LONDON: In a revealing interview with The Sunday Times, former UK Chancellor Sajid Javid reflected on his life journey from a childhood marked by poverty, domestic violence and racism to a career as a multimillionaire, cabinet minister, and home secretary. He also discussed his family’s complex past and integration in Britain and modern immigration policy.

Among the most striking revelations, British Pakistani Javid admitted that under the existing 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 arrived from Pakistan in the early 1960s. His father, arriving with just £1, worked as a bus driver, mill worker and shop owner, while his mother who was uneducated and initially unable to speak English, struggled to adapt. The Colour of Home, Javid’s new memoir, details a childhood shaped by hardship and family tension.

In revealing Sunday Times interview, Sajid Javid says he ‘wouldn’t allow his unskilled father or his non-English speaking mother entry’ into UK under current rules

The memoir describes his father’s violence. Javid recounts being beaten with a leather slipper, a wooden spoon and on one occasion a hammer that required a CT scan. He writes about enduring racist attacks from skinheads and school bullies, as well as the emotional toll of growing up in cramped and impoverished living conditions.

“Crouching in a ball and covering his face while his father beat him,” Javid recalls, highlights the intensity of these early struggles.

Family tensions extended to marriage expectations. His mother initially objected to his white Christian wife Laura refusing to meet her for two years, and had even tried to arrange a marriage with his cousin. His mother 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, his father apologised to Javid for his past violence.

Despite these hardships, the family’s story is one of resilience. Javid fulfilled his childhood goal of buying his parents a house in Bristol, writing that one of his proudest moments was achieving “enough to give myself and my family a better life”.

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”.

In politics, Javid was known for his positions on immigration. He supported a post-Brexit points-based system but argued that the UK “lets in too many immigrants” and stressed that language skills are essential for community cohesion.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2026