He defied a life of poverty and hardship to reach Oxford and become a barrister. Now Hashi Mohamed has written a book which aims to rethink the stalled project of social mobility

Hashi Mohamed is a 36-year-old barrister. He has the accent, a mentor once told of him, of someone who’s “been to Eton” and the confidence of a natural orator. If you had to place him within the complex matrix of the British class system, you’d probably say he was the son of wealthy Africans who attended an independent school and Oxbridge.

In fact, Mohamed is a Somali who was born in Kenya, where he lived in a rundown part of Nairobi with his four siblings (another having died), his mother (who also had six children from a previous marriage) and his travelling salesman father. When his father died in a car accident in 1993, Mohamed and three of his siblings were sent to England as refugees.

They lived with an aunt and then in various low-rent housing, some of it rat-infested, and were eventually reunited with their mother. A confused and alienated boy, he spent most of his teen years in a state of geographical and psychological dislocation. He went to a struggling comprehensive in north-west London where the headteacher was beaten up and laughed at, but he eventually managed to get a place at the University of Hertfordshire to study law and French.

The most reliable guide to a young person’s economic future is still their level of family wealth

From there he was awarded a postgraduate scholarship to Oxford, gained a position at No5 Chambers, noted experts in planning law, became a successful barrister, an accomplished public speaker and a broadcaster – he’s made two well-received documentaries for Radio 4. And he’s just written a book. To complete the picture of all-round achievement, he recently bought a house for himself. It’s in Wembley, not far from where he went to school. And that’s where I go to meet him.

He greets me with a big smile and a polite request that I remove my boots, before making tea and talking me through his story. Even in bare outline, Mohamed’s is an impressive tale, but he turns it into something much larger and far more resonant in his finely written memoir, People Like Us. The subtitle of the book is What It Takes to Make It in Modern Britain, which sounds like a how-to guide to success. In a sense it is, as Mohamed proffers advice from his own experience. But it’s also a rather ambitious and far-ranging attempt to rethink the whole stalled project of social mobility.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hashi Mohamed as a baby with his father in Nairobi, c 1984. Photograph: Courtesy of Hashi Mohamed

One of those concepts to which few people are opposed – at least publicly – social mobility has lost some of its lustre. Last year, the Labour party announced that if it formed a government it would replace the social mobility commission with a social justice commission. While a broad spectrum of society believes that social outcomes should not be determined by parental incomes, the fact remains that the most reliable guide to a young person’s economic future is still the level of family wealth. As a consequence there is a perception that social mobility applies only to the bright and gifted.

Mohamed is clearly bright and gifted, but his book is concerned not just with people like himself. Although he uses his own story as an illustration of the problems that beset the underprivileged, he argues for the kind of root-and-branch societal reform that will benefit everyone, not just the smartest. It is a thoughtful and nuanced book, packed with relevant data and unafraid to reject fashionable theories. As such, it is a sophisticated read. So what kind of audience did he intend to reach?

“I think I’ve got various audiences that I have most hope for,” he says, offering me some cakes made by a Hungarian neighbour. His voice is mellifluously assured. You could imagine him shining in court. “I really hope that parents and teachers are going to read it. I’m hoping what I’ve gone through and the lessons I’ve learned are going to be useful to people. I hope it will be useful to someone like me when I was 15 or 16 and trying to figure this stuff out.”

Mohamed says that he’d have loved to have had such a volume to refer to at that age, when he was full of unanswered questions about the mysterious world beyond his limited social confines in Brent. But any 15- or 16-year-old reading a book of this breadth of analysis and eloquence will have already marked themselves out as exceptional.

And that perhaps is the fundamental paradox at the heart of the book. The more Mohamed argues for raising the poor as a whole, the more he appears like a special case himself. That isn’t necessarily a problem – after all, if he weren’t, he wouldn’t have got himself into a position to be listened to. But the effect of his pristine prose is to underline the impression of someone inexorably bound for success.

Of course, as he is at pains to clarify, any sense of destiny is an illusion. At so many points of his life, things could have gone in a different direction. Had Somalia not been so unstable, his father would have remained there. Had his father not died in a car crash, Mohamed would almost certainly still be in Kenya today. Had a teacher not intervened here, a mentor there, who knows where he may have ended up?

There is a lot to savour in Mohamed’s climb, but his real point is that it shouldn’t be unusual

“It’s one of those major sort of counterfactuals that bothers me to this day,” he says, pouring more tea. “There’s a bit in the book about when I went back to Kenya 10 years later, and there was a huge part of me thinking: ‘Gosh, like, if I had stayed here, what would have become of me? What kind of human being would I have grown up to be?’”

When he was 18, Mohamed gained British citizenship, which meant he could get a passport and travel. So he returned to Nairobi for the first time since he’d buried his father, looking for clues to his identity. He stayed with an uncle who, like his brother (Mohamed’s father), was a natural entrepreneur who had built a thriving business and a large house. His uncle’s multilingual children had attended the best private schools and their lives seemed prepared for them. By contrast, the fatherless Mohamed felt adrift. Yet instead of feeling any resentment, he returned to Britain with renewed inspiration.

He realised that the future was there to grasp. No one thought he would do much with his life and that was in a way empowering – “the absence of expectation was a liberating force,” he writes. It marked the beginning of his conscious socioeconomic ascent. For those who enjoy a triumph-over-adversity narrative, there is a lot to savour in Mohamed’s climb. But his real point is that it shouldn’t be unusual and the path he took should be much more readily available to many more people from his kind of background.

Mohamed is keen to locate that background in as wide a setting as possible, which includes people who suffer from all kinds of inequality – not just refugees or ethnic minorities, but anyone who feels the system has not been designed to work for them. It lends the book a much more inclusive outlook, as Mohamed always has an eye on what unites rather than divides people. But it also means that the problem of inequality seems monumental. What’s the solution?

“If there were an easy answer we would have found it by now,” Mohamed writes in the introduction to his book. Nonetheless, he goes on to call for a massive social programme of investment in pre-school care, education, social care, housing, youth clubs, and much else besides.

Though grateful for the asylum his family was granted in the UK, he is scathing about how, in his eyes, they were abandoned by the authorities. After basic housing and benefits were accounted for, they were left to fend for themselves. And while he calls for support for all those at the bottom of the social ladder, the book is at its most impassioned when arguing for better treatment of people in the position he was in.

Given that there is already plenty of festering resentment about migrants in general, I say that it would take a brave politician to call for a vast increase in spending on new arrivals.

“I have a simple answer to that,” Mohamed says. “If you are not prepared to front load that support in a financially significant way, don’t bother helping these people. Don’t bother opening your borders up to them. Don’t bother letting them in. Because if you allow us in, but then leave us to fend for ourselves, without the proper infrastructure support and nurturing and understanding of the country that we’re in, the more likely it is that you will fall through the cracks. The more likely it is that you’re not going to end up like me. And the more likely it is that you’re going to end up like my half-brother, who’s been in and out of prison, had lots of issues and has struggled, like many more Somalis who are struggling.”

This is almost certainly true. But global politics is a messy business. North-east France is already overflowing with migrants desperate to cross to the UK. What would happen to their numbers if they knew that a radically improved social package awaited them on the other side of the channel? Such unpleasant questions are understandably beyond the remit of Mohamed’s book, but not, presumably, the calculations of politicians operating with an increasingly insular outlook. Mohamed is well aware of changing times.

“What you saw in Germany, where Angela Merkel made the decision to take over a million refugees, I actually think that that kind of decision without the proper investment to back it up is much more harmful than good.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hashi Mohamed, far left, in 1992, aged nine, with his brother and cousins in Nairobi. Photograph: Courtesy of Hashi Mohamed

But proper investment, it seems, is not necessarily enough. Mohamed’s fiancee is a Somali refugee from Sweden who now lives in London. The two of them regularly travel to see her family and therefore he has spent quite a bit of time in Sweden. At one time, he says, refugees could expect comprehensive support in Sweden, but since the spike in asylum seekers, between 2014 and 2016, it has become a harsher climate for new arrivals, and social tensions are growing. In any case, he says, the notion that Sweden was ever some kind of egalitarian utopia is a myth.

“They have spent so much more on their education system, so much on their welfare state, so much on helping those people who are at the bottom rung of society. And yet, when you see the actual mobility – how much more money are you earning than your parents? How much more professional are you in terms of the job that you’re in? How much more are you accepted by Swedish society? – they’re not doing that much better than we are.”

In which case, I say, however appealing and beneficial a huge expansion in the welfare state might be, it is no guarantee of the kind of social mobility he would like to see. He agrees, but takes a philosophical line on this question.

“I’m a big believer that if we can find a way of bucking the trend at the earliest possible moment, if we can find a way of plugging the hole based on to whom you are born, and where you are born, in those early stages, what you then go on to do with it later for me is neither here nor there. So in other words, if we can make sure that every single child from birth until about 18 is able to have the most stable, the most consistent, the most educationally nourishing environment, if they get to 18, and they fuck it all up, then fine.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Trafalgar Square, London, c 1996. Photograph: Courtesy of Hashi Mohamed

For all his convictions, Mohamed is no ideologue, much less a dogmatic thinker. He acknowledges, for example, that there can be drawbacks to increased state intervention, and one of those might be a failure to develop individual or familial responsibility.

“When we first came, we didn’t have that much help, or there was help available but we didn’t know where to get it. And what is interesting is that actually, as a family unit, we became a bit closer. Because when you feel that there’s this big bad world out there that you don’t understand, the bonds that then get stronger at home are actually quite profound.”

None of that alters his belief that, overall, a pronounced increase in state spending on the poor will deliver better results for society at large. At root, though, he is a pragmatist. As he writes in his book: “I have to deal with the world as it is, rather than as it should be.” It is why he speaks as he does, with his establishment vowels – as he notes, it opens up more doors. And it’s why he has little time for identity politics.

“I cannot ignore the suspicion,” he writes, “that at heart, both identity politics and the kind of structural lack of imagination that keeps people like me from progressing have something in common: they both encourage people to see themselves in terms of a single, disadvantageous aspect of their rich and varied individuality.”

There is indeed a point, he says, in employing intersectional social categories to draw attention to the various prejudices and disadvantages that might be restricting people’s options. But he doesn’t believe that it helps if people then define themselves by those categories.

“When you start referring to yourself as a person of colour, where does that definition of who you are begin and end?” he asks. “It begins: ‘Because I’m not white.’ And it ends: ‘Because I’m not white.’ So the whole essence of who you are has been defined by something of an other, something over there. Now, if that is where your self-identification begins and ends, in my mind, that’s not healthy.”

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It’s the kind of statement that won’t endear Mohamed to some readers, but he is never less than admirably true to himself, trying to make sense of a complex, fractious world as best he can. His book does not provide all the answers, even to his own story, let alone the many more he seeks to address. But it’s a careful and affecting study of personal struggle, social mobility and international migration that brings a fresh and well-informed voice to the debate.

These are issues that aren’t going to go away, and nor, I suspect, is Mohamed. I ask him if he’s thought of going into politics and he says it’s a question he often hears. He lists all the reasons why it doesn’t attract him – the uncertainty, harassment, the threat to his livelihood, family concerns.

“I just can’t see it in the short term,” he says, before adding, just in case, “but who knows?”

Who, indeed. All that can be said with certainty is that, if he did change his mind, it would be far from the most surprising thing to have happened in an already extraordinary life.