Lara Parizotto on the 'Painful' Decision to Quit Labour
Brentford councillor talks about the motivations behind her departure
Lara Parizotto
November 15, 2023
Lara Parizotto has never taken the easy option. Just before turning 18, she moved across the world from Brazil to the UK, a “naive” decision that she says changed the course of her personal and political life forever.
It was not a straightforward rise from migrant to becoming Hounslow’s third youngest councillor Lara told Local Democracy Reporting Services in her first sit-down interview since resigning from the Labour Party last month. She was off to a bad start when she first arrived in the UK and was forced to put plans of going to university on hold after she was told her Brazilian qualifications would not be accepted.
For three years she worked as a cleaner while she took her A levels, an experience she said was pivotal to her political development. “I didn’t have any family here so to pay for rent I worked as a cleaner… to me, that was very formative because in Brazil I could live a life where politics was not part of my day-to-day life, whereas in the UK politics became very personal.”
It was during her time as a cleaner that Lara says she met people and had experiences that shaped what would go on to become a central focus of her life. “As a migrant, as a cleaner, as a person working with other women that were in that situation.
“Many of them were undocumented and were facing extra exploitation by our employer because it is much easier to exploit people when they don’t have rights – after seeing that and living through it, it made me very political.”
Lara would quickly become active in the Labour Party joining in 2015 – the same year as Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to become party leader. At first, she was simply a member of the grassroots support, spending time socialising, organising and learning from her fellow Labour supporters.
It would take an incident in 2016, however, to fully solidify the course of Lara’s life into politics. The Byron Burger immigration raid, where 35 migrant workers were rounded up as part of a sting operation in the food chain’s Holborn outlet sparked outrage and protests.
Illegal workers from Albania, Brazil, Nepal and Egypt were told to meet at the restaurant for a health and safety course only to be ambushed in a Home Office sting which saw them detained and deported. “One of those thirty people was my former flatmates,” said the 27-year-old.
“I got home one day and he didn’t and we started getting worried and later on we found out that he had been detained and later on deported to Brazil.”
Cllr Parizotto declined the party's request to remove social media posts of her attending pro-Palestine marchs
The formative experience fed into her decision to study politics at Cambridge after passing her A Levels. It would be there that she would become increasingly active in the Labour Party not just as a supporter but as an organiser holding the position of Chair of the university’s Labour Club.
Throughout Lara’s time in the UK, the Labour Party has been an ever-present current in her life, after graduation, she worked in Hounslow Council before moving to a migrant support non-profit. Her activism and commitment both to the party and her political principles made her a popular local figure and she was put up for a seat in the Labour voting Brentford West ward, which she won in May 2022.
“As a migrant living in the UK without family, I think, meeting people through the party, it’s a cliche in a way, but they become family because they are the people you go to the pub with after canvassing session, it’s the people that give you work experience, all of these things are incredibly helpful especially for me when I didn’t have family to guide me to getting a job.”
Her closeness to the party, so interwoven in her personal and professional life, made her decision to leave Labour last month ‘painful’. The reason for her resignation was made clear in an 18 October statement.
In the statement, she wrote, “Today I cannot represent the Labour Party. I find my values and my work on racial justice, migrants rights, allyship with queer and trans people, decolonisation and global liberation movements of oppressed people unaligned with the Party.”
The decision was not an easy one for Lara. “Most of my life in the UK was as part of the Labour Party,” she said with a lamenting look.
“But over the last year, I have been forced to compromise my values. Specifically on migrants’ rights, trans rights and decolonial liberation and liberation movements generally.”
“We saw senior Labour politicians saying the cultural narrative on immigration and Labour if/or when in power will be better at deporting migrants than the current Conservative government and those things are heartbreaking for me to hear.”
However, the straw that broke the camel’s back for Lara was the party’s stance on the war currently raging in Gaza. Lara is a regular participant in marches calling for a ceasefire, something that Leader Keir Starmer has consistently shied away from.
According to the BBC nearly 50 councillors have resigned from the party, over the leadership’s position on the war with murmurs of a large rebellion in the parliamentary party also being reported as the SNP table a motion for a ceasefire in the House of Commons. An infamous interview on LBC was a catalyst for many of these resignations where the Labour leader said that “Israel has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“I think the LBC interview aired in those first few days. There was no clarification about those comments for around 10 days, why take so long to clarify what he meant in that interview? But by that point, I had already personally made my own decision,” she said.
For Lara more important than the rhetoric of the Labour Party was protesting the continuation of violence. She says she was sent a directive from the party requesting she and others not attend, her mind was made up.
After attending the march, she had a meeting with the Hounslow Labour group who requested she delete social media posts showing her going on the march. “It was my own personal decision of ‘I don’t want to’ and if I’m being asked to then that created a decision of do I stay in a party advising me to remove my Tweets and not attend a march that is so important to me and my decision was to resign.”
“It was very hard because a lot of my friends are Labour members, Labour councillors, a lot of my sense of community is there.”
The fallout from the decision is something that Lara is getting used to. People who have been her colleagues and mentors for years she says are all of a sudden “technically my adversaries”.
She says she still has strong working relationships with many of them, including her fellow councillor for the Brentford West ward Guy Lambert. Lara says she has received a lot of ‘sad to see you go’ type messages from her former Labour colleagues and even messages of support from the public.
Her resignation has implications for the council as a whole. Due to her no longer being affiliated with Labour, she has been stripped of her roles on committees including as Chair of the Children and Young People Scrutiny Panel which she says she is ‘heartbroken’ about.
In smaller ways, Lara is also having to come to terms with the new normal. While she used to enjoy the spacious surroundings of the Labour Party’s meeting room at Hounslow House, she has now been relegated to the closest thing to a council naughty step-in near the staff kitchen.
As a driven independent councillor, Lara has caught the eye of other parties looking to snatch up the opportunity to be represented in Hounslow Council. The local authority currently has no Lib Dem representatives, with Lara saying it didn’t take long for them to get in touch.
However, it seems for now she is more concerned about the issues that matter to her. Lara says she will continue to push for more migrant representation in UK politics through her non-profit organisation Migrant Democracy Project and will continue to march in solidarity with the Palestine cause – with no one preventing her from expressing her beliefs.
LDRS has reached out to the Labour Party for comment.
Rory Bennett - Local Democracy Reporter