UK election: Nigerian-born Onwurah wins seat for Labour

Nigerian-born Chi Onwurah won a seat to be declared for Labour in the December 12 general election in the United Kingdom.

However, the Conservatives won majority seats in the election.

Onwurah took Newcastle – upon-Tyne Central with 21,568 votes compared to her Conservative rival’s 9,290.

According to The Independent, her victory was followed by Labour’s Bridget Phillipson in Houghton and Sunderland south.

Onwurah’s 12,278 margin of victory was reportedly down from 14,937 in 2017 while the 3,115 majority won by Phillipson, a prominent Labour remainer, was around a quarter of her 12,341 margin of victory in 2017.

The 54-year-old Onwurah was born in Wallsend and grew up at Hillsview Avenue in Kenton.

She attended Kenton School before studying electrical engineering in London.

“My values and beliefs were formed in Newcastle based on the people I grew up with and my own experiences,” she wrote on her website.

“My maternal grandfather was a sheet metal worker in the shipyards of the Tyne during the depression. My mother grew up in poverty in Garth Heads on the quayside.

“In the fifties she married my father, a Nigerian student at Newcastle Medical School. In 1965, I was born, whilst they were living in Long Benton where my father had a dental practice.

“I was still a baby when my father took us to live in Awka, Nigeria. But two years later the Biafran civil war broke out bringing famine with it and, as described vividly in an Evening Chronicle article in 1968, my mother, my brother and sister and I returned as refugees to Newcastle, whilst my father stayed on in the Biafran army.

“This early experience of the impact of war on ordinary families left me with a strong sense of my own good fortune in living in a peaceful parliamentary democracy where it is possible to bring about change without taking up the gun or the sword.

“I am not a pacifist, I believe that our country is worth defending and fighting for.”