In the twenty second of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet Zebunisa Rao – standing in Brentford against Labour’s Ruth Cadbury
Zebunisa Rao is standing as an independent candidate against the Labour Party’s Ruth Cadbury in Brentford and Isleworth, Greater London, in the general election. Cadbury has been faithful to the party line under Keir Starmer, failing to challenge its awful position on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And this is a key reason which pushed Rao to stand as a candidate in the 2024 election. As she told the Canary:
It just seems that the world is standing on one side, and the world leaders on another… It’s difficult to just… go about daily life knowing that this is still happening.
Zebunisa Rao: ‘what hope do we have’ with Labour?
Through her campaigning on the situation in Palestine, Zebunisa Rao asserted:
I learned that we can’t really influence politics from the outside and, as much as we can, we have to get involved in order to get the representation that we deserve. Ethics and morality are completely thrown out currently and it’s really going to require normal people, not politicians but normal people, to inject all of these values back into the government.
In particular, she has strong words about Labour, which people would historically expect to stand against war crimes abroad. She lamented that the party’s stance on the Gaza genocide could well be indicative of how it plans to govern, saying:
We expect the shadow parliament to criticise the government when they’re wrong. But they supported the government. And if they can do that when there are crimes against humanity happening, then what hope do we have that they’re going to be caring and considerate of us as the government when they’re in power? It just feels they’ll be worse than Conservatives
She quoted one family in the constituency who told her “we’ve been lifelong Labour supporters, but this time we will not be voting Labour purely because of this, because of the lack of humanity”. And she stressed that:
You feel the humanity stands in the people. We are all the same. We care about life and death. If you see images of children dying and the government doesn’t care about that, then… you think that you do have the wrong government acting in power.
“Regular citizens’ assemblies” can help to reverse disenfranchisement
Zebunisa Rao insisted:
My focus is concerned with the message that I want to put out to the community, and I want that to have an effect that lasts longer than just the election.
She has been speaking to people in the constituency. And she said that in “a lot of the cases, the feeling is that the MPs don’t care about them, that they don’t even know that they exist”. She has been uploading comments from constituents on her website, and told us:
There was one story of a mother who has many issues such as disability and being evicted from her home. And when I asked… ‘what’s your main concern?’ … she said ‘Gaza is my main concern’.
Overall, she asserted, the idea of community assemblies is a key part of her promise to constituents:
I’m very interested in connecting all the issues together.
So the first step to connect them into manageable solutions would be to have community engagement with the government and to establish that through regular citizens’ assemblies, so any issues that need to be raised by the community can be brought there by representatives of the community.
They can… learn about what can be done, discuss, and then have decisions that come out of that and present them to the government through the MP.
So I think that would be very much necessary because the kind of disenchantment that’s happening, the disenfranchisement of the… community, that could be reversed by involving them regularly in these sessions.
The idea of having to vote Tory or Labour is just “brainwashing”
Zebunisa Rao strongly opposes the idea that not voting for the two establishment parties is the same as wasting your vote, and said:
This is a grassroots level effort, and this is where it all starts… When things get so bad and you imagine that they cannot get worse, they still can get worse, and they often do… To prevent it from getting even worse in the UK, we need to start working in a different way…
A while ago, someone mentioned to me that the idea that we have to vote for one of the two major parties, otherwise our vote is wasted, that this is brainwashing… The only way it’s wasted is if we don’t use it for a candidate who represents what we stand for.
She completely accepts that overcoming the current system will not be easy. But she believes we have got to this point partly through complacency, by allowing an out-of-touch political elite to determine our destinies for so long. Talking about the independent candidates currently running around Britain who are starting to build an alternative, she insisted:
We’re reminding everyone of the common themes of humanity, equality, service, community, family, and offering to make these within your reach as part of a support system that oversees as it governs, rather than kind of like an alien autocracy disguised as a democracy.
But the caveat is that it will take hard work and not giving up. And it has to be done together, and anything can be achieved faster with large numbers…
Whatever has happened in Gaza and the decline in this country, it didn’t happen overnight. There was a wave across the world of leaders who made it acceptable to remove their mask and show the dark side of human nature to be the norm. And this has partly come from our complacency…
Most of us have a revived conscience now and we will be able to work towards bringing us back to where we should be as human beings. This will not happen by waiting for someone else to do it. We all have to get up and do it.
For more on Rao’s comments see the full interview on our YouTube channel:
Watch and read all our #CanaryCandidates interviews here.
