On 10 February 2007 Shahid Malik wrote an article in The Times newspaper entitled ‘Stop whingeing and show leadership - the Labour MP for Dewsbury sends a message to the Muslim Council of Britain’. The Muslim portal Salaam also criticized Malik for his refusal to commemorate other genocides and atrocities at the same time as the Holocaust Memorial Day^[9].

In July 2008 Malik, who had agreed to speak at the opening of Islam Expo, pulled out of the event just hours before its start on order from Government ministers^[10]. 40,000 people attended the communiy event at Olympia in West London including former London mayor Ken Livingstone and senior Liberal Democract Simon Hugues.

Malik was criticized by fellow Muslim Parliamentarian Lord Nazir Ahmed for his article in the Sunday Times entitled "If you want sharia law, you should go and live in Saudi"^[11] which played into the hands of extremists and wrongly took the emphasis away from social issues such as halal meat, divorce and family matters where Muslims rely on Sharia laws in the same way that the Jewish community does in similar matters. In response, Lord Nazir Ahmed said:

Halaal and Kosher meat too is part of Sharia. We allow such slaughter methods in Britain in accordance with Sharia Law. Islamic burials, including purification of the deceased through a prescribed method, is allowed in Britain in accordance with Sharia Law….a few years ago I stood shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community, especially the women, when they felt a change in British Family Law was required to recognise a Jewish religious divorce. It was unfair that Jewish women had to wait months, sometimes years for the religious divorce to be finalised, when Christian women had the whole thing dealt with in one procedure through the civil courts. It was unequal treatment of British citizens on the grounds of faith. The Law was changed, it was the right change, and it was a legitimate demand. And I didn’t hear a single MP of the Jewish faith asking any Jewish woman to ‘go back to Israel’ for making such a demand.

(Muslim Weekly, 22nd September 2006).

• Guardian Unlimited Politics - Ask Aristotle: Shahid Malik MP
• TheyWorkForYou.com - Shahid Malik MP
• Transcript of maiden speech to the House of Commons
• Shahid Malik's website