| Alexandra Bulat | |
| Citizenship: | Romanian and British |
| Known For: | first English county councillor of Romanian descent |
| Party: | Labour |
| Movement: | Young Europeans |
Alexandra Bulat is a Romanian-British county councillor of Cambridgeshire. She is the first English county councillor of Romanian background, elected in UK local elections on 6 May 2021.[1] On 4 March 2024, she was announced as Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate for the Huntingdon constituency.[2] for the 2024 United Kingdom general election.
Mainly raised in Romania, Bulat had spent a year in the UK as a young child while her father worked for the NHS. Returning as a student, she initially had a poor command of English.[3]
Bulat is a Labour Party councillor reprenting Abbey ward on Cambridgeshire County Council. She was elected at the 2021 local elections winning 41.77% of the vote and a majority of 205 despite a 25.76% increase in the Green party votes compared to the previous election.[4]
Dr Bulat also won the University College London's (UCL) Provost Public Engagement ' Find Your Voice' Award in 2020 for public engagement by an early career researcher. She is a leading member of 3million and co-manager of their network for Young Europeans and she volunteers with charity Settled which helps EU people on application for 'settled status', following the UK Brexit arrangements.[5] She was invited to write for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 2019,[6] and by Al Jazeera to comment on the freedom of movement arrangements finally agreed for Gibraltar on 31 December 2020. She had previously spoken about incipient racism in Romanian language posters about shoplifting appearing in British supermarkets. And she was invited to speak about her formal analysis of the attitudes to migration identified in campaign policy fliers for the EU Referendum.[7] She was one of the 33 Labour councillors who signed an open letter to The Guardian calling for a confirmatory referendum on Brexit.[8]
As an outspoken advocate of EU citizens rights and a dual British-Romanian citizen, she shared her experiences of racist and xenophobic abuse with The London Economic Review and Labour party events,[9] with her political enquiries into the route to citizenship during the Brexit transition period noted The Independent.[10]
At the closing date in June 2021, for those not yet confirmed to have settled status in the UK, Bulat and others were concerned about the impact of a late surge in awareness and the backlog in applications and a loss of rights.[11] BBC reported that she spelled out basic rights that young Europeans would lose, and said that a 'physical proof of status' is needed to suit some people.[12] Attitudes to migrant workers who previously may have had to take work that could be considered 'low skilled' and the future 'points system' blocking access to the labour markets currently relying on EU migrants was a concern of her research in 2019.[13] In the debate on voter identification for voting in the UK,[14] Bulat and others produced a report on the current and potential impact on under-represented groups in London.[15] As vice-chair of the County Council committee looking at paid family leave, a motion which was then passed, she had said "For me this is a matter of principle and basic rights, especially if we want to improve diversity in local government”.[16]
In March 2024, Bulat was selected by Labour as the Propsective Parliamentary Candidate for Huntingdon for the upcoming General Election. Bulat stood in 2024 General Election on the 4th July 2024 and came second with 16,758 votes, behind the Conservative candidate Ben Obese-Jecty with 18,257.[17]
Her doctorate was based on research on exploring whether local contact affected attitudes towards EU migrants in 'a comparison of British, Romanian and Polish residents' views in two English local authorities in the context of Brexit'.[18] Her studies included ephemera in the British Library where her case study analysis identified a bias in the materials against migrants from certain EU countries.[19] A recent collaboration on EU citizens’ perceived identity is conducted with Professor Tanja Bueltmann of Strathclyde University.[20] She was later co-author of a study funded by EU Horizon Fund to study the impact of 'growing up abroad' as which compared Italian and more recent Romanian cohorts.[21]
Along with a doctorate from University College London, Bulat also has a Masters degree from Cambridge and an undergraduate degree from the University of Sussex.