Rushanara Ali (Bengali: রওশন আরা আলী; born 14 March 1975) is a British politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) since 2010 and as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Homelessness and Rough Sleeping since July 2024.

[1] With her family, Ali emigrated to the East End of London at the age of seven, where she attended Mulberry School for Girls and Tower Hamlets College.

[citation needed] The first in her family to go to university, Ali studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St John's College, Oxford.

[4] Previously, Ali worked as associate director of the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, a thinktank focused on social innovation.

[14] She is the first person of Bangladeshi origin to have been elected to the House of Commons,[15] and along with Shabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi, became one of the United Kingdom's first female Muslim MPs.

[18][19] She would later defend a constituent who alleged he was a victim of homophobic hate crime after his neighbours sang songs at him with the words "queer", "fairy" and "fag", calling for the case to be reconsidered in a letter to the Crown Prosecution Service.

[24] In a letter to the leader of the party Ed Miliband, she wrote "I appreciate the sincerity of members of parliament from all sides of the House who today support military action against ISIL.

[41][42] In October 2018, Ali signed the 'MPs not border guards' pledge, committing to not report constituents to the Home Office for immigration enforcement.

In March 2020, Ali was one of 76 Labour MPs to urge that the government grant recourse to public funds for all migrants in the UK regardless of their legal status.

[47] In November 2022, as a serving MP, Ali received £10,000 for 32 hours of work to represent a privately funded "Commission of Inquiry" to investigate the Kazakhstan Government and the detention of Zhanbolat Mamay.

[54] During the 2024 general election, she saw her 37,000-majority reduced to 1,700 and thus only narrowly avoided losing her seat to independent candidate Ajmal Masroor, who was running on a pro-Palestine platform.

[55][56] After Labour's victory in the 2024 general election, Ali was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Building Safety and Homelessness in the Starmer ministry.