Sharan Tabari says the idea of New Labour has now become tarnished but believes it still reflects her passion for social justice, writes Mairi MacDonald

NOT for the first time in her life, Sharan Tabari is holding down two jobs. She is one of the newer members of the Labour opposition in Westminster Council and her only regret is the lack of time she can devote to it. But being a councillor doesn’t pay the bills.
Based at her home in Little Venice she is also a correspondent for an American Persian language radio station.
Elected three years ago she is one of three Harrow Road councillors and puts improving housing, security and business opportunities in the area at the top of her agenda.
Born in Iran, Ms Tabari (pictured) first came to Britain in 1973 as a young Marxist to finish her degree in political theory.
Her experiences since then which led her back to Iran during the revolution and then again to London as an academic, journalist and eventually politician turned her from left-wing idealist to social democrat and self-confessed loyalist to the principles of New Labour. Not an unusual transformation within the current Labour ranks, but her route there sets Ms Tabari apart from many of the grey suits who inhabit her world.
Ms Tabari arrived in Britain 32 years ago to finish her degree in political theory at Essex University but five years later her native country was in the throes of a revolution. For Ms Tabari this was an opportunity to see political theory in action and having completed a Masters degree and embarked on a promising career at the BBC World Service, she turned round and rushed back to Iran.
“During the revolution in 1979 I felt very revolutionary and was hoping things would change in that country,” she says. “I still felt Iran was my home and had every intention to go back there. I had good prospects at the BBC as a radio broadcaster for the World Service but I went back.”
As the niece of a former Communist Party leader, Ehsan Tabari who fled Iran for exile in East Germany before Ms Tabari was born, for her like many others on the left, it was a time of hope – albeit short-lived.
“Iran at the time was a lab for political theory,” she explains. “Until that point it had been like studying chemistry without a laboratory to work in.”
Rather than finding work as a journalist, Ms Tabari turned to academia taking a job as a lecturer at an Iranian university, where she had to contend with the distrust of her students. Fresh from the west, Ms Tabari realised she cut a suspicious figure in the eyes of her students who suspected her of being a spy.
She says: “As a teacher in the university in Iran the students assumed I was working for the American government, and so they were puzzled to find I was a Marxist. I think I managed to get around it because I was very transparent and open.”
This is a quality she believes has helped her throughout her life even to appease apprehensive Labour Party members when she turned up to meetings in the 1980s.
She said: “I took to my classroom what I learned at the BBC – that you should not take your political views into a job. All I needed to do was to pave the way for them to think for themselves.”
It was not only her students who started to think differently and her experiences in Iran during the late 1970s moderated her revolutionary outlook.
“It transformed my self-opinion of the left,” she remembers.
“I always considered myself a Marxist and I came out of the experience (of revolution) disorientated. There was lots of violence all around when meanwhile I was teaching philosophy in the university.”
Her experience of Cold War Berlin on a visit to her uncle also confirmed to her that she could not hold onto her communist beliefs.
Ms Tabari returned to Britain in the 1980s to live in Golders Green with her husband and daughter. She eventually started working again for the BBC before taking her current job as a London correspondent for a Persian language radio station but with a new sense of belonging after the turmoil and violence she had witnessed in Iran.
“After a year of being back I decided I wanted to become a British citizen,” she says. “I wanted to be British and pay my dues to this society and started adopting it as my new home. And it quickly became my new home.”
Determined to become active in party politics, after some deliberation she joined the Labour Party. It was not an easy decision. She says: “Since visiting East Germany I was against the Communist Party. I didn’t know what I was only that there was a passion in me to change things.
“I chose Labour and although I believed in every principle I said at the time I thought it was time to change. I know that now the idea of New Labour is tarnished but I am not shying away from it. I believe in it and very strongly in the principles of social justice and social democracy.”