British-Liberian MP for Peckham, Miatta Fahnbulleh has been appointed UK secretary of state for energy and net zero as part of new Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first cabinet pick.
The radical Economist became a Member of Parliament in 2024 was leader of a policy thinktank called the New Economics Foundation (NEF) widely considered the bible for radical economic thinking through the prism of climate, social justice and the environment from 2017 to the end of 2023.
Immigrant Background
Miatta Fahnbulleh was born in Liberia in 1979, where her father was a prominent politician, she came to the UK aged six with her parents as asylum seekers fleeing the mounting tension that erupted into the first Liberian civil war. Her family successfully claimed asylum in the UK, settling in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where she attended an independent school.
She went on to study PPE at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating in 2000, before pursuing an MA and then a PhD in economic development at the London School of Economics.
Speaking on her Liberian childhood, she said “You see abject poverty and extreme wealth, you see how the family you were born into affects your life and you understand why inequality is wrong. It’s not just that it perpetuates itself, it’s that it’s fundamentally wrong and it needs to be changed. And that’s my core, that pursuit of economic justice.”
Public Service
Fahnbulleh was a former adviser to former Energy Minister, Ed Miliband before becoming an MP, and first joined the ranks of government as his deputy in DESNZ. After that, she became a minister at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
Fahnbulleh is one of the key policy brains in the Burnham cabinet and, like him, she champions the bottom-up approach of focusing economic growth in local communities, devolving resources and tax-raising powers.
Key Issues Before Her
A major issue she would have to deal with is the speculation in Westminster that Andy Burnham wants to approve new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.
A major sticking point has been the suggestions that new drilling would be approved at the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields off the north-east coast of Scotland.
This decision if implemented would come in direct conflict with what Miatta Fahnbulleh believes in. In a joint report with Friends of the Earth in 2021, her organisation called for a total end to new drilling in the North Sea basin, the cancellation of all future licensing rounds, the revocation of all undeveloped licences and the rejection of any applications for development consent.
All eyes would therefore be on her to see how she holds fast to her beliefs as she charts unforeseen territories in Andy Burnham’s government.
