Natasha Walter on legacy, humanism, and the fight for a fairer world

Natasha Walter is a feminist writer, human rights activist, and author of Living Dolls, A Quiet Life, and Before the Light Fades: A Family Story of Resistance. She founded the charity Women for Refugee Women in 2006, working to support and empower asylum-seeking women in the UK. We caught up with Natasha to explore how her humanist beliefs have shaped her activism and her writing.

Hi Natasha! How has your humanist perspective informed or fuelled your career?

Hello! My humanist perspective is threaded through everything I do, because I feel strongly that we can’t wait for a better life in the hereafter but need to create the best world possible right now for everyone and for our planet. More and more I feel that all the causes that I work on are connected and my involvement in all of them comes from a deep desire to live in a way that is in harmony with the world I’d like to see. We can’t sit back and wait for someone else to do the work that is needed, we each have to get on and do what we can ourselves.

Your father, Nicolas Walter, was a prominent humanist writer and campaigner much like you. How do you see his legacy today?

I recently wrote a book, Before the Light Fades: A Family Story of Resistance, in which I explored my mother’s and father’s lives and tried to grapple with their legacies – both personal and political. What I found inspiring about my father’s life and work was partly his intransigence! He was a genuinely uncompromising person in many ways, although very warm and kind to those close to him. But he really didn’t care about being fashionable or admired by others, he was content to plough his own furrow when it came to his political and moral beliefs. When he campaigned against blasphemy laws, for instance, he was completely relaxed about offending people of any faith in a way that would be seen as very provocative now.

I also find his anarchism particularly resonates with me now. He was one of the first people to state that ‘means are ends’ in the political sense – that we can’t act in hierarchical and exploitative ways if we want to create a non-hierarchical society, we have to start putting that into practice right now. So he was part of the Committee of 100, the radical flank of the nuclear disarmament movement, and was influential in steering it towards practical anarchism or direct democracy.

And I also found his and my mother’s commitment to civil disobedience very important. They were both arrested numerous times, and Nicolas went to prison once for heckling Harold Wilson about the Vietnam War. They also ran the risk of much longer prison sentences through their activities in the Spies for Peace, a group that secretly broke into government nuclear bunkers to publish state secrets. That courage is so vital and inspires me to this day. I truly admire people who are prepared to put their own safety and comfort on the line in order to try to bring about improvements in society.

You’ve been a vocal advocate for refugees and asylum seekers for many years. How has the political landscape around immigration evolved during this time, and what are the most pressing concerns you see today, especially for women?

I feel pretty despairing when I think about this issue. When I set up the organisation Women for Refugee Women in 2006 I was really hopeful that we could shift public attitudes and government policy through enabling refugee women to tell their stories and building empathy and understanding for their experiences. Women who cross borders to seek safety have usually survived violence, including sexual violence, and are too often retraumatised by the hostile environment and by being locked up in detention when they seek asylum in the UK. 

We did win some battles at Women for Refugee Women – we helped to end the immigration detention of children, and we won a time limit on the detention of pregnant women, for instance. But overall it’s horrible to see how governments have used migrants and refugees as a scapegoat for wider failures in society. It’s very hard right now to build empathy around what women who cross borders are going through. But change is urgently needed – we really need to build a transparent asylum process in which women who seek safety here can get a fair hearing. Right now one of the key issues for refugee women – and for many other people – is also the lack of decent affordable housing, so that even if they do get their refugee status women and children are so often struggling with homelessness or insecure housing. So this links into wider issues around getting our society working for everyone. I truly wish we could see more leadership from the current Labour government on fairness in society, as well as empathy towards those who cross borders.

How has your family background, including your grandfather’s experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shaped your own values, attitudes, and activism?

My grandfather came to the UK as a refugee in 1939, as did my grandmother, although they arrived separately. They were both interned – or detained – as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man during the war. When I started working in this field, I didn’t consciously connect my grandparents’ experiences with my own desire to stand up for refugees. I was deeply influenced by some refugee women and children whom I met when I was working as a journalist, including a woman from DR Congo who had been imprisoned and tortured there but who had ended up sleeping on the streets in London when she came here to seek asylum, and the families I met in detention centres in the UK.

But over time, the parallels have kept coming up for me. My grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis from 1933 to 1936 and then spent three years on the run across Europe. At one point he was in Prague when the Nazis marched in and had to flee across the border to Poland hidden in a coal train. Today we criminalise and despise people who make similar journeys. He and my grandmother had terrible experiences in the 1930s, but then they were lucky that they were able to rebuild their lives and bring up their children in safety after the war. And yet we deny refugees today the chance to rebuild their lives. The post war consensus around the need to treat refugees decently is collapsing, and people are suffering needlessly every day as a result. 

In Before the Light Fades, you explore the profound impact of your mother’s suicide. How did writing this book shape your understanding of grief?

I wrote that book out of a deep sense of grief and guilt. The grief never disappears, but by writing the book I felt I had done something that was very precious and important for me, which was to capture not only Ruth’s death, but also her life. She chose suicide out of a sense that her life was complete and out of fear of her growing dementia. Although I still feel she made that decision prematurely, I have come to accept and even respect her decision, which was of a piece with her determination to live life on her own terms. She was a wonderful woman and I am so glad I could tell her story.

In Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, you argued that despite advances in women’s rights, sexism was resurfacing in new forms. If you were to re-write the book today, how would you re-assess cultural sexism in 2025?

I have been so struck by the number of women who have come up to me in the last few years saying that Living Dolls was the first feminist book they read and wanting to talk about it with me. It’s very good for a writer to hear that! But it’s also sad, because they always go on to say that they feel that little has changed. In fact, the rise of social media and online misogyny often makes life harder for young women, and there is worryingly a growing divide in attitudes between young women and young men. My new book, which I’m working on at the moment, explores the current backlash to women’s rights and how we need to rebuild feminism in the face of these growing threats.

What do you see as humanism’s role in addressing contemporary challenges such as social inequality, climate change, and the rise of populism?

It’s vital to speak up for humanism and rationalism in a world in which more and more people are falling into misinformation and prejudice. Obviously we can’t dismiss the positive role that religion plays in many people’s lives, but I am concerned that so often people are just picking up on lazy prejudices rather than trying to build consensus around ways forward. Humanism has a role to play in helping to ground debates in truth and pragmatism.

You’ve written both non-fiction and literary fiction [Walter’s novel A Quiet Life, 2016, had its film rights optioned in 2017]. How do you approach these different forms of writing, and what are the unique challenges and rewards of each?

Fiction comes from a very different part of my mind, one that enjoys playfulness and the imagination, and it’s pure pleasure to write. I wish I was better at shaping my stories, as I have some unfinished fiction, but I’m finding it hard to complete another novel. Non-fiction feels more like a discipline, it’s about going step by step through the research and arguments. I enjoy it, but it can make me anxious because I’m always so concerned to get things right, to be accurate, to do my fact checking. The joy of writing non-fiction is when people respond saying that their minds have been changed, or they have opened up to new ways of thinking about an issue, or they want to continue the discussion that the book or article has started for them. It feels like such a privilege to be able to enter into these conversations with readers, I absolutely love that.

What about the humanist approach to life appeals to you most?

Honesty. I think all religions involve an element of self-delusion, and that’s no way to live your life. And freedom: the great thing about living in a secular society is that people have the ability to pursue their own religious or non-religious beliefs in their own ways, but not to compel others to follow them.

Are there any Humanists UK campaigns close to your heart?

I am a passionate believer in getting the church and other religious institutions out of education. I cannot see why we still have faith schools in the UK, which simply entrench division in society. I’m lucky that my children have been able to attend local state schools, where they’ve had friends of many faiths and none, and I think that should be the model for all education. I support the ongoing campaigns for assisted dying, particularly in the light of my mother’s decision to end her own life at a time of her choosing.

I also really support international campaigns to support non-believers in other countries in their struggles for freedom and, if necessary, for asylum. In my work at Women for Refugee Women I got to know many women who had rebelled against religious norms in their countries and had been persecuted as a result, and I think that women in Britain should stand in solidarity with women who face such repression worldwide.