A former child refugee who became the leader of Camden council has been selected to be the Labour candidate for the byelection in Holborn and St Pancras. Sagal Abdi-Wali, who came to the UK from Somalia as a child in the 1990s and was elected leader of Camden council in May, was chosen to represent Labour members in the north London seat vacated by Keir Starmer. She was previously the chair of the local constituency Labour party, after first being elected as a Labour councillor in 2022.
Abdi-Wali, said she was “delighted” and promised to put the community at the heart of her campaign. Now I am standing to say thank you and to give back the hope you gave me. Throughout this campaign, I promise to put our communities at the heart of everything I do, now and for the future.
Together, we can make hope win.” Abdi-Wali has worked for more than a decade as a volunteer and trustee for local charities and is a governor of two schools in the borough, according to Labour. The party’s members queued outside St Pancras church in Euston for the selection meeting on Wednesday night, with voters including MP Georgia Gould and her mother, Lady Gail Rebuck. The local figure will probably go head to head with Zack Polanski, who announced his intention to fight for the Commons seat.
Local Greens in Holborn and St Pancras still have to formally select their candidate under a process that will not be completed until next Friday. But it seems likely they will endorse Polanski, under whose leadership the party has soared in the polls, with membership more than tripling. The high-stakes byelection will pit the star power of Polanski against a resurgent Labour under Andy Burnham, with voters going to the polls on 8 October.
Starmer announced he was stepping down from the seat he has represented since 2015 last week, in the after his departure as prime minister. Starmer saw his majority more than halve at the last election from nearly 28,000 to 11,500 amid a challenge from the left. The Greens came third, with Starmer’s main competitor being Andrew Feinstein, a leftwing independent.
In a boost to Polanski, Feinstein has since confirmed he would not stand, indicating that the Camden People’s Alliance, the group which emerged from his campaign, would most likely back the Greens. Labour have further lost support to the Greens in the area since Starmer’s election. The Greens made gains on Camden council in the local elections in May, although they failed to take control of it.
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