Chris Williamson profile

Christopher Williamson (born 16 September 1956) is a Labour politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Derby North since 8 June 2017, having served previously for the same seat from 2010 until 2015. He was Shadow Minister for Communities and Local Government for three years between October 2010 and October 2013.

Williamson was also previously a local councillor in Derby, representing the Normanton ward from 1991 until his resignation in 2011. He served as leader of Derby City Council twice.

Early life and career

Born in Derby, he attended the St. John Fisher Primary School in Alvaston; Castle Donington High School, and St. Thomas More High School, Allenton before Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) where he obtained a CQSW in 1985.Template:Citation needed

Working as a mechanical engineering apprentice for a year from 1972 onwards, Williamson then worked as a bricklayer for six years. He was a social worker in Derby from 1983 to 1986 before working as a welfare rights officer. He has been a vegan since the 1970s.

Williamson joined the Labour Party in 1976. He became a councillor in 1991, then became Leader of the Labour Group on Derby City Council, serving as Leader of Derby City Council on two separate occasions. While council leader, Williamson formed a coalition with the Conservatives and in 2006 credited himself with having supported the Private finance initiative (PFI) while Chair of Housing in the 1990s. Interviewed in 2018, he termed his approach then as "innovative pragmatism" seeking to "be as radical as we possibly could within the confines that we were subjected to by central government". The scheme, he said, had not given "value for money".

He is a member of the League Against Cruel Sports and vice chair of the Local Government Anti Poverty Forum.

Parliamentary career

First term (2010–15)

Williamson was the second newly elected MP of the 2010 intake to make his maiden speech in the House of Commons, speaking in response to the Queen's Speech on 25 May 2010.

In October 2010, he became Shadow Fire and Emergency Services Minister within the Shadow Communities and Local Government team after serving just four months as an MP but after the reshuffle of the party in 2013; his role as Shadow Minister was replaced by Lyn Brown. During this period, he supported the Cameron coalition's 2011 military intervention in Libya and the British action against ISIS in Iraq in 2014 in parliamentary votes. In April 2018, Williamson said he was "naive" to support the votes on military intervention, although he was initially indecisive on the 2014 vote. He abstained on the Immigration Bill in 2014, following an instruction from the whips, which was later blamed for the Windrush scandal. He said at the time of the scandal: "I have to say – if I’m being honest – I didn’t study it enough or fully appreciate the implications".

He served as a member of the Communities and Local Government Committee between July and November 2010 and November 2013 to March 2015.

He was one of 16 signatories of an open letter to Ed Miliband in January 2015 calling on the party to commit to oppose further austerity, take rail franchises back into public ownership and strengthen collective bargaining arrangements.

At the 2015 general election, Williamson lost the Derby North seat to Amanda Solloway of the Conservative Party by 41 votes.

Second term (2017–present)

The Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn described Williamson in early 2016 as a "very great friend", saying that his defeat at the 2015 general election was "the worst result of that night". Williamson is an ally of Jeremy Corbyn and during the 2017 general election campaign he was described by the New Statesman as the "most pro-Jeremy Corbyn candidate in England’s most marginal constituency". Williamson expressed that his 2017 general election campaign in Derby North would be a "test case for Corbynism", and Corbyn campaigned for Williamson on 6 May.

At the unexpected general election, Williamson regained his former seat from Amanda Solloway of the Conservative Party with a majority of 2,015 votes. On 3 July 2017, Williamson was appointed as Shadow Fire and Emergency Services Minister within the Shadow Home Office team.

In August 2017, Williamson argued in favour of a plan, previously suggested by Jeremy Corbyn during his first leadership campaign, for women-only train carriages to reduce sexual assaults; reported incidents have doubled since 2012. Labour colleagues Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy were critical of the idea. The Women's Equality Party also criticised his comments.

Williamson resigned as shadow fire and emergency services minister on 11 January 2018 after a day earlier he had suggested in an interview that council tax on the highest value homes should be doubled. The pronouncement, which is not party policy and was outside Williamson's remit, was made without the knowledge of Andrew Gwynne, the shadow secretary of state for communities and local government.

With Corbyn as leader, he says the party has "a common-sense socialist" who does not place MPs in the situation of risking being in conflict with the party whips. Williamson insists he is "not one for undermining the leadership publicly", explaining the difference between his history in the Division lobbies and Corbyn's earlier frequent parliamentary vote rebellions as Corbyn expressing the opinions of party members on each occasion..

Labour and antisemitism under Corbyn

In an interview with Rowena Mason of The Guardian in late August 2017, Williamson said the disagreements over Corbyn’s handling of antisemitism within the Labour Party (and criticism of Corbyn's approach to the crisis in Venezuela) were "proxy wars and bullshit". According to Williamson: "I’m not saying it never ever happens but it is a really dirty, lowdown trick, particularly the antisemitism smears. Many people in the Jewish community are appalled by what they see as the weaponisation of antisemitism for political ends".

Marie van der Zyl, the Board of Deputies vice-president, said he should "show solidarity with those suffering racism within his own party rather than blaming the victims". Williamson later described antisemitism as being "utterly repugnant and a scourge on society, which is why I stand in absolute solidarity with anyone who is subjected to antisemitic abuse". In a later September article in Tribune magazine he wrote that his critics' "accusations of anti-Semitism were positively sinister" and "highly offensive and hurtful" in suggesting "that I was an anti-Semite myself, yet I have fought racism all my adult life".

In April 2018, Williamson said he had come across "evidence" Conservatives are posing on Twitter as Corbyn supporters. The other interviewee on the same Sky News broadcast, Nicky Morgan, an Education Secretary in the Cameron government, asked him a number of times if he favoured the expulsion of Ken Livingstone from the Labour Party. A month earlier, at a Momentum event in Peterborough, Williamson included Livingstone in his remarks: "We’ve got these ridiculous suspensions and expulsions from the party" made "in the most grotesque and unfair way".

Later in the month, Williamson backed Len McCluskey, who in a New Statesman article had accused Labour MPs of a campaign against Corbyn using the issue of antisemitism. He described his colleagues as "malcontents", on the BBCs Daily Politics programme, who were “completely out of step with party members" and voters. During the interview, he avoided saying if Chris Leslie, one of the Labour MPs named by McCluskey, should be deselected by indicating it was "a matter for Labour Party members in each constituency and not a matter for me or indeed Len".