Zarah Sultana (born 31 October 1993) is a British politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Coventry South since 2019. She was a Labour Party MP until July 2024 when she had the whip suspended for voting against the government to scrap the two-child benefit cap. She was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group and its chairperson from 2020 to 2025. She resigned her Labour Party membership on 3 July 2025 and co-founded Your Party with the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Between July and September 2025 she was a member of the Independent Alliance group of MPs. On 18 November 2025, she became Your Party's first MP in the House of Commons.
Early life and education Zarah Sultana was born in Birmingham on 31 October 1993 to a British Mirpuri family from Pakistan, and was raised with her three sisters in the Lozells area of the city. Her father, an accountant at the University of Central England, and her mother, a homemaker, were Labour Party members. Her grandfather migrated from Thub in Azad Kashmir to Birmingham in the 1960s.
Sultana attended Holte Visual and Performing Arts College, a non-selective community school, before studying at the selective King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for sixth form. In an interview in 2024 she said that at the age of 17, during a visit to the West Bank and Jerusalem, she visited a military court. She went on to study international relations with economics at the University of Birmingham from 2012.
Sultana joined the Labour Party in its West Midlands branch in 2011, whilst studying for her A-levels, following the coalition government's decision to treble university tuition fees to £9,000. In her first week of university, she travelled to the West Bank with a delegation of Labour councillors and activists, alongside her father, and subsequently became involved with Students for Justice in Palestine. At Birmingham, Sultana was elected to the National Executive Council of the National Union of Students by 2014, and to the National Committee of Young Labour. While taking a year off from her studies, she led a youth delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina on behalf of the British charity Remembering Srebrenica in 2014. She completed her degree with first-class honours..
Throughout her studies, Sultana worked retail jobs, including at Primark and H&M. After graduation, she moved to the voluntary sector, where she helped build campaigns against Islamophobia. She was employed as a marketing and engagement officer. She then worked as a community organiser for Labour's Community Organising Unit, established by Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2018, in the West Midlands, which later provided her with an electoral platform. By June 2018, she became the parliamentary officer for the group Muslim Engagement and Development.
Parliamentary career
2019 European Parliament election campaign Sultana was listed fifth of seven among the Labour candidates for the 2019 European Parliament election in the West Midlands constituency, meaning that she would be elected if Labour received enough votes in the region to appoint five members of the European Parliament (MEPs). She was not elected, as Labour won only one MEP in the constituency.
2019 general election campaign
In October 2019 she was selected as the Labour candidate for Coventry South over Neeraj Patil after the incumbent Labour MP, Jim Cunningham, announced he would not contest the election. Her campaign was backed by Unite the Union (led by Len McCluskey), Momentum, the Fire Brigades Union, the Communication Workers Union and the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers' Union. However, her selection was opposed by some local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) members, who preferred local candidates; one member would tell Jewish News in 2021 that the CLP was "remarkably moderate" in comparison to Sultana. Sultana was elected at the 2019 general election with a majority of 401 votes.
During the 2019 election campaign, the BBC reported that in 2015, whilst a student, Sultana made social media posts from an account she had deleted which implied that she would celebrate the deaths of the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former US president George W. Bush, and that she supported "violent resistance" by Palestinians. Sultana apologised for the posts and stated that she no longer held those views and "wrote them out of frustration rather than any malice" as she had felt "exasperated by endless cycles of global suffering, violence and needless killing". Since this, she has attended interfaith conferences and travelled to Auschwitz with an anti-fascist delegation. The Labour Party re-interviewed Sultana following this, and she remained the party's candidate.
After her election, The Jewish Chronicle reported that Sultana made social media posts in 2015 that students who supported Zionism should be "ashamed", as the state of Israel has "over 50 laws discriminating against Palestinians" and it was not "progressive to champion a state created through ethnic cleansing, sustained through occupation, apartheid and war crimes".
2019–2024, Parliament under Labour
In her maiden speech, Sultana denounced the policies of "40 years of Thatcherism" in an implicit reference to New Labour, and accused the successive Conservative governments from 2010 onwards of "waging war on working-class communities" and worsening the prospects for the young generation. Shortly after being elected as an MP, Sultana joined the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group and in the 2020 Labour leadership election, nominated Rebecca Long-Bailey for leader and Richard Burgon for deputy leader. In January 2020, Sultana was appointed parliamentary private secretary to Dan Carden, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. She was removed from this role by Keir Starmer when he became the party leader in April 2020.
In April 2020, Sultana was among the 35 British MPs who signed the Cuba Solidarity Campaign's letter calling on Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to demand the suspension of the United States embargo against Cuba, citing Cuba's active role in international aid related to the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2020 to May 2024, she served as an unpaid trustee of the Albany Theatre in Coventry.
In September 2020, Sultana was one of seven Labour MPs voting in favour of a ten minute rule bill to provide for the recall of Members of the House of Commons who changed their political party affiliation. The Bill ran out of parliamentary time in May 2021 and was not passed. In December 2020 UNICEF announced a £25,000 grant to provide breakfast boxes to vulnerable children in Southwark, London, a move criticised by the Leader of the House of Commons at the time, Jacob Rees-Mogg, as a "political stunt", but defended by Sultana, who reportedly sent him a copy of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in response.
In January 2021, Sultana spoke at the online launch of Jeremy Corbyn and Christine Blower's international non-governmental organisation Peace and Justice Project, alongside Noam Chomsky, Ronnie Kasrils, Len McCluskey and Yanis Varoufakis.
In April 2021, Sultana was profiled by Marie Le Conte for Vogue magazine, along with her Labour colleagues Charlotte Nichols, Taiwo Owatemi, and Sarah Owen. She spoke about the abuse she receives as a Muslim and as a woman of colour, including death threats and being told to 'go back to her own country'. Sultana was described as "one of the most left-wing new Labour MPs" who had "made a name for herself as an outspoken critic of the Government". In September 2021 Sultana broke down in tears during a debate in Parliament recounting the "Islamophobic hate" she had been subject to since being elected.
In May 2021, Sultana joined the advisory council of the Progressive International alongside Corbyn. In the same month, alongside celebrities and other public figures, Sultana was a signatory to an open letter published in Stylist magazine which called on the government to address what it described as an "epidemic of male violence" by funding an "ongoing, high-profile, expert-informed awareness campaign on men's violence against women and girls".
In September 2021 Sultana chaired the Fire Brigade Union's Climate Catastrophe: The Case for a Socialist Green New Deal fringe event at the Labour Party conference. In October 2021 she joined cross-party MPs including Caroline Lucas and Clive Lewis to launch the Green New Deal Bill in Parliament, "a game-changing plan to stop climate change and build a world in which we can thrive", which she described in a LabourList article as having "social justice at its heart, putting the interests of the many ahead of the greed of the few."
In November 2021, she launched the private limited company Zarah Sultana Campaigns, which acts as the data controller for her mailing list.
On 24 February 2022, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sultana was one of 11 Labour MPs threatened with losing the party whip after they signed a statement by the Stop the War Coalition which questioned the legitimacy of NATO and accused the alliance of "eastward expansion". All 11 MPs subsequently removed their signatures. After receiving a death threat, she criticised what she described as "inaccurate" reports by the media for creating "an active danger to the safety of public figures, and threaten[ing] to narrow our democracy". In a statement to The Guardian she said she "unequivocally condemned" the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine. She also criticised an anonymous Labour source who described the 11 MPs as a "mouthpiece for the Kremlin", and said that she had complained to the party chair, Anneliese Dodds, about party sources disseminating "dangerous and irresponsible messages".
In March 2022 Sultana pledged to donate her upcoming £2,212 pay rise to Coventry Foodbank and local charities in the city "supporting refugees, to help Ukrainians and all those fleeing brutal war". She also organised a crowdfunding campaign for Coventry Foodbank which raised £10,000, which equated to over five tonnes of food. She delivered a speech in Parliament on the cost-of-living crisis in May 2022. A backbencher, she was credited at the time with the largest social media audience among MPs on TikTok (315,000 followers) and Twitter (252,000), and the third-largest on Instagram (205,000).
In October 2022 Sultana was re-selected as the Labour Party MP for her constituency, after receiving 90% of the vote from six local branches of the party and support from all participating affiliate organisations. At the end of the month, she travelled to Brazil with the support of the Progressive International to observe the second round of the country's presidential elections. In November 2022 she addressed the picket line during the University and College Union (UCU) strikes on the University of Warwick campus. In December 2022, when over 2,000 firefighters and control staff attended a rally in Westminster to protest low pay, Sultana addressed the crowd alongside Jeremy Corbyn and Matt Wrack. In 2023 she opposed the Strike (Minimum Service Levels) Bill and was chair of the Fire Brigades Union parliamentary group.
During the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, she developed a significant media presence commenting on the situation in Gaza and criticising UK arms exports to Israel. During this time, she has become the MP receiving the most death threats and online abuse.
2024–present, Independent and Your Party At the 2024 general election she was returned and increased her majority from 401 to over 10,000, receiving 20,361 votes.