“One day my phone rang. ‘Bell, I’m in a detention centre’. It was Victor, my friend at university — he was deported within the next few weeks.” 

I sit across from new Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy as she recounts to me the experience that marked the beginning of the next 15 years of her life. 

Victor came to the UK from Kenya to study at Bradford University, where Bell was doing a degree in biomedical sciences. She hadn’t been able to get through to him for a few days before he was finally able to make the call. “I didn’t believe him, so he started to explain to me the story.” Victor had been working part-time at a gym but had unknowingly gone over the hours per week he was permitted to work under his international student visa. 

Unlike many European students who’d been given warnings for doing the same thing, Victor was made an example of, Bell tells me. Not only was her friend detained, but he was also taken to a tunnel and beaten to a pulp by G4S guards. Bell worked non-stop with migrant rights groups to get him out. “But before we could make our next move, Victor was taken out of the country.”

Bell describes her bewilderment at the brutal way he was deported. But witnessing this injustice, and learning “what could happen to people if we aren’t quick off the mark,” was a defining moment for Bell. “That’s when I really got active.” 

Fifteen years later and Bell is still fighting deportations. The difference is she’s now doing it from inside the Commons. 

We are sitting in Diane Abbott’s office in Portcullis House, the afternoon sun streaming in through the window. Bell’s former boss smiles down at us from framed snippets of the Voice newspaper positioned around the room. The cut-outs reflect Abbott’s lifetime of campaigning alongside communities, trade unions and activists. This, Bell tells me, is what being an MP is all about. “If you’re not part of a mass movement, what are you there for? What are you trying to change? If you’re not doing this then, you’re a…” she purses her lips as she utters the dirty word “... careerist.” 

The new Streatham MP seems very different from her predecessor Chuka Umunna, whose reputation for ignoring his constituents and Labour defection earnt him that title on many occasions. In contrast Bell identifies herself as a “proud and lifelong socialist,” and is very much involved in her local community and social justice movements up and down the country. She’s chatty, approachable and distinctly south London, breaking up her conservation with bursts of laughter.

Bell grew up in Brixton Hill, one of the eight wards in the Streatham constituency she now represents. Her parents came to Britain in the early 1970s from Ghana, taking their children back every now and again for holidays. As a teenager and young adult Bell wasn’t too interested in politics. “We only voted because we’d get into trouble if we didn’t,” she tells me, recounting how her mother would drag her and her siblings to the polling booth to vote for Labour. 

At the time we held this interview, Bell was due to turn 35 (“it’s always a drama when you have to tick the next box up,” she sighs). I’m impressed by how much she’s done in her short years. After graduating, Bell’s life took many twists and turns, first working as NUS black officer and then moving on to campaigns officer for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Bell had planned to join the Freedom Flotilla movement to break Israel’s brutal siege on Gaza. But a turn of events which entailed being held at gunpoint at a checkpoint in Egypt meant she wasn’t able to board the ship. She then studied another degree in law, while at the same time working in an immigration legal centre in Brixton. 

Bell started working for Abbott in 2010, first part-time and then as her chief of staff and later her political adviser. She tells me that one of her greatest achievements during that time was shifting attitudes within the party on immigration. Bell feels Labour has come a long way since 2015 when Ed Miliband unveiled his famous stone carved with a pledge to put “controls on immigration.” 

“At the beginning people in the party argued with Diane but now no-one argues about immigration policy within the Labour Party,” Bell explains. “You don’t have dissenting voices calling for stricter controls. And that is a massive change. It’s been amazing to be a part of. We’ve put something in place where Labour Party members will not allow us to go back to those days, and that, if we achieve nothing else, will be a massive achievement.” 

I can see the admiration and respect Bell has for her former boss. And it’s also clear that respect goes both ways. It was Abbott who encouraged her to run for MP, on more than one occasion. The first time the suggestion was made, Bell says she burst out laughing. “Who in their right mind would want to do that!?”

Her reluctance to run came partly from knowing all too well the horrific abuse a woman of colour in Parliament can face. Abbott, Britain’s first female black MP, has been subjected to more online abuse than any other politician, by a long way. “I remember the week the abuse got really bad was when the Sun and the Mail told the biggest lie ever,” Bell tells me. “They said that Diane had called everyone who voted for Brexit racist and up until today some people still believe that.” Bell had argued with the editors to retract the lies and issue an apology but only one did. Regardless, the damage was done. 

“We had so much racist abuse it was unbelievable, it just kept coming. We had people calling up and shouting n****r down the phone, we had more monkey cards than usual and people sending emails. One person decided to look up Diane’s staff and found my personal email to send her a death threat, a racist death threat.”

After a week of non-stop abuse, Bell said the team finally broke. “We came in here and sat with Diane and we both burst into tears.” It was then that Abbott wrote the hard-hitting Guardian article, detailing the relentless abuse she faces on a daily basis and the effect it has not only on her but her team. “I was really proud of her for that,” Bell tells me. 

But when the 2019 snap election was announced, Bell finally decided to go for it. Since her election in December, the new MP has used her position to confront racism in the Commons. In her maiden speech, Bell reminded her colleagues that the House once had 50 MPs who owned slave plantations. She demanded reparations for Parliament’s unapologetic colonial past in the way of “fair trade, handing back items that don’t belong to us, cancelling debts that have been paid over and over…” Without this: “How can I be equal to every other member of this house when this is how it treats people who look like me?”

The MP has taken well to her new position, though I feel she’s still getting to grips with the transition from running an MP’s office to being an MP herself. The biggest challenge so far, she tells me, was the Streatham terror attack. Bell was barely a few months into the job when 20-year-old Sudesh Amman stabbed two bystanders on Streatham High Road, before being shot dead by police. “You’ve got to reassure people,” she explains. “It was a lot of managing the feelings of the community.”

Bell has also had her hands full with her new role as shadow immigration minister, including charter flights to Jamaica, the Windrush scandal and Priti Patel’s disastrous immigration Bill. But these challenges have been more familiar to her, having campaigned for migrant rights for most of her adult life. For Bell the government’s relentless attacks on migrant and BAME communities is personal. 

“If you’re going to tell these people who have indefinite leave to remain that they are not British, if you are going to tell the Windrush generation that they are not British, at what point are you going to tell me that I am not British? It makes you feel insecure as a black person, because at what point is my right to stay in this country secure? It’s my country. That’s scary.”

The MP is currently working on legislation to bring about an end to indefinite detention, and has previously formulated policies that would see detention centres abolished entirely.

It’s been many years since Bell tried to thwart the deportation of her university friend but although Victor was dragged onto a plane, she’s never stopped fighting to save others from the same fate. “Thinking way back to Victor being in the detention centre to now where we’ve pressured the government so much that we may actually get a limit on detention — it feels like we’ve achieved something.”