Before turning 18, Lara Parizotto moved from Brazil to the UK, a "naive" decision that she says changed the course of her personal and political life forever. 

It was not a straightforward rise from migrant to becoming Hounslow's third youngest councillor, Parizotto told Local Democracy Reporting Services in her first sit-down interview since resigning from the Labour Party last month.

She was off to a bad start when she first arrived in the UK and was forced to put plans of going to university on hold, after she was told her Brazilian qualifications would not be accepted. 

For three years she worked as a cleaner while she took her A levels, an experience she said was pivotal to her political development.

She said: "I didn't have any family here so to pay for rent I worked as a cleaner… to me, that was very formative because in Brazil I could live a life where politics was not part of my day-to-day life, whereas in the UK politics became very personal." 

It was during her time as a cleaner that Parizotto says she met people and had experiences that shaped what would go on to become a central focus of her life.

Parizotto added: "As a migrant, as a cleaner, as a person working with other women that were in that situation. 

"Many of them were undocumented and were facing extra exploitation by our employer because it is much easier to exploit people when they don't have rights – after seeing that and living through it, it made me very political." 

Parizotto would quickly become active in the Labour Party joining in 2015 – the same year as Jeremy Corbyn's rise to become party leader.

At first, she was simply a member of the grassroots support, spending time socialising, organising and learning from her fellow Labour supporters. 

It would take an incident in 2016, however, to fully solidify the course of Parizotto's life into politics.

The Byron Burger immigration raid, where 35 migrant workers were rounded up as part of a sting operation in the food chain's Holborn outlet sparked outrage and protests. 

Illegal workers from Albania, Brazil, Nepal and Egypt were told to meet at the restaurant for a health and safety course only to be ambushed in a Home Office sting which saw them detained and deportated.

"One of those thirty people was my former flatmates," said the 27-year-old. 

"I got home one day and he didn't and we started getting worried and later on we found out that he had been detained and later on deported to Brazil." 

The formative experience fed into her decision to study politics at Cambridge after passing her A Levels. It would be there that she would become increasingly active in the Labour Party not just as a supporter but as an organiser holding the position of Chair of the university's Labour Club. 

Throughout Lara Parizotto's time in the UK, the Labour Party has been an ever-present current in her life, after graduation, she worked in Hounslow Council before moving to a migrant support non-profit.

Her activism and commitment both to the party and her political principles made her a popular local figure and she was put up for a seat in the Labour voting for Brentford West ward, which she won in May 2022. 

She explained: "As a migrant living in the UK without family, I think, meeting people through the party, it's a cliche in a way, but they become family because they are the people you go to the pub with after canvassing session, it's the people that give you work experience, all of these things are incredibly helpful especially for me when I didn't have family to guide me to getting a job." 

Her closeness to the party, so interwoven in her personal and professional life, made her decision to leave Labour last month 'painful'.

The reason for her resignation was made clear in an October 18 statement. 

In the statement, she wrote: "Today I cannot represent the Labour Party. I find my values and my work on racial justice, migrants rights, allyship with queer and trans people, decolonisation and global liberation movements of oppressed people unaligned with the Party." 

The decision was not an easy one for her. "Most of my life in the UK was as part of the Labour Party," she said with a lamenting look.

"But over the last year, I have been forced to compromise my values. Specifically on migrants rights, trans rights and decolonial liberation and liberation movements generally." 

"We saw senior Labour politicians saying the cultural narrative on immigration and Labour if/or when in power will be better at deporting migrants than the current conservative government and those things are heartbreaking for me to hear." 

However, the straw that broke the camel's back for Parizotto was the party's stance on the war currently raging in Gaza.

Parizotto is a regular participant in marches calling for a ceasefire, something that Leader Keir Starmer has consistently shied away from. 

According to the BBC nearly 50 councillors have resigned from the party, over the leadership's position on the war with murmurs of a large rebellion in the parliamentary party also being reported as the SNP table a motion for a ceasefire in the House of Commons.

An infamous interview on LBC was a catalyst for many of these resignations where the Labour leader said that "Israel has the right" to withhold power and water from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. 

Lara Parizotto joined the Labour party in 2015 and left in October 2023 (credit: Lara Parizotto).

"I think the LBC interview aired in those first few days. There was no clarification about those comments for around 10 days, why take so long to clarify what he meant in that interview? But by that point, I had already personally made my own decision," she said.

For Parizotto more important than the rhetoric of the Labour Party was protesting the continuation of violence. She says she was sent a directive from the party requesting she and others not attend, her mind was made up. 

After attending the march she had a meeting with the Hounslow Labour group who requested she delete social media posts showing her going on the march.

She said: "It was my own personal decision of 'I don't want to' and if I'm being asked to then that created a decision of do I stay in a party advising me to remove my Tweets and not attend a march that is so important to me and my decision was to resign." 

"It was very hard because a lot of my friends are Labour members, Labour councillors, a lot of my sense of community is there."

The fallout from the decision is something that Parizotto is getting used to. People who have been her colleagues and mentors for years she says are all of a sudden "technically my adversaries". 

She says she still has strong working relationships with many of them, including her fellow councillor for the Brentford West ward Guy Lambert.

Parizotto says she has received a lot of 'sad to see you go' type messages from her former Labour colleagues and even messages of support from the public. 

Her resignation has implications for the council as a whole. Due to her not longer being affiliated with Labour, she has been stripped of her roles on committees including as Chair of the Children and Young People Scrutiny Panel which she says she is 'heartbroken' about. 

In smaller ways, Parizotto is also having to come to terms with the new normal. While she used to enjoy the spacious surroundings of the Labour Party's meeting room at Hounslow House, she has now been relegated to the closest thing to a council naughty step-in near the staff kitchen. 

As a driven independent councillor, Parizotto has caught the eye of other parties looking to snatch up the opportunity to be represented in Hounslow Council.

The local authority currently has no Lib Dem representatives, with Parizotto saying it didn't take long for them to get in touch. 

However, it seems for now she is more concerned about the issues that matter to her.

Paritzotto says she will continue to push for more migrant representation in UK politics through her non-profit organisation Migrant Democracy Project and will continue to march in solidarity with the Palestine cause – with no one preventing her from expressing her beliefs. 

LDRS has reached out to the Labour Party for comment.

We want to provide Brentford with more and more clickbait-free local news. To do that, we need a loyal newsletter following. Help us survive and sign up for our free weekly newsletter by clicking the link HERE.