Samia Meah with Prince William. Photo: Jeremy Selwyn

AS a teenager, I was the beneficiary of a charity that Prince William was patron of. We worked together to raise awareness regarding youth homelessness.

Though I was passionate about the cause, I firmly believed that the monarchy should be abolished if we are ever to truly eradicate inequality, such as youth homelessness, that stem from structural inequality and racism.

No child should be homeless, or should be in the circumstances that lead to homelessness in the first place in this privileged country.

How can we allow one family to receive millions of our tax money with no judgement and yet we judge children and families living under the poverty line, less than £1 per day? It’s nonsensical.

I recently posted “#AbolishTheMonarchy” on social media and received a barrage of abuse from people who told me, among other violent things, that I was not British. One abuser was an acquaintance of a school friend from Camden. Ironically, in their reaction, they were proving my point to be true: racism is rife in Britain and indeed, across the globe.

When the Queen called out to her Commonwealth to help rebuild the UK after the Second World War my father and his brothers left Bangladesh in search of a better life for their future children. I was born and raised in Somers Town in the 1990s.

After a laborious working life in Britain, my father died in his 40s, when I was just five. My poor mother and brother’s mental health deteriorated rapidly due to his leading absence. This was exacerbated by the extreme poverty and isolation we were left to live in. So a very high functioning family became a very dysfunctional one, resulting in physical and mental abuse and sheer neglect for the child me – this began when I was six.

I was on the child protection list due to living under the poverty line. I was also on the young carer list, as I translated all phone calls and letters for my mother. After school I would take her up Camden High Street to go to the post office to collect her little benefit money and pay all her bills. As carer and translator, I’d go to official appointments with the council, bank or anywhere else. Official translators were often unavailable. I’d take my mum food shopping on foot, and carry all the bags home. If I didn’t do these things, she would faint in the streets from anxiety panic attacks.

From the age of eight I walked myself to school, with matted hair and unclean clothes. When a friend asked why my hair never had a parting, I would simply reply: “I don’t know.” I would get teased for having a charity shop uniform, white girls in my class would laugh at the fact that I only had the one set and the white boys would mimic strange sounds (“bud-bud-ding!”) to mock my people, before bursting out in laughter. It wasn’t much of a childhood.

I didn’t tell anyone about the full extent of the abuse, though the warning signs were easy to spot, as I thought my family would be put into prison by the police and I knew they were too vulnerable to handle that. I didn’t get any real help at school because my grades were good – even though my attendance was very poor… I had to make the choice as a small child to endure the abuse until aged 16, when I’d found out that I could become my own legal guardian.

Soon after my final GCSE exam and my sweet-16th birthday, I left home to move into a Centrepoint hostel for the young and homeless in Delancey Street. They asked me to promote the cause on their behalf. Feeling grateful to them, I began volunteering with Prince William on many occasions spanning 11 years. I was asked to do things like deliver speeches alongside him, speak to the press regarding our working relationship and photograph him for the tabloids, as I was a photographer by this point.

I think William is nice. It’s nice that he’s let me photograph him or asked me join him in delivering various speeches. He’s always been nice to me and is seemingly a lovely person. William’s sympathy for me and others like me is real. But do you know what else is real? Inequality, systemic injustice and white supremacy created by the after-effects of colonialism that run deep in every facet and institution of this country. Homeless people dying on our expensive streets, traumatised nurses who are starving and children raised in poverty, as sole carers for their parents, is real.

When we fight to uphold the monarchy, we fight to uphold the archaic view that some humans are born superior to others. This is called white supremacy. This toxic belief is claiming lives as we speak, through structural inequality and systemic racism.
You might say what happened to me was rare, but a BBC report says 800,000 children are currently young carers in the UK. According to the Youth Homeless Databank, 121,000 young people are currently homeless or at serious risk of homelessness.

The 2020 government report on poverty states that in the period 2016/17-2018/19 67 per cent of Bangladeshi children were living in poverty. These figures could be worse now due to the pandemic.

Children, like the one I used to be, know that they are born different. They are seen and treated as unequal from birth, by state and country – we are trapped. Before taking our first breath, we are born with huge disadvantages and nothing about that is humane.

We currently foster inequality by providing measly food parcels to children living in poverty. Why? Because malnourished children can’t concentrate as well at school, and therefore are less likely to succeed later in life, thus continuing the cycle of entrenched poverty. Inequality in Britain is structural and on purpose.

Everyone holds subconscious internal bias, every doctor, teacher, judge, nurse and lawyer – thus perpetuating the structural inequality and racism.

Upon finishing secondary school in Somers Town, my head of year told me that a lot of the teachers disregarded children like me (who were Bengali, female, wore a hijab and were quiet) because they assumed I would simply get arranged married after school.

If you are a teacher please don’t ignore any warning signs and please consider your own bias towards the children. If you are a GP please believe and help women and people of colour when they speak about their illnesses – they know their bodies best. If you are an employer, please consider blind hiring and ensuring your workplace is a diverse and safe place for everyone.

Please have conversations in your own homes, schools and places of work about how we can better treat each other in active ways, and not just with one-off passive annual training days.

We need equality but need equity too.

Please consider writing to your MP or protesting, we need more people to not only to support in their hearts and minds but to actively stand with us in public too. Without our collective voices, change cannot occur.

• See more about Samia at www.samiacreative.com/about