Labour’s “blatant racism” and “thuggery” led me to stand in Croydon West, says Donna Murray-Turner

In the eighteenth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet Donna Murray-Turner – standing against Labour’s Sarah Jones

Donna Murray-Turner is standing as the Taking The Initiative Party general election candidate in Croydon West in Greater London. Despite working with the Labour Party in the past, her experience of racism and “thuggery” in the party has pushed her to stand against it in the 2024 election.

In general, she told the Canary:

Politicians and people in charge don’t know how to talk to Black people. They don’t know how to talk to anyone, but race has that added layer of ‘oh god, what are we gonna do here’… So they come into a community that is almost thrice… removed from the realities under which they promote.

Black people don’t vote because the system never works for us. It doesn’t ever keep our children safe from the agencies, like police. Look at the disparities in health. Nothing works for people of colour, especially Black people.

And she left Labour precisely “because of out-and-out racism locally here”. She explained that a Black member of the community was “cleared to be a councillor”, but was replaced with a white politician at the last minute. And she said:

Nobody did anything. Nobody challenged… That to me spoke of blatant racism. And I stepped back and I saw that two people that I held in high regard politically let it happen…

When we’re talking about anti-racism and we look at allyship as a topic, it is around how you let things happen around you. It’s about proactivity. It’s not just saying ‘well, I saw an act of discrimination and I thought it was wrong’. It’s about calling it out, it’s about the action, it’s a doing word… That was the first inkling that I had that maybe this isn’t the party for me.

She later added an example of why she believes “the Labour Party locally is thuggery”.

“We’ve got genocide going on in the working classes of the United Kingdom”

Donna Murray-Turner believes that “the Labour Party is just like the 2.0 version of the Conservatives”. They are just part of the same establishment machine:

In the land where there is no leadership, the people perish. Croydon is disintegrating because nobody politically is seeing the bigger picture. They are guided by huge pieces of national machinery who want to mould local issues into what they want.

And she asked:

Who is talking for the NHS workers who’ve got… degree qualification jobs that are accessing foodbanks? But who’s talking for them? This is not about race. This is about class.

She added:

We’ve got genocide going on in the working classes of the United Kingdom right here right now, and I don’t hear anybody talking about that. Yet they’re coming and we foolishly are giving them – decade after decade, century after century – giving these people our vote, and what do they do for us?

Her mission, she stressed, is “for Croydon to be woken up slightly and be more alive to the fact that you’re being swindled right in front of your face”. And her top priority is the most underprivileged section of society:

Politically, people on the bottom, the people that politicians call the underclass, the people who have to make the harsh decision between children’s school uniform and paying their rent, the people that the schools I work with have internal foodbanks for, the families who are fed even through the school holidays because there is no money to feed – those are the people that I am the voice for.

“I know what it is not to have your humanity taken seriously”

At one hustings, Donna Murray-Turner said, someone asked a question about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And among the candidates, she lamented:

Nobody mentioned that these were human lives, nobody mentioned that these people had families, nobody mentioned that maybe these are children, nobody mentioned maybe these are pregnant women, nobody spoke about the rape, nobody spoke about the realities of genocide. Not one of them.

I was the only one who spoke and said, ‘I stand with you because I am a product of genocide, I am a product of the transatlantic slavery [trade]… Several generations later, and I know what living that trauma feels like. So yes, what this does cause is generations later that trauma, that response to oppression.

She also argued that we must all stand up whenever any group in society is attacked, insisting:

I stand with you because I know what it is not to have your humanity taken seriously.

Donna Murray-Turner: if the elites won’t step aside, we must make them leave

Speaking about the dogwhistling of establishment parties, Donna Murray-Turner insisted:

If it wasn’t for people from the Caribbean, there would be no NHS from its inception. If it wasn’t for people from the colonies, there would be no national health service from its inception. Labour has fed off of our decade in, decade out vote. But I say no longer.

In short, we can’t just wait for politicians to do better. There must be consequences for the people who have allowed things to get so bad. As she emphasised:

If you don’t have the decency to take yourself away, sometimes you must be shown the door.

She also sees a hopefully moment now with so many independent candidates standing up against the Tory-Labour machine. As she insisted:

I have never known there to be a time to have so many candidates standing independently ever… It’s a nominal historical moment… because so many people are standing independently and people are listening to their voices because they’re saying, ‘well actually you get what I’m saying’.

She added that, for her:

This is just the beginning. And I’m young enough and bright enough to give this at least two more goes. … If this can start collegiality nationally around how we start an independent political movement that will hold these people to the fire, I’m for it all day every day.

For more on Murray-Turner’s comments see the full interview on our YouTube channel:

Watch and read all our #CanaryCandidates interviews here.