Mothin Ali
Mothin Ali is a British politician who has served as Deputy Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, alongside Rachel Millward, since September 2025. He has also served as a member of Leeds City Council for Gipton and Harehills since 2024.
Early life
Ali is of Bangladeshi descent. His family moved to the UK in the 1960s, and his father worked as a unionised steelworker in Sheffield, where Ali was born and raised.In 2000, Ali moved to Gipton and Harehills.
Politics
Ali joined the Labour Party at the age of eighteen, but left and joined the Green Party in 2020, following the beginning of Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party. He began campaigning for election as the Green Party candidate for the Gipton and Harehills ward of Leeds City Council in 2022; this was one of the UK's poorest areas, 40% of whose population was Muslim, with over 65% coming from minority ethnic groups.Ali was elected in the 2024 Leeds City Council Election. This result was interpreted by Ali and some other commentators as a sign of local voters' dissatisfaction with the Labour Party's stance on the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Ali described his local election victory a win for the people of Gaza amidst the Israeli invasion: "We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine." Following this, he shouted the Takbir, which means "God is the greatest" in Arabic. He was investigated for the comments made in his victory speech. He added that he hoped to work jointly with Jewish Greens and Muslim Greens to discuss how to promote an end to the Gaza War. As a member of the Greens For Palestine group, Ali supported a change to Green Party policy to label the Israeli government's conduct in the Gaza war as apartheid and genocide and to support the associated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Ali made a prominent speech promoting this policy at the Green Party's annual conference in September 2024, and the party accepted the proposed policy change.
Ali is an anti-racism campaigner. He started the DigItOut campaign, which aims to end racism in horticulture. This was a response to his own experiences of racism in the gardening world, including abuse he received on his YouTube channel, which worsened after the publication in 2021 of the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. He is a long-standing critic of the UK government's Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, arguing that it embeds Islamophobia. In the wake of the 2024 United Kingdom riots, Ali criticised the racism of their perpetrators while also criticising what he saw as growing media and government encouragement of racist attitudes, and particularly Islamophobia, in the UK. As of 2024, he was campaigning to make Leeds what he called a "city of belonging", modelled on the concept of a City of Sanctuary.
Shortly after his election, Ali sought to overturn a Leeds City Council policy to close a number of council-run nurseries; the following year saw him campaigning for improved consultation regarding changes to road layouts in his ward.
For the 2024 West Yorkshire mayoral election, Ali was also nominated by his party to be the Green Party's pick to be deputy Mayor of West Yorkshire in the event that the Green Party won. However, the Greens came third. In June 2025, Ali announced he was standing to be deputy leader of the Green Party in the upcoming election; he was elected in September that year.