Natasha Walter is a writer and campaigner on women’s rights, refugees and climate change. She is the founder of the charity Women for Refugee Women and a patron of Humanists UK. Her father Nicolas Walter was a former editor of this magazine.

You’ve seen humanism evolve over the decades. What’s changed and how do you see its role today?

Given that I grew up in a household where my father was editing the New Humanist when I was young, humanism was always there – always part of my understanding and my family approach to the world. But my father [who was born in 1934] was still rather of that mindset of battling against the Christian establishment, against the Church and against its influence on daily lives. Now, the Church isn’t so influential in daily life. I still think there’s a lot of work to be done on religious schools and the negative effect that they have in terms of building truly inclusive education in this country, but if you look at the statistics in terms of religious belief in Britain when my father was active compared with now, we are in a really different situation.

So some of the battles that were being fought then, they’re not as alive to us today. My children go to local comprehensive schools and I was really struck a few years ago to realise that they know no hymns. They don’t even know any carols. It’s a small thing but I think it speaks to that withdrawal of the Christian influence. So our battles today are rather different.

What are the most relevant battles?

I’d like to see secularists in the UK being bolder about taking the fight not only to the legacy of the Christian influence in our daily lives but also the way that other religions can have a really negative effect, particularly on women’s rights and liberties. There’s often a real fear around talking about that. Obviously it has to be led by women from those backgrounds, but we from other backgrounds should be showing solidarity to women in those fights. It took so long for affected women to be heard on the issue of FGM [female genital mutilation], for instance, because a lot of feminists were worried about cultural sensitivity. I think that’s appalling. We’ve got to speak up for the universality of these rights. When you look at some of the main countries that asylum seekers are coming from, they’re often theocracies. Women here should be doing more to support women who are fleeing that kind of oppression from religious governments.

As someone who campaigns on asylum policy, what have the last few years felt like?

It’s been absolutely devastating. I set up Women for Refugee Women in 2006. That was actually under a Labour government – let’s not forget that punitive policies around asylum have not been the preserve of Conservative governments. We wanted to campaign against the fact that so many people, particularly women, were being refused asylum and then being forced to live in total destitution, unable to work, unable to claim benefits. This made them vulnerable to further abuse. We also campaigned against the use of detention. And for a few years we got policy wins, like ending the detention of families and reducing the detention of women for immigration purposes.

But then came this unbelievable backlash – which I was not expecting, hand on heart. I felt we won certain battles but we lost a war in the last few years. There has been this incredible undermining of the right to seek asylum in this country. It isn’t just about the Rwanda policy, although that was a flagship policy that mobilised many people because it was so clearly unjust, impractical and inhumane. But it was part of an overall policy of really striking at the heart of the right to seek asylum.

We have to remember the cost to each individual caught up in these punitive policies. Individuals who’ve already survived abuse and violence, who’ve already made dangerous journeys. They’ve come here to seek safety and then they’ve had this re-traumatisation through this broken asylum system. I just hope that we might be able to turn a corner now [with the new government]. It’s going to take a lot of effort to restore an asylum process that works.

What do you make of Labour’s approach so far?

I welcome the fact that the Rwanda plan is dead. I think that’s a testament to greater humanity among those who are now in charge, but also greater practicality. That policy was always a piece of performative cruelty. It was always unworkable and a massive waste of money. But so far, what we’ve seen in terms of announcements from the new government is very much about enforcement, in terms of cracking down on traffickers and smugglers and in terms of deportations. [The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill announced in July will establish a new Border Security Command and extend counter-terror powers to tackle “organised immigration crime”. Labour also says it wants to clear the backlog of asylum applications so that it can speed up deportations of those have been rejected.]

I can absolutely see why they would start there, given the state of public opinion. I just hope that in the background there’s also more work being done in terms of the investment we need for a workable asylum system, in terms of the processing of claims, and in terms of putting more into legal aid so that people can actually access the advice they need.

I think Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, understands that you’re not going to stop people migrating, so what you need to do is to think about pragmatic ways that their claims can be processed, how they can be integrated into society, and how they can be supported to rebuild their lives within communities.

What would you like to see from this government on asylum policy?

I’d like to see the government re-establish the right to seek asylum in this country, including for those people who enter through irregular routes. To have a transparent asylum process where claims can be processed fairly. This also means restoring access to legal advice, since the legal aid system has been devastated and many people seeking asylum are currently unable to get quality legal advice. I’d like to see an end to the use of detention, which is completely unnecessary in a working asylum process, except as a last resort immediately prior to deportation. So that would be my dream – if we aren’t going to be living in a no-borders world, which would be my ultimate vision.

I think safe and legal routes, which is what a lot of the refugee sector is often talking about, are vital. But it’s important for people to be realistic and to recognise that even if you’ve got routes to resettlement, people are still going to move. So having safe and legal routes does not preclude the need for a functioning asylum system for those who make their way here irregularly and does not preclude the need to treat them with dignity once they get to the UK.

People will always cross borders without permission. This is close to my heart because I do have a family background with refugees, as so many people do in the UK. My grandfather, who left Nazi Germany, got to Britain in summer 1939 – he left mainland Europe at the last possible moment. Sometimes when he crossed borders he had official permission, sometimes he crossed illegally. He had a complicated journey, from Germany to Amsterdam to Prague, and then when the Nazis came to Prague, an illegal journey hidden in a coal train across the border to Poland. And then he got the papers that enabled him to cross into Britain at the very, very last minute. We have the papers that he used – it said he could enter Britain on condition that he left at the earliest possible moment. He was known as a “transmigrant” and he had no right to work. Of course, he put down roots and eventually got citizenship, but this isn’t a new problem for the world.

Reform gained 14 per cent of the vote in the general election on the back of a primarily anti-immigration campaign. What do we do about this?

I think to rebuild trust in the immigration system, the government also needs to do the other stuff – the stuff that isn’t immigration – in order to bring people together more. Because when people talk about why they don’t want more immigrants in this country, when you listen to them, what they’re enunciating is their anxiety about the pressures on public services and housing.

They say, “My daughter’s on the waiting list for social housing and she can’t get in and migrants are getting the housing.” They talk about not being able to get an appointment with their GP and they think it’s because there are too many migrants trying to get appointments. They talk about how the schools their kids go to seem to be overwhelmed and they see migrants as the problem. Migrants aren’t the problem. The problem is the under-investment in public services, over many, many years.

If we can get that to work better – if we can make sure that people feel they can rely on the NHS, on education, that their kids will be able to get affordable housing – that’s what would allay people’s fears about migration. Because you can see in places where there is a lot of migration but where people still have faith in their future that immigration is just not an issue. So in a way the person that worries me most in the government is not Yvette Cooper [who has responsibility for asylum and immigration] but Rachel Reeves [the chancellor] and her reluctance to grasp that nettle of taxing the wealthy and investing in public services.

Does humanism have any lessons about how we might tackle this sort of division?

I suppose it goes back to the heart of humanism, which is that if this world is all we have, if this life is the only life we have, we need to be sure we are treating people better here and now. We really are all in this together, and we need to build societies based on our trust in shared values – of welcome, of kindness, of safety and dignity.

Is your climate activism connected to these issues?

The climate emergency gives an urgency to everything that we’re doing, and it makes us recognise our limits. I’m currently writing a book about feminism in the context of the climate emergency. It’s tentatively titled Feminism for a World on Fire, and it’s scheduled for publication next year by Virago.

A lot of feminist discourse over recent years has really bought into that capitalist ethos of self-advancement, self-empowerment, success within the existing hierarchies. And what the climate emergency teaches us is that business as usual is not going to work anymore.

We need to shift our paradigm. We have to think about how we can work better as a society, as a community, on a finite planet.

Labour has not committed to repealing the Conservatives’ anti-protest laws, which so far have primarily been used against climate protesters.

I’d love to see Labour really grasp the nettle on this – although I think it won’t move on this immediately – because it’s just shocking how the right to protest has been undermined. [Walter herself has been arrested on climate protests.] And it’s not just about these incredibly repressive laws but about the policing and what’s happening in the courts, the way that judges are really preventing freedom of expression and the right to a fair trial.

I know that sounds alarmist, but when you see what’s happening – for example, with defendants not being allowed to mention the climate emergency in court – there’s a huge crisis in justice. There are a lot of lawyers, including Keir Starmer, now in government. I hope they really think about the rule of law and about how important it is that the right to protest is respected.

What impact are the new anti-protest laws having on activism?

It’s had a real chilling effect on protest and what we’re now seeing is just a small group of people who are prepared to protest and prepared to go to jail for their protest. We’ve lost the wider base of people who are moving into activism in a less disruptive way.

You get these peaceful, legal protests like the Restore Nature Now march [involving around 60,000 people in London in June]. It was a fantastic day, super inclusive, creative, colourful, lots of singing and dancing. Zero interest in the media. Nobody took any notice and it had little impact beyond the people that participated. And then at the other extreme you have people who are taking part in protests that are still peaceful, still non-violent, but disruptive. A little bit of cornstarch on Stonehenge [in June, two Just Stop Oil protesters sprayed the landmark with orange cornstarch] and everybody goes mad. So you’ve got this weird split.

What we were seeing at the beginning of Extinction Rebellion was something very different. People were able to come together. It was disruptive but not enormously so. There were lots of great conversations, it made people think about it, talk about it, it had an impact on politics and really raised the urgency of the climate emergency in the media and in parliament. That’s what I’d like to see again.

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