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Nadia Whittome
Nadia Whittome was interviewed by Amal Malik for the Museum of Youth Culture, and talks about being Nottingham East’s Labour MP, as well as her Punjabi Sikh and Anglo-Indian Catholic parentage
Skip to mediaPart of the external The Museum of Youth Culture oral history collection
About
Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, grew up in Nottingham in a single-parent household with her mother and brother. She experienced racism and isolation, especially at private school. She found her voice in a youth art group celebrating Black and Brown excellence. Politically aware from a young age, she inherited an interest in the Labour Party from her parents. Her father was in the Indian Workers' Association. Nadia encourages young South Asians to discuss politics at home.
This interview was conducted as part of the ‘Stories of South Asian Youth in Britain’ project, led by the Museum of Youth Culture. Amal Malik conducted the interview, and the full collection of project interviews is available online with the Museum. The Museum of Youth Culture is the world’s first museum dedicated to the story of teenagers and young people, collecting the scenes, styles and social movements forged by youth over the last century.
Listen to Nadia talking about her education and path into politics.
Interview conducted by Amal Malik.
NW: As I got a bit older, I mean, I think our generation grew up in a lot of political turmoil and that was sort of compounded as young people of colour, I think, because we lived through like 9/11, the Iraq war. We were very, very young then. And then the financial crash and massive job losses. And we...I mean, I don't know how old you are, but I think we spent our very early years under although an imperfect Labour government, it was a Labour government that afforded us a lot of opportunities. But then as well, it was imperfect. And that was a difficult thing to grapple with, with things like immigration laws and very authoritarian policing under the Labour government. And then in 2010, I was 13 at the time of the election, and I remember taking a big interest in that, because I really wanted Labour to win, even though I didn't like a lot of what the Labour Party was saying, because I thought that they were the best party. And I just wanted them to be a different party. You know, to be prioritizing some of the things that I was interested in more. And I remember being disappointed that the Lib Dems were saying a lot of good stuff, and I really wanted this to come from Labour, because we were culturally a Labour family in a Labour city. And I knew that it was...that Labour was our party as South Asian people, that, you know, it had always been the Labour Party that we'd been involved in. My dad was in the Indian Workers' Association and all that kind of thing. So yeah, I was interested then. But I felt pretty hopeless. And I think there was that sort of tipping point between feeling very dispirited and angry and actually taking action. So it was in 2013 when the Bedroom Tax was introduced, and, you know, my neighbours were hit really hard by it and my community was hit hard, that I got involved in the fight back. I just felt so angry. And I think that anger has been building up over many, many years. And I thought, this is a disgrace and we need to stop this. This can't be going on and on like this.
AM: Yeah.
NW: And that was the beginning of it, I suppose.
AM: Yeah. So how did that kind of impact you when you left school and kind of post-secondary life? So, I think for a lot of young people when they go to university, you can kind of get introduced into like a more diverse circle of people from different classes and background, there's more opportunities to get involved in like liberation societies. Was that something that you kind of got involved in?
NW: Well, education was always quite a struggle for me. So, I went to sixth-form college and then I finished some of my A-levels, but not all of them. It was...I mean, having...you remember me saying that, you know, I was quite close to not even finishing my GCSEs, so going on to do A-levels was quite a big step for me. And I don't think it was really a surprise to anyone that I didn't finish them. But then I went on to do an access course, and I really loved that. And I had two Black...two out of three of my teachers were Black. And that was really nice, because like even though sometimes they were hard on me, it was because they really wanted me to succeed. And they were sort of...like particularly Stephen, my teacher, I felt like he was hard on me in the same kind of way as my mum would be hard on me. And I felt like I didn't want to let him down in the same way that I wouldn't want my mum to be let down. And I knew that his journey to the UK would have been similar to my parents', and that he was coming from a really good place. In fact, I remember with him, he took us to the Houses of Parliament on a college trip. And I remember the guy who was showing us around was talking about colonialism and how the colonies weren't all bad. And me and the other Black and Brown kids in the class were looking at each other like, 'Is this guy for real?' And then he turned to us and he was like, 'Well, if it weren't for the British empire, you wouldn't speak English, would you?' And I was livid. And I opened my mouth. And Stephen just looked at me and like gave me a look like, 'Jeez, not today, Nadia'. And I was like, okay, only for Stephen though, I won't say anything.
AM: Yeah. That's the thing, especially I feel like when you're quite young, you kind of...a lot of our views are really undermined, just because...purely from age, but a lot of us had...have dealt with so much racism and trauma from living in the UK, kind of seeing like our history be completely whitewashed. And when obviously topics of like colonialism come up, it does become...well, can become, a conversation exactly like that.
NW: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think the way that schools are structured, because it's so hierarchical, and there isn't really an emphasis on learning from each other, it becomes like teachers...and I'm not bashing teachers here, I think teachers do a fantastic job, but nobody knows everything, and we can learn from people who are younger than us. I learn from people who are younger than me, schoolchildren now teach me things. And I think that that's a beautiful thing. I remember not very long ago, actually, I saw one of my old teachers at the bus stop, and we got into...somehow, we got into the same conversation, because I was saying that my brother had come back from Sydney, and she really liked my brother. My brother was really popular with the teachers at school. I don't know why. But we were talking about him and about Australia, and about how, you know, they haven't really come to terms with their colonial past. And I sort of just thought that she would agree with me. I don't know why I thought this. Everything that I had learned up until then did not teach me that. But for some reason, I thought that this was a non-controversial thing to say. And we had the same conversation about how the colonies weren't all bad, what about the railways? And it just made me think of how far we have yet to come…
AM: Yeah.
NW: And how difficult it is for children in schools. I think particularly our generation, which is so clued-up and so knowledgeable, and we've been able to educate ourselves and educate each other, particularly, you know, with alternative media like gal-dem...
AM: Yeah.
NW: The social media. It must be very difficult for children to sit there with all the knowledge that they've acquired through alternative spaces and listen to stuff like, the colonies weren't all bad.
AM: Yeah. It's actually, I think, knowing different, and us being able to access exactly that sort of media in the current generation that we are, it's really quite tricky to kind of then grapple with the difficulties of growing up being a minority in the UK, absolutely.
NW: Yeah, yeah.
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Entry credit
Anya Amlani
