David Lammy facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
David Lammy
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Official portrait, 2019
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| Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs | |
| Assumed office 29 November 2021 |
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| Leader | Keir Starmer |
| Preceded by | Lisa Nandy Preet Gill |
| Shadow Secretary of State for Justice Shadow Lord Chancellor |
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| In office 6 April 2020 – 29 November 2021 |
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| Leader | Keir Starmer |
| Preceded by | Richard Burgon |
| Succeeded by | Steve Reed |
| Shadow Minister for Universities and Science | |
| In office 12 May 2010 – 8 October 2010 |
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| Leader | Harriet Harman (Acting) |
| Preceded by | David Willetts |
| Succeeded by | Gareth Thomas |
| Minister of State for Higher Education and Intellectual Property | |
| In office 5 October 2008 – 11 May 2010 |
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| Prime Minister | Gordon Brown |
| Preceded by | Bill Rammell |
| Succeeded by | David Willetts |
| Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills | |
| In office 29 June 2007 – 5 October 2008 |
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| Prime Minister | Gordon Brown |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Siôn Simon |
| Minister of State for Culture | |
| In office 10 May 2005 – 28 June 2007 |
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| Prime Minister | Tony Blair |
| Preceded by | Estelle Morris |
| Succeeded by | Margaret Hodge |
| Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs | |
| In office 13 June 2003 – 10 May 2005 |
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| Prime Minister | Tony Blair |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Bridget Prentice |
| Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health | |
| In office 29 May 2002 – 13 June 2003 |
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| Prime Minister | Tony Blair |
| Preceded by | Yvette Cooper |
| Succeeded by | Melanie Johnson |
| Member of Parliament for Tottenham |
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| Assumed office 22 June 2000 |
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| Preceded by | Bernie Grant |
| Majority | 30,175 (64.4%) |
| Member of the London Assembly as the 10th Additional Member | |
| In office 4 May 2000 – 4 July 2000 |
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| Preceded by | Constituency established |
| Succeeded by | Jennette Arnold |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
David Lindon Lammy
19 July 1972 Holloway, London, England |
| Political party | Labour |
| Other political affiliations |
Labour Friends of Israel |
| Spouse |
Nicola Green
(m. 2005) |
| Children | 3 |
| Education | Downhills Primary School, Tottenham, London The King's School, Peterborough |
| Alma mater | SOAS University of London (LLB) Harvard University (LLM) |
| Occupation |
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| Signature |  |
David Lammy (born 19 July 1972) is an English politician and lawyer serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs since 2021. A member of the Labour Party, he has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Tottenham since the 2000 Tottenham by-election.
Lammy was a Minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, most recently as Minister of State for Universities in the Brown ministry. He served as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice from 2020 to 2021 and has served as Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs in Keir Starmer's Shadow Cabinet since November 2021.
Contents
Early life and education
Lammy was born on 19 July 1972 in Whittington Hospital in Archway, North London, to Guyanese parents David and Rosalind Lammy. He and his four siblings were raised solely by his mother, after his father left the family when Lammy was 12 years old. Lammy speaks publicly about the importance of fathers and the need to support them in seeking to be active in the lives of their children. He chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood and has written on the issue.
Lammy grew up in Tottenham, and was educated at Downhills Primary School there, followed by the awarding of an Inner London Education Authority choral scholarship, at the age of 10, to sing at Peterborough Cathedral and attend The King's School, Peterborough. He studied at the School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, graduating with a 2:1. Lammy went on to study at Harvard University, where he became the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School; there he studied for a Master of Laws degree and graduated in 1997. He was called to the bar of England and Wales in 1994 at Lincoln's Inn. He was employed as an attorney at Howard Rice in California from 1997 to 1998, and with D.J. Freeman from 1998 to 2000. He is a visiting lecturer at SOAS. Lammy is also a presenter on LBC and hosts a weekly Sunday show, from 10am to 1pm.
Political career
In 2000 he was elected for Labour on the London-wide list to the London Assembly. During the London election campaign Lammy was selected as the Labour candidate for Tottenham when Bernie Grant died. He was elected to the seat in a by-election held on 22 June 2000. Aged 27, he was the youngest Member of Parliament (MP) in the house until 2003 when Sarah Teather was elected.
Minister
In 2002, he was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Health. In 2003, Lammy was appointed by Blair as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Constitutional Affairs and while a member of the Government, he voted in favour of authorisation for Britain to invade Iraq in 2003. After the 2005 general election, Blair appointed Lammy as Minister for Culture at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
In June 2007, new Prime Minister Gordon Brown demoted Lammy to the rank of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. In October 2008, he was promoted by Brown to Minister of State and appointed to the Privy Council. In June 2009, Brown appointed Lammy as Minister for Higher Education in the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, leading the Commons ministerial team as Lord Mandelson was Secretary of State. He held the position until May 2010 when Labour lost the election.
Opposition backbencher
After Labour lost the 2010 general election, 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 nonetheless declared his support for David Miliband. After the election of Ed Miliband, Lammy pledged his full support but turned down a post in the Shadow Cabinet, asserting a need to speak on a wide range of issues that would arise in his constituency due to the "large cuts in the public services".
In 2010 there were suggestions that Lammy might stand for election as Mayor of London in 2012. Lammy pledged his support to Ken Livingstone's bid to become the Labour London mayoral candidate, declaring him "London's Mayor in waiting". 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.
Following the party's defeat in the 2015 general election, Lammy was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn, whom he is good friends with, as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015.
London mayoral candidate
On 4 September 2014, Lammy announced his intention to seek the Labour nomination for the 2016 mayoral election. In the London Labour Party's selection process, he secured 9.4% of first preference votes and was fourth overall, behind Sadiq Khan, Tessa Jowell, and Diane Abbott.
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 Communication Regulations. It was the first time a politician had been fined for authorising nuisance calls.
Return to the frontbench
Lammy endorsed Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner in the 2020 Labour leadership and deputy leadership elections. After Starmer was elected Labour leader in April 2020, Lammy was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice.
In the November 2021 Shadow Cabinet reshuffle, Lammy was promoted to Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs.
Lammy attended the 2022 Bilderberg meeting in Washington, D.C.
In August 2022, an inquiry found that he had inadvertently breached the MPs' code of conduct. He apologised in a letter to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone.
In January 2023, Lammy visited Northern Ireland with Shadow Secretary Peter Kyle and Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Jenny Chapman, visiting Foyle Port to make a statement on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Views
Issues of race, prejudice and equality
Lammy has commented on Britain's history of slavery. He has also criticised the University of Oxford for admitting relatively few black students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. 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.
On 5 February 2013, Lammy gave a speech in the House of Commons on why he would be voting in favour of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill 2013, critically comparing the relegation of British same-sex couples to civil partnerships to the "separate but equal" legal doctrine that justified Jim Crow laws in the 20th-century United States.
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.
He has spoken out against antisemitism within the Labour Party, and attended an Enough is Enough rally protesting against it. Lammy stated that antisemitism has "come back because extremism has come back" and is damaging support for Labour among Britain's Jewish community. He is a member of Labour Friends of Israel.
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. The documentary was produced by Professor David Olusoga's production company; Olusoga described the failure to commemorate black and Asian service personnel as one of the "biggest scandals" he had ever come across.
The documentary inspired an investigation by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. 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. In April 2021, Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered an "unreserved apology" over the findings of the review. Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace apologised in the House of Commons, promising to make amends and take action. Lammy, who was critical to bringing the matter to light, called this a "watershed moment".
Lammy considers himself English; he said: "I'm of African descent, African-Caribbean descent, but I am English." In March 2021, Lammy was a guest on LBC when he rejected a caller's assertion that the dual identity of African-Caribbean descent and English nationality are impossible.
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?"
Other views
Lammy described the Grenfell Tower fire as "corporate manslaughter" and called for arrests to be made; his friend Khadija Saye died in the fire. He also criticised the authorities for failing to say how many people had died. He has written about what he believes to be the shortcomings of the housing market.
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Lammy is a staunch advocate of British membership of the European Union. On 23 June 2018, Lammy 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. On 30 December 2020 he voted for the Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson's Government.
He 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.
Personal life
Lammy married the artist Nicola Green in 2005; the couple have two sons and a daughter. Lammy is a Christian. He is also a Tottenham Hotspur F.C. fan. He states that his identity is "African, African-Caribbean, British, English, a Londoner and European". "I'm black, I'm English, I'm British and I'm proud."
In November 2011, he published a book, Out of the Ashes: Britain After the Riots, about the August 2011 riots. In 2020, he published his second book, Tribes, which explored social division and the need for belonging.
Lammy features as one of the 100 Great Black Britons on both the 2003 and 2020 lists. 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.
Honours
- He was sworn in as a member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council in 2008. This gave him the honorific prefix "The Right Honourable" for life.
- He has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; this gave him the Post Nominal Letters "FRSA" for as long as he remains a Fellow.
