Evelyn Akoto, a Southwark Labour councillor since 2014, has thrown her hat in the ring to replace Harriet Harman as Labour candidate for MP for Camberwell and Peckham.
In what some may interpret as a bid to differentiate herself from incumbent Harriet Harman, she told the News this week that, if selected and then elected, she would insist on having a local office and surprisingly added that she would not be an ‘aloof’ MP.
Cllr Akoto is the cabinet member for health and wellbeing and her achievements include setting up the council’s first food insecurity strategy for struggling families and setting up the Holiday Food and Fun programme to tackle food poverty.
As an Old Kent Road councillor, she also initiated a cross-party youth violence commission and kickstarted an award-winning review of youth services.
But her journey to key local party figure was not inevitable. She grew up on the Aylesbury Estate in the “uncaring” Thatcher era, and remembers a pervading “sense of desperation, no hope”.
“I was born in Ghana and, at the age of six, my family and I moved to the UK and settled in Southwark. I lived on various estates in the borough before moving permanently to the Aylesbury Estate in the 1980s, at the height of the uncaring Thatcher era.
“Despite that tough start in life, I did well at St Saviour’s & St Olave’s secondary school in the borough and proceeded to higher education.
“At sixteen I got a job at East Street market – I worked from 6am to 5pm and was paid £20 – in retrospect this was clearly child labour! But I was just proud to have found a job and to be earning my own money so my mother could focus on paying the important bills.
“I saw so many young people get caught up in crime and gangs and I wanted better for myself. Though I never felt scared, there was a sense of desperation, no hope and a sense that this was their lot which manifested in violence and unrest – but I made up my mind that I was not going to accept the limitation.
“As your Labour MP, I will put the needs of the constituency first, including opening a local office where residents and members can meet with me.
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“I will work with our community groups, local businesses, charities and local councillors to shape our national policies.”
She has also said she will set up a work experience project in the constituency which will provide training to “help widen young people’s aspirations”.
On a national level, she says she would campaign and lobby against society’s “huge inequalities”. Evelyn describes an education system that “channels its prejudices via exclusions” and “a job market not geared to supporting those on the fringes”.
She also talks about a healthcare system with “unequal access” and a police force “that threatens rather than protects some communities”.
Evelyn says she would be a “visible rather than an “aloof MP”: “This is an area where I’ve lived all my life. I want my constituents to see I’m doing the same things as them, that I’m using the same services as them.
“I don’t want to become an MP and become aloof. I’m going to be going to my Lidl, the same one where you are, where my children go to. That’s what I mean when I say I want to be visible.”
