David Lindon Lammy[3] was born on 19 July 1972 in Whittington Hospital in Archway to Guyanese parents David and Rosalind Lammy.[4][5][6] He and his four siblings were raised solely by his mother after his father left the family when Lammy was 12 years old. Lammy has spoken about the importance of fathers and the need to support them in seeking to be active in the lives of their children.[7] He chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood, and has written on the issue.[8][9][10]
After Harvard, Lammy was employed as an attorney at Howard Rice in California from 1997 to 1998, and with D. J. Freeman from 1998 to 2000.[6] He is a visiting professor of practice at SOAS.[15][16]
Parliamentary career
In May 2000, Lammy was elected for Labour on the London-wide list to the London Assembly.[17] Later in the same month, he was selected as the Labour candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Tottenham, following the recent death of the veteran member of parliament (MP), Bernie Grant.[18] Lammy was elected to the seat in a by-election held on 22 June 2000 with 53.5% of the vote and a majority of 5,646.[19] Aged 27, he was the youngest MP in the house at the time.[20]
Lammy was re-elected as MP for Tottenham at the 2001 general election with an increased vote share of 67.5% and an increased majority of 16,916.[21]
At the 2010 general election, Lammy was again re-elected, with an increased vote share of 59.3% and an increased majority of 16,931.[26] After Labour lost the election, Lammy returned to the backbenches, and a Labour Party leadership contest was announced. During the contest Lammy nominated Diane Abbott, saying that he felt it was important to have a diverse field of candidates, but subsequently declared his support for David Miliband. Following the election of Ed Miliband, Lammy pledged his full support but turned down a post in the Shadow cabinet, highlighting the need to speak on a wide range of issues that would arise in his constituency due to "large cuts in the public services".[27]
In 2012, Lammy pledged his support to Ken Livingstone's bid to become the Labour London mayoral candidate in the 2012 London mayoral election, declaring him "London's Mayor in waiting".[28] Lammy became Livingstone's selection campaign chair. In 2014, Lammy announced that he was considering entering the race to become Mayor of London in the 2016 election.[29]
In March 2016, he was fined £5,000 for instigating 35,629 automatic phone calls urging people to back his mayoral campaign without gaining permission to contact the party members concerned. Lammy apologised "unreservedly" for breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.[36] It was the first time a politician had been fined for authorising nuisance calls.[37]
Return to the frontbench
At the snap 2017 general election, Lammy was again re-elected with an increased vote share of 81.6% and an increased majority of 34,584.[38][39] At the 2019 general election, Lammy was again re-elected, with a decreased vote share of 76% and a decreased majority of 30,175.[40][41]
On 7 February 2022, while Lammy and Starmer were leaving Parliament, they were ambushed by a group of people who shouted abuse at Starmer including the words "traitor" and "Jimmy Savile". This followed Boris Johnson falsely blaming Starmer for the non-prosecution of Savile when Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions in the Crown Prosecution Service. Starmer was DPP in the years immediately prior to Savile's death but there is no evidence he was involved in the decision to not have him prosecuted.[46] Two people, a man and a woman, were arrested after a traffic cone was thrown at police officers. Johnson tweeted that it was "absolutely disgraceful" and thanked the police for acting swiftly.[47] Shayan Sardarizadeh for BBC Monitoring said that the protest was an attempt to recreate the Ottawa "freedom convoy" protests in the UK, and noted that the activists' references to Magna Carta indicated that the protesters were members of the sovereign citizen movement.[47]Julian Smith, the former chief whip, and Simon Hoare were among Conservatives who called for Johnson to apologise. MP Kim Leadbeater and Brendan Cox, the sister and husband of murdered MP Jo Cox, warned against politicians lending credence to far-right conspiracy theories.[48][49] The following day, a Downing Street source said that Johnson still would not apologise for the slur against Starmer.[50] Following the incident when activists forced police to protect Lammy and Starmer extremists issued multiple death threats against Starmer and other Labour MPs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) sent material to the Metropolitan Police. Imran Ahmed of the CCDH stated, "Every time a violent extremist makes a threat of violence and gets away with it, the norms of those groups worsen, and others are driven to newer depths of behaviour."[51]
On 19 November 2023, Lammy visited Israel and had a meeting with Israeli president Isaac Herzog and Foreign Minister Eli Cohen.[53] That month, Lammy said an Israeli strike on a refugee camp could be "legally justified".[54] In January 2024, as he was giving a speech, he was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters.[55]
On 14 July 2024, Lammy visited Israel and met with the families of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip.[67] He called for a ceasefire in Gaza that would be conditional on the release of all hostages.[68] After receiving assurances of its neutrality, Lammy announced the resumption of British funding to the UNRWA, stating that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was "desperate" and "no other agency" could deliver aid on the scale needed.[69]
Lammy promised to review the UK's relationship with China.[70] In August 2024, he refused to label China's persecution of the Uyghur ethnic minority as "genocide".[71]
On 14 August 2024, he met Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in London to discuss the growing UK–Saudi partnership. Lammy wrote on X: "We'll work together on shared defence, economic & security interests, including pressing for de-escalation in the region and a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza."[72]
Lammy visited the Norwegian Joint Headquarters in Bodø together with his Norwegian counterpart, Espen Barth Eide, to discuss deepening defence and security ties with the country and tackling threats from Russia.[73]
On 19 September 2024, Lammy sparked a diplomatic row with Armenia because of a reference to Nagorno Kharabakh conflict in his blog post.[74] His remarks were described as "callous", as he referred to what has been described as ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Christian population of the region as "liberation",[75] and "ignorant" because of parallels he drew between Azerbaijan (a dictatorship in allied relations with Russia) and Ukraine, which is fighting against Russia.[76][77]
Following the UK's decision to relinquish control of the Chagos Islands, Lammy asserted that this didn't signal a shift in the government's position on other overseas territories. He furthermore stated that the status of the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar were "non-negotiable".[78]
In November 2024, following the issuace by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in Gaza, Lammy clarified that he considered there to be not discretion for him but to implement the warrant. His position contrasted with France's view that Netanyahu benefited from immunity from the ICC.[79] Lammy's strong stance came through in response to questions by the Foreign Affairs Committee's Abtisam Mohamed who pressed the foreign secratary to clarify UK's position on the implementation of the newly issued warrant.[80]
Political views
Crime
Lammy has talked about black and minority ethnic people, in particular younger people, with regards to their relation with crime and how they are treated by the criminal justice system.[81]
On 11 August 2011, in an address to Parliament, Lammy attributed part of the cause for England's riots of a few days earlier to destructive "cultures" that had emerged under the prevailing policies.[82] He also stated that legislation restricting the degree of violence that parents are allowed to use when disciplining their children was partly to blame for current youth culture, that had contributed to the riots.[83]
In September 2017 Lammy stated that the criminal justice system deals with "disproportionate numbers" of young people from black and ethnic minority communities: despite saying that although decisions to charge were "broadly proportionate", he asserted that black and ethnic minority people still face and perceive bias.[84] Lammy said that young black people are nine times more likely to be incarcerated than "comparable" white people, and proposed a number of measures including a system of "deferred prosecution" for young first time offenders to reduce incarcerations.[85] Lammy has claimed that black and ethnic minority people offend "at the same rates" as comparable white people "when taking age and socioeconomic status into account"; however, they were more likely to be stopped and searched, if charged, more likely to be convicted, more likely to be sent to prison and less likely to get support in prison.[86]
In 2018, Lammy blamed the then-Prime MinisterTheresa May, Home SecretaryAmber Rudd, and London MayorSadiq Khan for failing to take responsibility over fatal stabbings in London.[33] He also criticised inequality, high youth unemployment among black males, and local authorities cutting youth services and outreach programmes.[87]
Lammy has commented on Britain's history of slavery.[88][89][90] He has also criticised the University of Oxford for admitting relatively few black students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds.[91] He believes the Windrush scandal concerns injustice to a generation who are British, have made their homes and worked in Britain and deserve to be treated better.[92]
In January 2016, Lammy was commissioned by then-Prime Minister David Cameron to report on the effects of racial discrimination and disadvantage on the procedures of the police, courts, prisons and the probation service. Lammy published his report in September 2017, concluding that prosecutions against some BAME suspects should be delayed or dropped outright to mitigate racial bias.[94][95]
He has spoken out against antisemitism within the Labour Party, and attended an Enough is Enough rally. At the rally, Lammy stated that antisemitism has "come back because extremism has come back" and is damaging support for Labour among Britain's Jewish community.[97]
In January 2019, Lammy described Rod Liddle having a column in a weekly newspaper as a "national disgrace" and accused Liddle of having "white middle class privilege" for expressing the view that absent fathers played a role in violent crime involving black youths.[98] Writing in an article for The Spectator, Liddle disputed Lammy's claim that he was raised in a family reliant on tax credits, which were not introduced in the United Kingdom until Lammy was aged 31.[99] Lammy made the same argument – that absent fathers are a 'key cause of knife crime' – in 2012.[100]
Lammy recorded a Channel 4 documentary for Remembrance Sunday called The Unremembered: Britain's Forgotten War Heroes, which was broadcast on 10 November 2019. In it he reveals how Africans who died in their own continent serving Britain during WWI were denied the honour of an individual grave, despite the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's reputation for equality.[101] The documentary was produced by Professor David Olusoga's production company; Olusoga described the failure to commemorate black and Asian soldiers as one of the "biggest scandals" he had ever come across.[102]
The documentary inspired an investigation by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.[103] The subsequent report found that "pervasive racism" underpinned the failure to properly commemorate service personnel. The report stated that up to 54,000 casualties of "certain ethnic groups" did not receive the same remembrance treatment as white soldiers who had died and another 350,000 military personnel recruited from east Africa and Egypt were not commemorated by name or even at all.[104] In April 2021, Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered an "unreserved apology" over the findings of the review.[103]Secretary of State for DefenceBen Wallace apologised in the House of Commons, promising to make amends and take action.[105] Lammy, who was critical to bringing the matter to light, called this a "watershed moment".[103]
Home Office security
In October 2022, Lammy called for a full investigation into an alleged security breach by Suella Braverman. Lammy said: "The home secretary is the most serious job you could have in our state. This is a person who makes judgements about terrorism and counter-terrorism, who makes judgements about very, very serious offenders, whether they should be allowed out of prison, and for that reason, it's someone who, I'm afraid, judgement is critically important. I'm afraid this is a lapse of judgement that, quite rightly, she was sacked for. The question is, why was she brought back?"[106]
Foreign policy
Lammy with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on 10 July 2024Lammy with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, 26 July 2024
Lammy is a staunch advocate of British membership of the European Union. On 23 June 2018, he appeared at the People's Vote march in London to mark the second anniversary of the referendum to leave the European Union. The People's Vote was a campaign group calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union.[107] On 30 December 2020, he voted for the Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson's Government.
In April 2019, Lammy was criticised for saying his comparison of the European Research Group (which consists of Conservative MPs) to Nazis and proponents of the South African apartheid was "not strong enough".[109]
In late 2023, following an IDF bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp, Lammy commented that the strike was wrong "when it comes to the ethics," but also that "if there is a military objective it can be legally justifiable". The comments were criticised by the Muslim Association of Britain as shameful and morally depraved.[110]
Lammy is a supporter of Israel. In September 2024, he described himself as a "liberal, progressive Zionist".[111] He opposed a full arms embargo on Israel.[112] In October 2024, Lammy stated that describing Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide "undermines the seriousness of that term", leading MP Chris Law to state the comment revealed Lammy's "blatant contempt for the fundamental rights and the very lives of Palestinians."[108]
Lammy has stressed wanting to maintain a strong relationship with the United States. On a trip to Washington D.C. in May 2024, Lammy spoke at the Hudson Institute where he described himself as a "good Christian" and "small-c conservative" who had common cause with the U.S. Republican Party.[113]
Lammy wrote in a Substack post in September 2024 that "Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s" in reference to the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, which resulted in the exodus of the Armenian population.[114] The Foreign Office clarified that his comment did not mark a change in the UK government’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh, but Armenia asked for further clarification.[115] Lammy description of the event was widely criticized.[116][117] Conservative MP Alicia Kearns said Lammy’s comments are “totally inappropriate and throws into question the foreign secretary’s judgment”.[115][118] US congressman Brad Sherman said the remarks were “a stain on UK foreign policy” and accused Lammy of having “endorsed ethnic cleansing”.[115][119] Laurence Broers, a scholar of the Caucasus, called Lammy's remarks "poorly informed" as Azerbaijan, in addition to recovering territory, "enacted a sustained campaign aimed at cleansing the territory of its ethnic Armenian population—and succeeded."[120][121]Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan's ambassador to the UK, said Lammy's remarks are "absolutely true".[115]
Other views
Lammy speaking at an anti-Brexit rally in Parliament Square on 25 March 2017
In Lammy's book, Out of the Ashes, Lammy stated in reference to the 2011 England riots that, "If parents were allowed to hit their children, the riots wouldn't have happened" and has said the ban on smacking children should be overturned.[122][123]
Lammy described the Grenfell Tower fire as "corporate manslaughter" and called for arrests to be made;[124] his friend Khadija Saye died in the fire.[125][126] He also criticised the authorities for failing to say how many people had died.[127] Reacting to the first official estimate of deaths, he said on 2 july 2017 "We know that 80 people have lost their lives but the view amongst the victims – I spoke to them yesterday – is that many more lost their lives." The official death toll for the fire is 72. He has written about what he believes to be the shortcomings of the housing market.[128]
Lammy supports shared parental leave, which he maintains would "normalise" fathers being an equal parent with the mother, and would mean they become more involved in the raising of children, arguing that the barriers to "fathers playing a deeper role in family life" are not just legislative, but also cultural. He points out Scandinavian countries such as Sweden as examples of where governments have successfully made this happen, which he states has also helped increase gender equality.[7][129]
Lammy has called former Conservative Party Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher a "visionary leader for the UK" and that, "You can take issue with Mrs Thatcher's prescription, but she had a big manifesto for change and set about a course that lasted for over two decades".[130]
Comic Relief
In 2017, writing in The Guardian, Lammy argued that Comic Relief perpetuated problematic stereotypes of Africa, and that they had a responsibility to use its powerful position to move the debate on in a more constructive way by establishing an image of African people as equals.[131] His comments came after a video featuring Ed Sheeran meeting and rescuing a child in Liberia was criticised as "poverty porn" and was given the "Rusty Radiator" award for the "most offensive and stereotypical fundraising video of the year".[132][133] In 2018, in response to Lammy's comments and the backlash to Sheeran's video, Comic Relief announced they would take steps towards change by halting their use of celebrities for appeals.[134]
In February 2019, Lammy criticised Stacey Dooley for photographs she posted on social media of her trip to Uganda for Comic Relief, and said that "the world does not need any more white saviours", and that she was "perpetuating 'tired and unhelpful stereotypes' about Africa".[135][136] He also stated however, that he does not question her "good motives".[137] The donations received for the Red Nose Day broadcast in March 2019 fell by £8 million and the money raised that year was the lowest since 2007, which some have blamed on Lammy's remarks. Critics of his view included Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales[138] and Conservative Party MP Chris Philp.[139] Lammy responded to criticism with a statement in which he referred to the decline in donations being due to contributing factors of austerity, declining viewing figures, trends in the charity sector and format fatigue and that he hoped his comments "would inspire the charity to refresh its image and think harder about the effects its output has on our perceptions of Africa".[140]
Following this, in October 2020, Comic Relief announced it would stop sending celebrities to Africa for its fundraising films.[141] They stated that they would no longer send celebrities to Africa nor portray Africa with images of starving people or critically ill children,[142] instead, they would be using local filmmakers to provide a more "authentic" perspective and give agency back to African people.[143]
Personal life
Lammy married the artist Nicola Green in 2005;[6] the couple have two sons and a daughter.[144][145]
Lammy features as one of the 100 Great Black Britons on both the 2003 and 2020 lists.[153][154] He has regularly been included in the Powerlist as one of the most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent, including the most recent editions published in 2020 and 2021.[155]
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↑ Cruddas, Jon; Rutherford Jonathan (10 December 2011). "David Lammy's lesson". New Statesman. Retrieved 16 December 2011. David Lammy's book Out of the Ashes: Britain After the Riots [...] is about more than the English riots, it's about the future of Labour in the country.
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