Miatta Fahnbulleh, chief executive of a left-wing think tank and former policy advisor to number ten, is vying to become the next MP for Camberwell and Peckham.
Her bid comes after Labour MP Harriet Harman announced in December 2021 that she’d be standing down at the next election after almost forty years in the role.
Miatta has lived in southeast London for twenty years. But despite strong connections with the constituency, she maintains that meaningful change begins at the national level.
“When you get into the bear pit that is Westminster, unless you have that emotional connection with a place, you can get lost.
“But in the end… people want an MP that’s rooted [in the constituency] but they also want an MP that can drive big change nationally because they understand that’s what can unlock change locally.”
As an MP she says she would “stand up for big ideas”. She would campaign for the introduction of a ‘living income’, improving social care, childcare and housing.
She would also push to ensure the climate transition is done in a way that “pumps investment into communities”.
Miatta knows Camberwell and Peckham well: “My dad is Liberian and my mum is Sierra Leonian and we settled in north London, but there’s a massive Sierra Leonian community in Camberwell and Peckham.
“So growing up, it was a community I got to know. It’s where we went to do our hair, it’s where we went to do shopping before supermarkets had aisles for African food.”
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Although at home on Rye Lane, she’s just as comfortable in the corridors of Whitehall. She spent three years working for the Prime Minister’s strategy unit and another three leading devolution and local economic growth in the Cabinet Office.
Miatta says being so close to the levers of power during the 2008 economic crash was a watershed moment. She said: “My time at the centre showed me… that profound change is possible if there is the political will, if there is the focus and there is the vision, which times of crisis generate. We saw this during the pandemic when things that you’d never believe were possible, we were doing.”
She left the civil service when the coalition government’s programme of austerity meant dismantling ‘Sure Start’, a family support scheme she’d spent years building.
Nowadays, the 43-year-old mother of three heads up the New Economics Foundation, a think tank promoting “social, economic and environmental justice”.
Asked why she now wants to become an MP, she says the UK’s struggles have left her with no choice. “It feels like politics is still a few steps behind where the country is and the scale of crises. When we [Labour] win, we have to win for big change and, if we don’t, I don’t think the country will forgive us.”
