Halaleh Taheri and Cllr Santiago Bell-Bradford

ISLINGTON will become a “Borough of Sanctuary” for migrants and refugees in recognition of the council’s work helping people who are fleeing violence and persecution.

Councillors voted to pass the motion at a full council meeting last Thursday to join Islington with a network of other local authorities across the country which have declared themselves proud to welcome “people in need of safety”.

Labour councillor Santiago Bell-Bradford, Islington’s Migrants Champion, said the move was in open resistance to the government’s “hostile environment” policies.

“Only last week, immigration officers arrested a worker in Finsbury Park ward over his immigration status,” he told the chamber.

“These attacks are happening every day, and it’s our responsibility as a council to push back and make this borough safe and welcoming to migrants.”

But the leader of an Islington-based charity has called for “actions not words” from the council.

Halaleh Taheri, founder and executive director of The Middle Eastern Women and Society Organisation, whose headquarters are in Finsbury Park, told the Tribune she wants the council to be more proactive in liaising with groups like hers.

“We have so many clients,” she said. “I’m in the grass-root, I’m on the ground with those people. I know what they need but every time we must go to the council. The council should search us out and they should come to us.”

Cllr Bell-Bradford said he was proud of the borough’s record of supporting migrants, but acknowledged there was still work to be done in reaching different groups.

“If they feel like they haven’t been in the room for these discussions, the onus is on me personally to make sure I bridge that gap,” he said.

“We set up a dedicated team specifically for this issue [migration], one of the few local authorities in the country to do so, and funded it at a time of unprecedented Tory cuts to local government.

“We’ve directly supported 137 asylum seeker migrant families with no recourse to public funds during lockdown. There’s still tons more to do, but I’m certainly proud of what we’ve done.”

In an emotive speech about his own family’s story delivered to the meeting, he said: “In 1973 when Pinochet took power in a violent coup in Chile, because my grandfather proudly worked for Allende’s socialist government, my family were put in concentration camps and extradited to different countries around the world.

“And it was the UK and later Islington that welcomed them, providing them with council housing, services and support that made it possible to establish a new life in this borough and give back to the community that had already given so much to them.

“And I know that my grandfather would have been proud, and that my dad is proud, that I’m standing before you and playing a small part in making sure other migrant and refugee families have the same opportunities we did.”

The motion was passed unanimously, bar one abstention. Rakhia Ismail – the councillor who defected from Labour to the Conservative Party last year – labelled the motion “lip service”.