Murad Qureshi (; born 27 May 1965) is a British Labour and Co-operative Party politician, and a former Member of the London Assembly. Early life and education Qureshi was born in Greater Manchester, but he was brought up in Westminster, London, where his parents moved in July 1965. He attended Quintin Kynaston School and graduated from the University of East Anglia with a degree in Development Studies in 1987, before undertaking an MSc in Environmental Economics at University College London, which he completed in 1993. Qureshi is of Bangladeshi descent, and comes from a politically active family: his late father Mushtaq Qureshi was a Labour Party councillor in the City of Westminster and was a freedom fighter in the Bangladesh War of Liberation. His youngest sister, Papya Qureshi, was also a councillor in Westminster. Career Before becoming an Assembly Member, he worked in Housing and Regeneration for 15 years, helping establish housing associations and co-ops in the East End. He was an Executive Committee member of SERA from 1994 to 2000 and a former board member of BRAC U.K, an international NGO seeking to alleviate poverty and empower the poor. Qureshi was Jeremy Corbyn's successor as Chair of Stop the War Coalition, standing down at the 2021 AGM. Politics Qureshi was a councillor for Church Street on Westminster City Council from 1998 to 2006, and was elected on the Labour Party's party list to the London Assembly at the 2004 Assembly election. He was re-elected at the 2008 election and again at the 2012 Assembly election. He failed to be re-elected at the 2016 election; because Labour gained constituency seats, it lost seats from its party list, which Qureshi was on. In 2005, he was described as "the only Muslim member" of the London Assembly, although he supports Amartya Sen's theory of plural identities and has criticised the practice of individuals "defining themselves simply by their religion, without taking into account other key aspects of their identity". Qureshi was Chair of the London Assembly's Environment Committee and a Member of the Transport Committee. He was also a member of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, which oversees the London Fire Brigade between 2004–2012 and Chair of the Mayor's London Waterways Commission, since its inception. From 2004 to 2006, Qureshi was a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Under his chairmanship of the Environment Committee at the London Assembly, a