United against division
Councillors from across the borough have joined Leader Cllr Grace Williams’ calls for the UK Government not to abandon its commitment to “diversity and openness” in its latest push to curb migration.
At a Full Council meeting on Thursday, 22 May, Cllr Williams launched an impassioned defence of Waltham Forest’s history as a welcome home to people from all over the world, highlighting the borough’s shared values and opposition to division and hate across the community.
She also committed to renewing the council’s Borough of Sanctuary framework for 2026, and welcomed the news that Waltham Forest Library Services had been honoured earlier in the week with the Library of Sanctuary award through the national charity, City of Sanctuary.
Waltham Forest first published its three-year Borough of Sanctuary Framework in 2023, laying out a strategy to support those seeking sanctuary and ensuring local services are in place to give everyone the opportunity to thrive.
This comes a week after she co-signed a letter with fellow Borough of Sanctuary Co-Chair, Averil Pooten-Watan, reminding the Home Secretary that “communities like ours are on the sharp end of language which causes division and that recent public discourse on this issue has led to real fear and worry.”
Cllr Grace Williams, Leader of Waltham Forest Council, said:
Even before Windrush, my great grandfather made a new home here in London after leaving his birthplace, Jamaica in the 1900s. London is a great city precisely because its openness, diversity and the hard work of those who have made London their home.
Immigration is integral to the story of Waltham Forest, and we have a moral duty to offer sanctuary to people in need, wherever they come from.
Cllr Williams also pointed to the community’s response to far-right agitators in August 2024, when thousands of local people came to Walthamstow to take part in the single largest counter-protest in the country during the anti-immigration riots that summer.
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