Powerlist 2025: Dawn Butler MP ‘had no function fashions to look as much as in politics’

Labour MP Dawn Butler opened up about not having any role models to look up to in the world of politics at the Powerlist 2025 awards.

Ms Butler, who was born to Jamaican parents, revealed she did not see many people who represented her as a Black woman in a political space.

When asked if she had someone to look up to in her girlhood days, she said: “Oh no, not in the political sphere, not at all.”

When Ms Butler was first elected as MP for Brent South in 2005, there were only a handful of Black MPs, including Diane Abbott and David Lammy.

She continued: “You don’t necessarily see who you want to be but if you have that support and encouragement around you and cocooning you, I think you can be elevated to where you want to be and I think sometimes that’s important.”

Ms Butler gave praise to the Powerlist for creating an opportunity for the UK African and Caribbean community to celebrate the success of their people at an uplifting event.

She said: “Walking in here today it’s like a huge warm hug by the great and beautiful Black community. Sometimes you don’t realise that you need that.

“Sometimes you’re struggling in your workplace. Sometimes you’re struggling when you go to the shops, sometimes you don’t realise you need this injection of Black excellence and that’s what today is about.”

The Powerlist awards was founded in 2005 to celebrate the accomplishments of African and African-Caribbeans in the UK from a range of sectors including business to entertainment. The Powerlist aims to spotlight Black role models to inspire youngsters who lack representation in mainstream coverage.

Ms Butler, who was the first Black woman to stand at the despatch box as a government minister, said that if the Powerlist existed when she was a girl she would feel she could “accomplish and achieve absolutely anything no matter what anybody would say to me.”

Ms Butler has been very vocal about the need for the UK government to pay reparations for slavery, a catastrophic trade which has heavily disadvantaged Africans and Caribbeans.

In a Black History Month debate, she said reparations had previously been paid to the “wrong people” as Britain paid 20 million pounds to slave owners in compensation.

Ms Butler explained: “Six years ago in 2018 I received a message – so did everybody else in the country – and this message said to inform me that we had finished paying reparations owed, and the message said the amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015, which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.

“I was absolutely shocked when I received that message and I thought, I don’t consent to my taxpayers’ money paying slave owners compensation.”

She added: “Some things will be easy to compensate. It’s not just about money.

“We could give back artefacts, we can give back the bodies of freedom fighters, stolen jewels and precious metals wherever they may be, make good the land and seas ruined by oil spills, correct the education of history, compensate land for homeowners, cancel the debt.

“You know, there’s lots of things that can be done to make sure we have reparations.”