Alison Lowe: 'I come from Seacroft - I never thought I'd end up at the House of Lords'

When Alison Lowe, West Yorkshire’s deputy mayor for policing, found out she was becoming a peer to sit in the House of Lords her first thought, naturally, was “terror”.

“I come from Leeds, I come from Seacroft. It would never have been something I would have thought of for myself,” she told The Yorkshire Post in an exclusive interview about the appointment.

Ms Lowe - who will become Baroness Lowe of Armley next month - had exploratory discussions about potentially becoming a peer in April, with the former Leeds West MP Sir John Battle.

“He and a few other Northern MPs were trying to get more Northern peers [into the House of Lords] because they wanted more Northern voices,” she explains.

However, with Sir Keir Starmer standing down as Prime Minister, the entire process sped up catching Ms Lowe off guard.

On 15 July, she received a call to say she would be named as a peer in Sir Keir’s resignation honours.

While her first thought was a “combination of joy but also terror”, her second went to her father Alfred, whose birthday would have been the next day.

He came to the UK from the Caribbean island of St Kitts in 1956 as part of the Windrush generation, heading straight to Leeds where he would live until his death in 2014.

“My mum and dad would have been so proud,” Ms Lowe says, welling up, “it was so close to my dad's birthday so I miss him every day.

“He was of the Windrush generation and that was my next thought: in the 70 years since he came to this country from that little village in St Kitts [I’m going] to the House of Lords. It just blew my mind.”

Alfred arrived in Leeds at the age of 21 and lived in a big house in Grange Avenue, in Chapeltown, with other people from the Windrush generation.

It was from there that he met Ms Lowe’s mother Kay, who was Irish and hailed from Halton Moor.

“Without them I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am, because they gave me the values that I have today,” she says.

“My mum had to leave school at 14 to look after her brothers and sisters because she was the eldest.

“My mum could have been prime minister, my mum should have been prime minister.

“She could have been anything she wanted to be. But she couldn't because poverty meant that she had to give up school and everything that she could have been to look after the kids so they could have enough food.”

Ms Lowe remembers her dad - who worked as a bus driver and a plasterer for Leeds City Council - always told his children: “You go to work.

“My mum was a socialist, a trade unionist. She said you don’t work for yourself, you work for your community, you work for your family, you work for society.”

Growing up as one three black families on a huge 4,000 house council estate in Seacroft, Ms Lowe remembers that disputes - including over racial slurs - would be solved in a fight on the street.

“If someone gave you some jip in those days, you dealt with it there and then.

“No knives, no guns - it was ‘all right let's sort out. The parents would come and get in a circle with rest of the street and you would fight in the middle like you were in a boxing match.

“We obviously saw some of the worst of the racism and bigotry, but we also saw some of the best because it was in those communities where we grew up that we were embraced,” she says.

“We understood Leeds values about fairness, about justice. I learned to be a very strong independent person.

“I use my mouth more now for reasoning and negotiation skills, but in those days if you wanted something you had to fight for it.”

Ms Lowe became Leeds’ first black female councillor when she was elected to serve Armley in 1990, a role she kept until 2019.

Now she says Leeds is “so much more inclusive, so much more embracing of different cultures and viewpoints, yet it retains its Leeds identity”.

“Helping people is a Leeds value - that's the way that we were brought up as Leeds people helping Leeds people.

“West Yorkshire has got a great community, but we're also really different from the 60s and 70s in that we're much more diverse and more welcoming.”

Ms Lowe is now deputy mayor for policing and crime in West Yorkshire, under Tracy Brabin, and uses her experience as a survivor of sexual and domestic abuse to try and drive change for victims.

“Having been a victim is horrible, and you don’t want to be a victim,” she explains.

“So I needed to become a survivor and I could only become a survivor if I acknowledged the harm that had been caused to me.”

Ms Lowe says that for years she didn’t tell anyone about the abuse she suffered, but kept it bottled away.

“I had a breakdown in my 40s, I was not the person I wanted to be because it was getting on top of me,” she says.

“When I least expected it, it took over and I really wanted to end it all, it really got to that dark, dark place.”

Ms Lowe says that she got professional help and began to talk about what happened and “once I started I couldn’t stop”.

“Not stopping is the thing that keeps me well, not stopping is the thing that gives me my power back,” she says.

“I try to give that message to other victims of rape, sexual abuse, domestic abuse because people can take a can try to take our power away but they can only succeed if we let them.”

Ms Lowe tried three times to become an MP. She stood to be the candidate in Leeds North East in 1997, but was beaten in selection by Liz Davies.

Then in 2010 in Leeds West, former Chancellor Rachel Reeves became the candidate ahead of her, and then in 2015 in Batley and Spen, Jo Cox, who was murdered a year later, was selected.

She reveals this made her mother, Kay, quite bitter towards Labour, however says she never thought about quitting the party.

However, soon she will be joining Parliament in a role she never could have imagined.

“When that door closed, I thought it was closed forever,” she says.

“I accepted it and I was OK with it because I was still making a difference to people that I cared about.

“So when it happened that's why I had that maelstrom of emotions.”

From September, the House of Lords will have another strong, Northern voice when Ms Lowe is sworn in as Baroness of Armley.