Former UK chancellor Sajid Javid has reflected on his journey from a childhood marked by poverty, domestic violence and racism to becoming a cabinet minister and multimillionaire, while defending his views on modern immigration policy, in an interview with The Sunday Times.
Th British Pakistani politician said that under current UK immigration rules, he “wouldn’t allow either his unskilled father or his non-English speaking mother entry today”.
“The biggest block to good community cohesion is English. We should have set a requirement that if you want to settle in the UK, you should be able to speak fluent English. We should have done that ages ago,” he said.
Javid’s parents migrated from Pakistan in the early 1960s. His father arrived with just £1 and worked as a bus driver, mill worker and later a shop owner, while his mother, who was uneducated and unable to speak English at the time, struggled to adapt to life in Britain. Javid recounts this upbringing in his memoir, The Colour of Home, which details a childhood shaped by hardship and family tension.
The memoir also documents domestic violence at home. Javid writes that his father beat him with a leather slipper, a wooden spoon and, on one occasion, a hammer – an assault that required a CT scan. He also describes enduring racist abuse from skinheads and school bullies, alongside the emotional strain of growing up in overcrowded and impoverished conditions.
“Crouching in a ball and covering my face while my father beat me” Javid recalls, describing the severity of those experiences.
Family tensions extended into adulthood. His mother initially refused to meet his white Christian wife, Laura, for two years and had attempted to arrange his marriage to a cousin. Javid writes that she also “didn’t want two black workmen her husband employed to come for dinner”, though she later learnt English and “came to deeply regret her racism towards the black workmen”.
Later in life, Javid said his father apologised for the violence.
Despite the hardships, Javid described his family’s story as one of resilience. He fulfilled a childhood ambition of buying his parents a home in Bristol, writing that one of his proudest moments was achieving “enough to give myself and my family a better life”.
Reflecting on immigration debates, he told the interviewer that a “Reform voter… might think this is exactly the kind of family that we want in the UK because they went on a journey and look where they’ve ended”.
During his political career, Javid consistently advocated tougher immigration controls. He supported the post-Brexit points-based system, argued that the UK “lets in too many immigrants”, and repeatedly stressed that language proficiency is essential for community cohesion.
