Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (born Yasmin Damji on 10 December 1949) is a Ugandan-born British journalist and author. Currently a regular columnist for The Independent and the Evening Standard, she is a well-known commentator on issues of immigration, diversity and multiculturalism. She is a founder member of British Muslims for Secular Democracy.
Alibhai-Brown's mother was born in East Africa and her father moved there from India in the 1920s. Born into the Ugandan Asian community in Kampala in 1949, she belongs to the Nizari branch of the Ismaili faith, . After graduating in English literature from Makerere University in 1972, she left Uganda for Britain shortly before the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin and completed a Master of Philosophy in literature at Linacre College, Oxford in 1975. After working as a teacher, particularly with immigrants and refugees, she moved into journalism in her mid-thirties. She is married to Colin Brown, Chairman of the Consumer Services Panel of the Financial Services Authority; the couple have a daughter and Alibhai-Brown has a son from a previous marriage
A journalist on the New Statesman magazine in the early 1980s, Alibhai-Brown now contributes a weekly column to The Independent. She has also written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Time magazine, Newsweek and the Daily Mail, and has appeared on the current affairs TV shows Dateline London and The Wright Stuff. Alibhai-Brown has won numerous awards for her journalism, including the EMMA Media Personality of the Year in 2000, the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2002 and the EMMA Award for Journalism in 2004.
Alibhai-Brown was a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank associated with New Labour, from 1996 to 2001, though she ended her connection with the Labour Party over the war in Iraq and other issues, and supported the Liberal Democrats in the 2005 General Election. She is Senior Research Associate at the Foreign Policy Centre, an Honorary Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University and Honorary Visiting Professor at Cardiff and Lincoln Universities.
Alibhai-Brown was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2001, but in 2003 Benjamin Zephaniah's public refusal of an OBE inspired her to return the award. She wrote that her decision had been made partly in a growing spirit of republicanism and partly in protest at the Labour government, particularly its conduct of the war in Iraq, and has since criticised the British honours system as "beyond repair".
Alibhai-Brown has attracted criticism from many commentators. Michael Wharton has accused her of a fanatical pursuit of political correctness: "At 3.6 degrees on the Alibhai-Brown scale, it sets off a shrill scream that will not stop until you’ve pulled yourself together with a well-chosen anti-racist slogan." Commentator Douglas Murray accused her of callously disregarding the lives of British soldiers killed in action: "The vindication of her own opinion is of more importance to her than the lives of British and American troops and Iraqi civilians." Stephen Pollard accused her of racism while calling her opinions "utterly vile" in The Spectator
