Murad Qureshi (Bengali: মুরাদ কোরেশী; born 27 May 1965) is a British Labour and Co-operative Party politician, and a former Member of the London Assembly.^[1][2]

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.^[1]

Qureshi is of Bangladeshi descent,^[3][4] and comes from a politically active family: his late father Mushtaq Qureshi was a Labour Party councillor in the City of Westminster^[5] and was a freedom fighter in the Bangladesh War of Liberation. His youngest sister, Papya Qureshi, was also a councillor in Westminster.^[6]

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.^[7]

He was an Executive Committee member of SERA from 1994 to 2000^[7] and a former board member of BRAC U.K, an international NGO seeking to alleviate poverty and empower the poor.

In 2018 it was reported that Jeremy Corbyn had intended to propose Qureshi for a peerage.^[8]

Among his campaigns, Qureshi has called for the inclusion of Twenty20 cricket in the 2012 Olympic Games,^[23] a proposal which has received the backing of the London Assembly,^[24] and he has advocated the use of blue lines to mark the courses of London's underground rivers.^[25]

He has called for Edgware Road tube station (Bakerloo Line) to be renamed Church Street Market, as this would end the confusion between that station and the namesake station on the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines.^[26]

He has worked for many years to raise awareness of the crucial role of remittances in international development^[27][28] with his last letter in the Financial Times generating much debate. In 2004, remittances was the key topic on which he presented evidence before the House of Commons International Development Committee as part of a submission by the British Bangladeshi International Development Group.^[29]

In 2007, Qureshi hosted a meeting at City Hall which launched the Cambridge IGCSEs in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India Studies^[30] with Amartya Sen's support. Qureshi closely follows political developments in South Asia, and was in Bangladesh for the parliamentary elections in December 2008.^[31]

He is Chairman of Capital SERA, the London branch of SERA.^[32] He contributes regular columns to the Morning Star,^[33] The China Daily,^[34] Tribune^[35] and the Westminster Extra.

Qureshi has a music record named after him, and has financially backed a British film Shongram, which is a romantic drama, set during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation struggle.^{[citation needed]}

Qureshi lists his recreations as "football and cricket (playing and watching)".^[1]

• British Bangladeshi
• List of British Bangladeshis
• List of ethnic minority politicians in the United Kingdom