“People still are accusing me of being a rioter,” said Mothin Ali, the Green party councillor for Gipton and Harehills in Leeds. It is true he was there on Thursday night when a police car was turned on its side, projectiles were thrown at riot police and a doubledecker bus was set alight in a night of unrest triggered when police turned up to help social services take some children into care. But far from being a rioter, it was Ali, and others in the community, who stood in front of police in efforts to protect them, stopped people throwing bins and crates on the blaze and ultimately gathered water from nearby homes to put out the fire. What made him put his safety at risk? “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s my area. I didn’t want people getting involved when they shouldn’t be getting involved. Throwing a rock and ending up with a 10-year jail sentence.
“And some of the police officers over the last few years I’ve got to know and I didn’t want them to get hurt. I thought, this is what a councillor is supposed to do.” Early in the evening Ali was accused of rioting online by members of the far right, including Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, who claimed footage showed the “newly elected councillor for the area rioting tonight in Leeds. Multiple reports he’s even on the streets with them.” Though many people saw the subsequent images and video of Ali protecting the community and giving rousing speeches to those gathered, some of the lies have stuck.
On Sunday, a far-right demonstration was organised in Gipton, an area adjacent to Harehills. About 20 to 30 people attended, many from outside Leeds, Ali said, but there was no trouble. It is likely that the reason he was picked out for online abuse on Thursday was that he was already no stranger to the far right. “Tommy Robinson absolutely loves me,” he joked. “Some of the far right, I’m their sweetheart.”
When he was elected to Leeds city council in May, he was criticised for his vocal support for Gaza, which eventually led to racist abuse and death threats. MailOnline accused him of “sparking outrage” by saying Allahu Akbar, a declaration of faith, at the end of his victory speech. He also said it was a “win for the people of Gaza”. “There was a whole load of thanks, but everything else just got lost,” said Ali. “Some of the rightwing newspapers just clipped the last 10 seconds, with ‘he said Allahu Akbar, he’s the Gaza councillor, what a vile guy, what a bad guy’. And because of the way I was dressed and the way I look, I just fit the caricature. “It got really, really threatening after that. My phone started going off every few minutes, it was ‘die [P-word], die’ and ‘I’m gonna kill you’. They started posting pictures of my kids and all that sort of thing. I shut my social media down. I deleted Twitter, I came off Facebook. “I wasn’t expecting it,” he added. “I thought probably I’d get some criticism afterwards but I never thought it would be as crazy as it was. It was relentless, day after day. There was an incident where someone turned up at my house, someone let my tyres down, someone phoned the police and made a death threat and was asking about my security. “It’s just horrible, absolutely horrible. But people here know what I’m about.”
As he walked through Harehills on Monday, four days on from the unrest, many people stopped to thank him for what he did on Thursday night. Other people came up to him to tell him about problems in the area that needed solving. From his point of view there were immediate problems that needed tackling after more than a decade of a Tory government. “We need to be able to reach out to the communities, people who are quite isolated, bring them into the system, [and say ‘Look, this is the value of voting, this is the value of education, the schools aren’t your enemies, the teachers are trying to help you.’ Build that level of trust, because there is a massive level of distrust. And we’ve got to make sure they’re welcomed into the system, not forced into the system.” But, in stereotypical local councillor style, he said one of the biggest complaints was bin collections being missed because of blockages in the narrow streets. He pulled up a meme made from a picture taken by a local photographer, which described him as the “hero of Harehills”. He said: “I think someone should have captioned it: ‘Nothing stops me on bin day.’”