Transcript

HASHI MOHAMED:

I didn’t excel at school. I didn’t go to one of our prestigious universities for my first degree but I would end up doing a post-graduate degree at Oxford on a full scholarship, and then I became a barrister. So what exactly happened, and what does it tell us about social mobility in Britain? In part I put it down to a visit to Kenya when I was nineteen. I went back to the semi-slum we had shared as a family. When it rained it smelt the same way I remembered and I walked the streets with a deep sense of familiarity. I recalled the early morning crowing cockerels and the frequent power cuts. And I came to one very firm conclusion – I did not want to spend the rest of my life here. With this settled, I decided my home and my future would be in the UK. And from this point on, my confidence and determination grew. It is this self-belief that I try and instil in other people with backgrounds like mine. This is a gathering of students from poor homes, seeking careers in the law, people like Deepak.

DEEPAK:

Today is probably I think it’s the first time I've met a barrister. I'm from East London and there's a lot of Indian boys, Somali boys and a lot of our parents, they don’t do white collar jobs. They fix fridges. They're delivery drivers and so on, so there is a lack of social networking that goes on in sort of my extended family and so on

HASHI MOHAMED:

I am often asked to talk at events like this. Many in the audience migrated to the UK or have parents who migrated here and for them seeing someone like me is a real eye opener and my message is always uncompromising.

HASHI MOHAMED:

[GIVING SPEECH] Just because you have grown up in very poor circumstances and just because you have grown up in a very deprived area without the necessary opportunities that may have been available to you, it does not necessarily follow that you are somebody with a handicap. Indeed I would go as far as to say it’s a strengh because it means you have still managed to have made it through many problems and many issues and many disadvantages and that means that you are somebody with character. So play to your strengths, tell a compelling story. If I was able to do it from my circumstances, I do strongly also believe that you are able to do it. Thank you very much ladies and gentleman.

HASHI MOHAMED:

Over lunch afterwards I spoke to some of the students. I wanted to know what they thought of what I had said, especially about social confidence, which I believe is vital if you are to succeed at the bar.

1ST SPEAKER:

That was what really resonated with what you said that if you have confidence in yourself you can overcome some challenges that seem insurmountable, but I think along the way I've lost that with having to deal with so many things, you know being the only breadwinner while looking after my family, and I've lost a lot of confidence. Can I do it? Do I even want to do it? I'm so tired of trying to do it. So I think today I've got some of that confidence back.

2ND SPEAKER:

Yeah, I just want to add to that. I think that sometimes telling your story can make you appear weaker than other people. I mean you’ve come from a difficult background. I think that it kind of like defeats you.

3RD SPEAKER:

But when you say defeat you what is it that, that is that...

2ND SPEAKER:

Yeah, to some extent it’s special pleading like ‘oh I should have mitigating circumstances’, which I don’t want personally. I don’t want to have people look down on me or pity me. It’s quite personal and it’s quite difficult to share your story sometimes because it’s like you don’t want to be vulnerable.

3RD SPEAKER:

I do agree confidence is really important. There's something for me at my university that I just really admired in people that had come from certain private schools, that had sort of had pumped into them to have this confidence. But I also think that it’s not just confidence as a level of... you have to learn how to adapt. And this is something that I wanted to ask you about because I think, even like the way I speak from a young age, I've sort of learnt that if I refine my voice in a certain way, people take me more seriously. And it’s a level of sort of adapting that is not necessarily positive, doesn’t go with all of my beliefs. And I wondered what you thought about that and whether that’s something that you’ve felt that you’ve had to do?

HASHI MOHAMED

It’s almost like a chameleon like trick that you have to perform in the sense that you have to be a number of people in a number of different settings right? So when I'm, for example, around my grandmother and my mother and the sort of older folk in my family I only speak in Somali. And then of course, if I may be hanging around with my nieces and nephews or my friends, we might be talking about ‘dabbing’ and all sorts of other ways of doing things and ‘What's going on fam?’, ‘What you saying fam?’ and you talk in a different kind of context. And then the next day I'm in Court saying ‘My Lord, my learned friend is completely mistaken.’ And you're constantly having to adapt as you say, and that’s why, when I'm hanging around with my nieces and nephews and my cousins, I'm like, look guys, I’m more than happy to play this game and talk in this way now, but I just hope you guys can switch this off. You are gonna have to do that to get far.