By Sophie Perry
Queer Labour MP Nadia Whittome has said the UK’s “cruel” asylum system needs a “complete overhaul” during a meeting with an LGBTQ+ refugee in parliament.
Whittome has been a consistent advocate of LGBTQ+ rights since being elected in 2019 at just 23-years old, standing up for trans rights in the face of political attacks on the community and calling out transphobia in her own party.
The Labour MP for Nottingham East met Memory, a lesbian refugee woman from Uganda, in June during Pride Month.
The meeting between the two was organised by Women for Refugee Women (WRW), a charity based in London which supports refugee and asylum-seeking women, and saw them reflect on the current system, their identities and being able to live as their authentic selves.
During the meeting, which took place at Whittome’s office in parliament, the 28-year-old politician said that the UK needs a “complete overhaul of the asylum and immigration system so that it’s more humane, more compassionate, gives people dignity”.
She added it should be a system which “recognises that what one person might call border control is actually violence. People being turned away, denied protection and sanctuary when they need it, families being broken up, people being forced into poverty while they’re waiting for their claims”.
Memory, who is a Rainbow Sister at WRW, told Whittome “people seeking safety like me are treated as numbers or as problems” by MPs, and asked if that is what the Labour MP sees that happening.
“There’s tendency for some MPs, perhaps those who aren’t embedded in their communities or social justice movements outside of Parliament, to see people as figures on a spreadsheet,” Whittome said, “rather than human beings who are no different from them or their families and who are just as deserving of dignity and respect.
“I think it’s really powerful when you come to Parliament and are so generous with your time to make MPs listen to what the real human stories are behind the headlines that they see that are too often very dehumanising,” Whittome told Memory, adding such engagement with politicians “forces” them to “really consider the consequences of the policies that we’re passing”.
“I certainly do think about how policies affect people’s lives – all the time,” she continued. “That’s what drives me to stand up on these issues and to push the Government – including my own party – to be going much further, to reverse the harmful policies that have been introduced by previous Conservative governments and also, to be frank, successive Labour governments too.
“The Hostile Environment didn’t just start under the Conservatives, it ramped up under the Conservatives.”
She added the media plays a huge role in the way many minority groups of perceived by the public, saying it has a “has a vested interest in trying to divide people and they do that by convincing people that the cause of their problems is migrants, refugees, disabled people, trans people”.
Whittome said: “Whoever it is they are trying to scapegoat to deflect from the real perpetrators – the Conservative governments, the ruling class, exploitative bosses, mega corporations that are destroying the planet. People want to hold onto power, influence and money.
But people suffer as a result. It’s not just a case of hurting people’s feelings. There are actual consequences to stirring up hatred and division. It eggs on politicians to produce more harmful and more regressive, right-wing policies and encourages the public to push for those things as well.”
Later on in the conversation, when Memory said that many LGBTQ+ refugees face being stoned in their home nations simply for being LGBTQ+, Whittome said the conversation made her “realise just how lucky I am to, just by an accident of birth, to be born in a country where I’m free to be who I am”.
“That shouldn’t be a matter of luck or it shouldn’t be a privilege,” she said. “It should be a basic human right.
“It really reinforces to me how cruel it is that we don’t have an asylum and immigration system that gives everyone who needs it sanctuary and protection from persecution.”
“The progress that we have, including in the UK, has been hard won and fought for and progress isn’t linear,” Whittome went on to say.
“We can’t just assume and take it for granted that it’s going to keep moving forwards. I think seeing the really concerted global efforts to roll back LGBTQ+ rights reminds us that we have to keep fighting, because yeah, people are trying to take our rights away.
“And that fight, we’re not going to give up. We are not giving up.”