Sagal Abdi-Wali takes Camden migrant sanctuary campaign into Parliament

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Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali is heading to the Commons after the party held Holborn and St Pancras, ready to push the same migrant sanctuary agenda she drove as Camden Council leader. In a fundraising email sent after her selection on 9 September 2026 she boasted of £670 million for council housing and “helping make Camden a Borough of Sanctuary”, then declared: “Now, I want to take that fight to Parliament.”

That fight is already written into council spending. Camden’s Borough of Sanctuary grants handed £58,000 to 12 organisations in June 2025. In March 2026 the programme was topped up with £370,000 for 2026-27, money Abdi-Wali called “essential”. Council objectives openly include lobbying for “safe routes of entry into the UK”.

The record stretches back years. Standing for Camden Square in 2022 she pledged “10 new sanctuary homes for refugees” and residents trained as “sanctuary ambassadors”. When Camden won sanctuary status in 2024 she said the borough was “more vibrant and improved thanks to the refugees we have welcomed”. Weeks after she became leader, libraries were declared “Libraries of Sanctuary” and an inclusion calendar followed.

Housing numbers tell their own story. The strategy she ran as Cabinet Member for Better Homes records 98 homes acquired for refugees while more than 8,000 people sit on the waiting list. Local families face the squeeze; the priority list does not.

Guido Fawkes set out the pattern in full, from the sanctuary cash to the earlier politics. As chair of the local CLP in 2020 she was first signatory to a letter claiming Britain was not free of the “guilt or sin of institutionalised and systemic racism”. In 2019 she wrote of the “socialist principles by which I stand”. The new MP now takes that same programme from Camden Town Hall to the green benches.

Original source: Guido Fawkes