Aneesa Akbar: ‘I just want a society built on compassion and justice’
‘MOUTH-WATERING’: Aneesa Akbar at Asi Barbecue Restaurant. Pictures by Phil Ascough
Chewing the Fat, out to lunch with Phil Ascough
This week’s guest: Aneesa Akbar
You could say we were fellow students in Cottingham, but that would be stretching it.
As a sixth-former enduring A-levels, I spent a couple of nights at The Lawns while checking out the University of Hull. Long enough to establish that recent claims of the village always embracing newcomers – even scruffy students – were being made by people new to the village, or with short memories.
More than 30 years later Aneesa Akbar stayed for an entire academic year at Needler Hall, now looking altogether smarter and more welcoming as Aldi.
Aneesa has similar memories of frostiness: “The locals of Cottingham didn’t much care for the students in 2010, but we were a bit rowdy so I wasn’t that surprised.”
Maybe it was Aneesa and her chums who I was cursing for the clutter caused by abandoned shopping trolleys nicked from the Co-op by students booling their beer back to Needler.
A-level results sent me elsewhere but it’s funny how things work out. The pulling power of Hull brought me back more than 40 years ago, and for the last 30 I’ve lived in Cott.
I never knowingly met Aneesa until a couple of years ago. I’d been reviewing the Brazilian restaurant on the sort of lovely summer afternoon that the marina was made for, and then waddled along the quayside with my companion, both of us stuffed and wondering whether we could muster the energy to roll across Murdoch’s Connection.
We paused after spying a woman on a bench, recognised her from the “gobby left-wing Twitter account” far from typical of a City Councillor, and decided she would be good company for a pint or two so tempted her to the Taphouse.
Beer for us, soft drinks for Aneesa who was en route to represent the Council at a cultural event. We found her bright, bubbly, a breath of fresh air and something of a kindred spirit so we kept in touch and then identified her as an excellent subject for this column.
We met in the early evening because Asi Barbecue Restaurant – recommended by Aneesa and outstanding when I called in a couple of times for research purposes – doesn’t open until 4pm.
Asi is Turkish, terrific and not widely known. I used to go there a fair bit years ago when, as The Brickmakers pub, it bounced to the sounds of the region’s best rock and blues bands.
It still looks like a pub and most of the brews on the bar are the same as you’d find in any traditional neighbourhood hostelry. But in the fridges and on the shelves there are bottles of Efes and raki, and the menu makes your mouth water with its array of meze and mains and the sort of super-sweet desserts that demand a Turkish coffee accompaniment.
Unusually, because many restaurants fail badly on this, Asi also keep people up to date online, with a decent website and Facebook presence. There’s also a car park, but it’s not the biggest and Walton Street outside suffers from blanket restrictions imposed on the off chance that there might be an event at the MKM Stadium.
You can park on the streets for an hour. To do justice to the Asi menu you need two, three, maybe more. That shouldn’t be a problem when there’s no fair, football or rugby. Maybe I need to write a letter to a friendly councillor…
The interview was agreed long before the uproar in Cottingham about housing asylum seekers at The Lawns, but that episode gave us a handy reference point for a chat about Hull’s development as a multicultural community.
For me the biggest concern was to see a few hundred people on the streets of my village not so much marching in protest, more sleepwalking to disaster. They seemed oblivious to the way in which the far right were trying to hijack concerns about the government’s cynical and cruel approach to the refugee situation, and then use the numbers on the street to legitimise their racist agenda.
The Facebook group set up as the social media voice of the protesters was at first shambolic and shocking, open for all to see members who included some prominent, respected people from across the region, seemingly happy to align themselves with neo-Nazis. Then, within a couple of days, sinister as the site pulled down the shutters, enabling participants to peddle their hate in private.
Aneesa showed the more measured, weary concern of someone who, sadly, has experienced it all before.
She recalled: “I remember seeing my dad being verbally abused in the Stretford Arndale and seeing the EDL march in our neighbourhood. I remember one of my friends being stopped by a security guard who we later found out was a member of the BNP. He was just stopping people of colour.”
Aneesa’s grandfather came to England from Pakistan some years ago and had his own shop in Manchester. Aneesa grew up as a Muslim in Chorlton-cum-Hardy and became politically aware as she progressed through her teens.
She said: “If you could see me when I was 14 you’d see I wasn’t a gobby leftie, but as I was growing up I used to sneak out not to go and get drunk but to go on protests with my friends. I still don’t see politics as a career, and if I ever do that will be a bad sign.”
Hull was her third choice of university but has become her first love, and it was in the Tory stronghold of Cottingham that she began to hone her political views.
She said: “I applied to Sheffield and Birmingham first but coming to Hull through clearing was the best thing that ever happened to me and I learned so much about myself.
Aneesa with gnome mug
“I lived in Cottingham for my first year. There were a lot of Tories but my course was quite good because it enabled me to debate people. I didn’t know many Tories growing up. It encouraged me to become politically active and to raise my voice a bit, because I was very shy growing up.”
The activism led to Aneesa joining the Labour Party, winning election to Hull City Council in 2018 and again in 2022, and in between taking the controversial decision to challenge Diana Johnson to stand as Labour’s candidate for Hull North in the 2019 General Election.
A few years earlier Aneesa had also generated a bit of turbulence in her first job: “There were a few flashpoints because I tried to unionise the workforce. I was there for three years and then worked in admin at a housing association – it was useful to get an insight into how social housing works.”
Now she works full-time representing the residents in Central ward, which extends from Freetown Way east to the River Hull, north to Sculcoates and west to embrace Spring Bank, Hull Royal Infirmary and a fair bit of Anlaby Road.
It’s a busy patch: “The public generally don’t really know how much work councillors do. That’s not saying councillors should be given more because you don’t want a situation where you professionalise it too much, but we want to see a scenario where councillors can come from different walks of life – single mothers, disabled people, working-class.
“The worst bits are people not understanding your vision and the obstacles that stop you doing the things that help people. Some of the most satisfying things are those individual pieces of case work that are difficult for people and that we are able to get to the bottom of. And knowing that you have restored some faith and trust for that resident.
“I have seen so many people who have been battered and bruised by Tory austerity. I’ve had people ringing me up crying and people ringing me who have no food. I’ve also bumped into people in the pub who told me I helped them move on from being homeless.”
We move on to discuss two of Aneesa’s various interests outside politics. Garden gnomes and knitting could scarcely be more traditional, white, middle-class reader of a few national newspapers which shall remain nameless.
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The knitting is just something she picked up at university. The gnome collection – about a dozen in all – was inspired in part by Amelie, a French film in which the title character steal’s her father’s garden gnome and gives it to her friend, an air stewardess who takes it on her global travels, snapping pictures at famous landmarks.
And then there are the gnome liberation activists who occasionally hit the headlines: “I find it odd that people will run around ‘liberating’ garden gnomes yet never seem to think about the limits on their own personal freedoms.”
At the risk of offending Aneesa’s socialist sensitivities I find myself thinking of commercial opportunities.
How about a range of Diversity Dwarves – gnomes of colour, Pride gnomes, girl gnomes? And long, knitted scarves bearing a modern take on the name of a famous scarf wearer. From “Doctor Who” to “Doctor Where?”, “Doctor When” and – coming soon – “Doctor How Effing Much?!!!”
Which puts us back on track, joining the dots from shy schoolgirl to Hull’s only BAME woman on the City Council.
Aneesa recalled: “I remember instances in primary school when I would challenge back against someone being bullied. At secondary school I remember students walking out of their classes to protest against the Iraq war. There was a lot of social injustice going on in the world and the New Labour government was quite totalitarian. That’s what made me political and made me want to be part of something different and create a more compassionate society.
“I grew up with those sort of sympathies. I just can’t bear to live under austerity and see working-class people have their lives stripped away from them by 13 years of governments which are now firmly far-right with racism against refugees and attacks on trade unions. It’s just unnecessary. I can’t remember a time of a government thinking about justice and how power is distributed.
“It’s about wanting to make a society that’s built on compassion and justice. That’s the responsibility of all of us.”
Gnorman the gnome
For Aneesa, the pressures are ramped up by racism and by the lockdowns and limitations of recent years triggering unpleasant memories of enforced isolation in the past.
She said: “Some people have become fixated with the idea that leaving the EU was the start of racism but it wasn’t. I experienced it in the early 2000s and it goes back much further.
“Coming to Hull it was a different type of racism. Manchester was explicit but Hull is more subtle. It’s a friendly city and I think a lot of the racism is masked in ignorance and because I was in a university bubble.
“But there’s some horrific staff that’s happened here. I remember as a student the EDL wanted to march on the mosque and we went to protest against that. There have also been far-right protests in the city centre. And far-right graffiti at the mosque.
“The racism I have experienced in Hull increased when I became a councillor, not so much from residents but more from political opponents in my own party or other parties, or in the media when I have held up a mirror to them. I have spoken to BAME colleagues and they have had experiences as well.
“I know I am quite vocal. I am more likely to attract that behaviour but that doesn’t justify it. Most of it has been horrific and goes way beyond abuse on social media. I’ve received racism on my doorstep and when out canvassing or even just shopping. I’ve also received it in emails and phone calls.
“It usually happens when I call out racism against other people and about Spring Bank being reported as a no-go area. People who are vulnerable have been targeted. But it’s not about victim blaming. It’s not because I have brought it on myself. It’s because I have done my job.”
Politics doesn’t feature heavily in Aneesa’s ambitions. She wants to travel and to go back to university. At 31 there’s plenty of time for everything.
And that was it. We left Asi and I gave Aneesa a lift to her street. On a Friday night as other drinkers and diners were still getting ready to go out, this political firebrand called in to sign an important form for a resident, and then went home to do her knitting.