As she walked to work through King’s Cross during the austerity years of the 2010s, Sagal Abdi-Wali began to notice a gradual increase in people sleeping rough. “It broke my heart,” she told me when we met at a noisy café on Camden High Street at the heart of the Holborn and St Pancras constituency. It was witnessing more and more people on the streets, unable to find a safe and secure home that drove her into local and now national politics. “I wanted to do everything we could to make sure we solve it again,” she said.
Years of volunteering in the community followed before a move into frontline politics in her home borough of Camden. Abdi-Wali was first elected as a councillor for Camden Square ward – not far from those King’s Cross streets – in 2022, before becoming the leader of the council earlier this year. As of last Wednesday, she is also the Labour Party candidate in the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election.
Somebody else who shares Abdi-Wali’s passion for solving the UK’s homelessness crisis is the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who pledged to “end rough sleeping” on his first day at No 10. He too ran in a by-election earlier this year, winning a landslide victory in Makerfield on 18 June before running, uncontested, to replace Keir Starmer as the next Labour leader. Burnham has given Abdi-Wali advice on how to survive the gruelling ordeal of a parliamentary by-election. “Mostly about resting, taking time and speaking truthfully about who I am and being naturally me,” she said. “I think that’s what people are responding to [on the doorsteps] and obviously that’s his way of doing things.”
The by-election was triggered by Starmer’s resignation as the MP for Holborn and St Pancras on 1 September. Abdi-Wali worked closely with the former prime minister in her role at the council and helped out on his 2020 leadership bid. When I asked what she made of his decision to resign, she spoke warmly of Starmer. “I think for a lot of people, it’s really understandable,” she said. “People really value the work that Keir has done, not just over the past 11 years that he represented the constituency as a member of parliament, but in the decades before that when he was a public servant.” She said the former PM had given “his life to social justice”.
Still, it is unlikely that Starmer’s decision to resign, triggering the sixth by-election this year, went down smoothly in Labour circles. The party has held power in Holborn and St Pancras since 1983, when the veteran MP and Starmer’s predecessor, Frank Dobson was the seat’s MP. At the local elections in May, when pockets of London turned Green, Camden stayed under a Labour majority (although the Green group did become the opposition). This race is Labour’s to lose.
But the Greens – who have selected party leader Zack Polanski as their candidate – are already throwing everything at winning the constituency. They are framing a vote for Polanski as a way of holding Burnham to account from the left by electing a Green MP, rather than – as they would have it – “just another Labour backbencher”.
Abdi-Wali rejects this framing. “I will never be just another Labour backbencher,” she said. “I will be someone who’s a local, committed, dedicated public servant, which I don’t think any of the other people on the ballot can be”. She seems unfazed by the Green Party’s attempts to take the seat from Labour. “I haven’t really had much of a chance to see any of [the Green Party’s campaigning],” she said. Instead, she has been focused on the Labour campaign in the borough, cycling around from the constituency’s northernmost edge in leafy Kentish Town to the bustling central London wards of Holborn and Covent Garden. “People come and speak to me about their concerns and their issues – honestly, I’m just focused on that.”
Eyebrows have been raised over some of the ways in which Labour has framed its approach to this contest. A post on X from London Labour on 9 September, shortly after Abdi-Wali was selected said she was “bringing hope back to Holborn and St Pancras”: an odd way of framing things, critics said, considering that the party has held the seat for more than 40 years. When I ask Abdi-Wali about this, she distances herself from it. “It’s not about bringing hope back. We have given people hope”. Instead, she suggested that Labour’s message in this campaign is to persuade the residents of Holborn and St Pancras that the constituency’s “best days” are not behind them, but ahead. “I think that’s something to really fight for,” she said.
As a child, Abdi-Wali fled Somalia, and settled in the borough with her parents. This element of her story has already been subject to attacks from the right. Before her selection, Zia Yusuf, the home affairs spokesperson for Reform posted on X: “The frontrunner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour to replace the former prime minister Keir Starmer in our parliament was born in Somalia. Do you understand what’s happening?”. His comments were branded straightforward racism by a Labour minister.
“I think it’s just a bit sad,” Abdi-Wali said, when I asked how Yusuf’s comments had made her feel. “It personally had no impact on me, I’m very thick-skinned.” Instead, she told me, she has thought about the impact that Yusuf’s comments might have on young people from a similar background to her who might want to get more involved in politics or their community but are put off by how divided and contentious it may appear from the outside. “That’s why so many of us are here fighting this fight,” she said.
There are now just over two weeks to go until polling day. In the meantime, the Labour Party is due in Liverpool for its annual conference. Abdi-Wali won’t be attending. She’ll be out on the doorstep trying to persuade residents to vote Labour. Is she confident of victory? (Last week Polanski told the New Statesman he is “incredibly confident” about winning.) “For me, it’s most about putting everything I can into this to make sure that residents are hearing from us, that they know what I stand for,” she said. “So that they know that with me they’ll have an advocate that will fight for us every single day.”
[Further reading: Greens’ radical plan for the economy revealed]
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Subscribe here to commentIt does not matter where you were born. It is your abilities and your attitude to life that defines you. I arrived from Ireland at the age of 19 in 1958. In three years I was at university, in six years a graduate of London University, in ten years an employee of IBM. Your progress is even more spectacular and you will not be a backbencher for long. Join the Housing Department and solve the problem of rough sleeping. Half of it is caused by bad mental health which I believe could be solved by building hostels staffed by people trained in mental health management.
Comment from Twitter:
“This interview dismays me on three levels.
As a New Ststesman subscriber, a Camden resident and, most, a journalist.
Sagal Abdi-Wali faces heavy criticism.
Why not interrogate her loyalty to Starmer, despite his rightwards lurch? Now the borough’s leader, her poor record on bousing repairs and meetings attendance? The council’s pension fund links to Israel’s military.and illegal settlements? Labour halving assistance to her Somalia birth country? Reductions in welfare for disabled people? Rationing winter fuel aid to pensioners? Crackdowns on migrants?
The WASPI claimants sellout? Burnham’s sellouts on fiscal rules, student fees, public ownership and rent controls?
“…with me they’ll have an advocate that will fight for us every single day”? Really?”
I will be weighing up whether it’s time to try “The Nerve” or not.