Donna Murray-Turner is Labour’s alternative for Croydon West

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

Donna Murray-Turner is the election candidate for the Taking The Initiative Party in Croydon West in Greater London. Despite having worked with the Labor Party in the past, her experience of racism and “huggery” in the party pushed her to oppose the 2024 election.

In general, she said Canary:

Politicians and those in charge don’t know how to talk to black people. They don’t know how to talk to anyone, but race has that extra layer of “oh my god, what are we going to do here”… So they come to a community that’s almost three times… removed from the realities they’re promoting.

Black people don’t vote because the system never works for us. It never keeps our children safe from agencies like the police. Look at the health differences. Nothing works for black people, especially black people.

And she left Labor precisely “because of the total racism here”. She explained that a black member of the community was “authorized to be a councillor” but was replaced by a white politician at the last minute. And she said:

Nobody did anything. No one contested… That spoke to me of blatant racism. And I stepped back and saw that two people I held in high regard politically had let it happen…

When we talk about anti-racism and look at alliance as a topic, it’s about how you let things happen around you. It’s about proactivity. It’s not just saying “well, I saw an act of discrimination and thought it was wrong.” It’s about shouting, it’s about action, it’s a word that makes… That was the first inkling I had that maybe this isn’t the party for me.

She later added an example of why she thinks “the Labor Party locally is a bully”.

“We have genocide going on in the UK working class”

Donna Murray-Turner believes “The Labor Party is just like the Tories 2.0”. They are just part of the same establishment machine:

In the country where there is no leadership, people perish. Croydon is falling apart because nobody politically sees the bigger picture. They are guided by huge pieces of national machinery that want to shape local issues into what they want.

And she asked:

Who speaks for NHS workers who have… skilled jobs and access food banks? But who speaks for them? It’s not about race. It’s about class.

She added:

We have genocide on the working classes in the UK right now, and I don’t hear anyone talking about it. Yet they come and we foolishly give them—decade after decade, century after century—we give these people our vote, and what do they do for us?

Her mission, she stressed, is “to give Croydon a gentle wake-up call and make it more alive with the fact that you’re being scammed right in front of you.” And her priority is the most disadvantaged section of society:

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

“I know what it means to not take humanity seriously”

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

Nobody mentioned that these are human lives, nobody mentioned that these people have families, nobody mentioned that maybe these are children, nobody mentioned that these are pregnant women, nobody talked about rape, nobody talked about the realities of genocide. None of them.

I was the only one who spoke up and said, “I’m with you because I’m a product of genocide, I’m a product of transatlantic slavery… A few generations later and I know what it’s like to live that trauma. So yes, what causes this is generations later that trauma, that response to oppression.

She also argued that we must all stand up whenever a group in society is under attack, insisting:

I’m with you because I know what it means to not have your humanity taken seriously.

Donna Murray-Turner: If the elites won’t go away, we have to make them go away

Speaking about the institution’s party whistling, Donna Murray-Turner insisted:

If it wasn’t for Caribbean people, there would be no NHS from its inception. If it weren’t for people from the colonies, there wouldn’t be a national health service to begin with. Labor has fed off our vote decade after decade. But I say not anymore.

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

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

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

I’ve never known there’s ever been a time where they’ve had so many independent candidates… It’s a nominal historic moment… because so many people are independent and people are making their voices heard because they’re saying, “Well, in fact, you understand what I am saying’.

She added that for her:

This is just the beginning. And I’m young and bright enough to give this at least two more tries. … If this can start national collegiality around how we’re going to start an independent political movement that’s going to hold these people to the fire, I’m all 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.

Featured image via Canary