Antoinette Fernandez’ path into politics was the opposite of the rags-to-riches experience many of her peers had. As the daughter of the Queen Mother of Lagos and her diplomat husband, the Nigerian-born writer, activist and newly-elected Green Party candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington had a privileged upbringing, boarding at Millfield School in Somerset before a master’s degree at the London Film School and starting out as a film director.
Fernandez’ father Oloye Antonio Oladeinde Fernandez — the late business magnate and UN ambassador, once considered one of the richest men in Africa — was helping to fund her creative career through a trust at the time, but became involved in a public feud and asked Fernandez to take his side in newspaper interviews. She refused and “literally, overnight, got cut off” from the family fortune at the age of 31. “I was no longer able to afford to be a film director, because you need money for that, and I suddenly became someone who desperately needed a job,” she tells me now, 15 years on.
Suddenly financially independent for the first time in her life, Fernandez quickly found herself a job as a bartender at Black’s, a members’ club on Dean Street, working 16-hour shifts around which she struggled to find the time or energy to maintain her creative work or apply for funding. This riches-to-rags experience might have challenged her at the time, but it laid the foundations for what was to become a promising political career. After volunteering for the Green Party several years after her family fallout in 2014, she applied to be the Green Party’s candidate for the London Assembly North East constituency last year, and was selected in August.
Then a second opportunity immediately came knocking. Just weeks after starting the job, another candidacy became available: this time in Hackney North and Stoke Newington — Diane Abbott’s constituency since 1987, and newly-competitive after long-time Hackney MP Abbott was suspended from the Labour Party, pending an internal investigation, following backlash to an antisemitic letter she wrote in the Observer (Abbott strongly disputes these charges). Last month, Fernandez won that too, becoming the first ever Black female Green Party candidate in the history of Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
“I’m trying to live up to the role,” Fernandez, 46, tells me today, just weeks after winning the seat. She meets me at the eclectic Mama Shelter hotel near Broadway Market in an enthusiastic flurry of energy, wearing on-trend wide-leg jeans, a cropped suit jacket and a large grin. She is clearly excited about the new gig, but feeling the pressure to make a name for herself before next year’s election in a constituency that is, for the first time, a competitive seat for the Greens. The constituency is left-leaning and equally concerned about air pollution and climate change as it is about rising rents and quality of life. Could Fernandez help to coax some of its traditional Labour voters over to the Greens?
Quite possibly, if her manifesto is anything to go by. “I’m quite stubborn... I don’t compromise,” she says, listing the causes she cares about most: housing, police reform, community involvement with the environment. While she shares core social values with Abbott, she’s more radical and uncompromising in her determination to effect change, particularly when it comes to the environmental agenda — something she believes the current Tory government has failed to tackle in any meaningful way. “They’re not doing anything [for the planet] at all, they’re denying [climate change] and feeding into conspiracies and pandering to their cronies in industry, and to their donors,” she says.
Fernandez is currently pushing Hackney Council to install solar panels on all 313 council-owned properties and utilise the river as an affordable and sustainable public transport option. She condemns Tower Hamlet’s recent announcement that it’ll be removing almost all of its low-traffic neighbourhoods, a scheme she supports and would like to see more of, where feasible. “I think a lot of the problems people had with [low traffic neighbourhoods] came from misunderstanding and fear,” she says. She would have liked to have seen Mayor of London work harder at informing Londoners about the scheme, instead of just “throw[ing] money at it”.
Like most of the Greens, Fernandez is weary of putting the onus on individuals to reverse the effects of the climate crisis. “People are doing the best they can,” she says. “It’s really hard to make demands of everyday people trying to survive in this economy. Let’s target industry and big energy, they’re the offenders – British Petroleum, Shell.”
Fernandez believes most of her politics is informed by her experience of life from the perspective of the upper class and as someone who, for a long time, was pretty much broke. She has eleven half-siblings but as her mother and father’s only child together, she grew up relatively isolated from the rest of the family. She was legally raised by her mother in the UK, but says she doesn’t really feel she was raised by her, instead spending most of her time boarding at Millfield School in Somerset or at summer camps before moving into a flat on her own at the age of 16. She went on to attain a bachelor’s degree in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University and moved to Hackney 15 years ago, around the same time she began attending film school — an industry she believes prepared her for politics, in many ways.
“Unfortunately, film school then was very much a product of the film industry then as well. It was rife with sexism, and some elements of racism. I remember I was in a situation where I was on a team with five guys and one girl, and I told the girl she could be the director of photography. And the guys came up to me and said ‘Look, we can’t have two women in charge.’ I went to the staff and they said: ‘Well, Antoinette, that’s just how it is. That’s how the industry is. You just have to deal with it.’”
Deal with it she did. As a politician today, Fernandez regularly speaks about her stints living in Europe have helped her appreciate the upsides and downsides of our city from both the outside and within, and how her jobs as a photographer, filmmaker, gallerist and bartender have given her an insight into the challenges many Londoners — particularly creatives — face every day (she is still looking for an agent for her fantasy novel, a fiction set in Somerset that she says weaves environmental issues in with a story of unrequited love between a black woman and an aristocratic white man).
“When you’re working so hard every day, it’s very difficult to go home and focus on what you’re really passionate about,” she tells me. “You’re exhausted, right? You’re worrying about rent, you’re worrying about food, you don’t have enough money to be able to go out and socialise and relax. You’re in a constant state of survival.”
Let’s target industry and big energy on the environment... It’s really hard to make demands of everyday people trying to survive
For these reasons, Fernandez plans to push for universal basic income trials for her constituency. She also wants to question Hackney Council about why new developments aren’t specifically focusing entirely on social housing and affordable homes. “[Companies] are building luxury flats while people are paying almost £1,200 for a room. They’re not building homes to ease this–they’re building homes to attract more money.”
What about gentrification? “I’m not anti-gentrification,” she says. “I mean, of course, Hackney has gentrified extraordinarily since I moved here in 2009, and after a certain point it gets very disruptive. It starts to become a sort of whitewashing and social cleansing. With Hackney North in particular, you have an area where many artists and galleries moved because they needed space to breathe and it was affordable. But when artists make something interesting and edgy and fun, other people come, and the people that come after that come because they want to profit.”
When asked about the astronomical rise in rents, Fernandez says she’s not into rent caps like Labour. It’s too late for that. “Rent has been ridiculous for well over a decade. We need rent reductions,” she says. She is more interested in fixing housing supply, which has caused the cost of living crisis, and which she sees as the result of the government allowing supermarkets and energy companies to bump up prices without a meaningful windfall tax. She also thinks it’s important to disincentivize the idea that purchasing homes can be an investment, one that people use to generate additional income or as a way to pad their retirement plans. “Homes should be exactly what they are–a basic need.”
Although next year’s election could still see Fernandez running against Abbott, Fernandez holds a deep respect for Abbott’s political accomplishments. “At the end of the day, we have to remember that Diane Abbott has been continuously elected since 1987, and there’s a reason for that. I really admire her as the first-ever Black female MP in the House of Commons.”
She shares Abbott’s commitment to removing police officers from schools, a policy she believes is only serving to criminalize and adultify children – especially Black children - and is especially horrified at the story of Child Q, a young Black schoolgirl in Hackney who was strip-searched by female police officers in 2022.
Fernandez deems the plague of antisemitism within the Labour party “appalling,” but cautions people to be careful of weaponizing that for their own gains. “Rather than trying to deal with the issue of antisemitism, they’re using it to push out people who don’t necessarily conform to New Labour.” She defines New Labour using Margaret Thatcher’s answer to a question about her greatest accomplishments in office - “Tony Blair and New Labour” - and paints the party as one with less interest in social justice, rent reductions, or climate action than one that is solely focused on appealing to Tory voters and pandering to right-wing agendas.
“They [the Tories] don’t have any incentive to do what’s right for communities. The whole point of the Green Party is to protect the environment. So there’s no way that we’d come into power and suddenly start to do a Keir Starmer and become more right-wing,” she says.
I asked Fernandez if she practices a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. “No, not at all,” she says. “People shouldn’t be dogmatic. You have to do what’s right for you. I think you have to remember that in the global south, meat is a very important part of their diet. And the global south [encompasses] the least contributing countries when it comes to climate change. I think we need to be very careful about forcing our culture and ideals onto others, because that’s another form of colonialism.”
Instead of demonizing people for what they eat, she wants to look into ways to make good quality meat that is farmed in a sustainable manner available to people. She is also interested in turning available public grassy areas into public gardens to grow food–things like fruit trees, nuts, chili, tomatoes. “It’s very therapeutic to see things you’ve planted grow,” she says. “It’s little things like this that help keep people engaged with the community and the environment around them. It causes you to start talking to your neighbours, and that will also help bridge the divide between people who —I don’t want to call them gentrifiers – but people who have recently moved to Hackney and communities that have been here for a very long time.”
So what of Fernandez’ own plans — does she hope to be here for a long time, too? “If I believe in something, I’m going to follow that through to the bitter end,” she tells me, grinning again. I’ll take that as a yes, then. Abbott could have some competition.
