David Lammy

Minister

In 2002, he became Parliamentary under-Secretary in the Department of Health. In 2003, Lammy was appointed as a Minister in the Department for Constitutional Affairs. As a member of the Government, he voted in favour of authorisation for Britain to invade Iraq in 2003. After the 2005 general election Lammy was appointed Minister for Culture at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

In June 2007, Lammy was appointed as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. In October 2008, he was promoted to Minister of State and was appointed to the Privy Council. In June 2009 until June 2010 when Labour lost the election, he became Minister for Higher Education in the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Opposition backbencher

Lammy with Tottenham Labour Party members and others before joining the TUC Anti-Cuts March in March 2011

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. He explained this decision by 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" that his constituents rely on.^[11] Deciding instead to become a back-bench opposition MP. Lammy opposed the Coalition Government's comprehensive spending review.

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".^[12] Lammy became Livingstone's selection campaign chair. In 2013 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 as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015.^[13]

London mayoral candidate

On 4 September 2014, Lammy announced his intention to seek the Labour nomination for the 2016 mayoral election.^[14] 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 breaking the rules of the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations.^[15] It was the first time a politician had been fined for authorising nuisance calls.^[16]

Crime

Lammy in 2015

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 three destructive 'cultures' that had emerged under the prevailing policies: "A Grand Theft Auto culture that glamourises violence. A consumer culture fixated on the brands we wear, not who we are and what we achieve. A gang culture with warped notions of loyalty, respect and honour."^[20]

He has also suggested that a ban on the smacking of children was partly to blame for the riots.^[21]

Lammy has blamed the Prime Minister and Home Secretary for failing to take responsibility over fatal stabbings in London.^[22] Lammy said, “I do know from the police that there are big gangs, eastern European, Albanian, that traffic people and guns. It’s not being handled solely by the Met. We’ve cut our Border Force. The National Crime Agency, the lead agency in this regard, reports an increase in this activity.” Lammy also blames inequality, high youth unemployment among black males, also local authorities cutting youth services and outreach programmes. Lammy added, “We aren’t debating this in parliament. I’ve not had a phone call from the home secretary, I haven’t had a phone call from the mayor, no one’s come to visit my constituency. This is happening across London at large. I’m sick of the political football, what I want is a political consensus.” Lammy wrote on Twitter, "Is a life in my constituency worth less than a life elsewhere in our country? I have had four young people lose their lives since Christmas and not a single phone call or visit from the PM or Home Secretary. Where is the political consensus on a serious strategy? Enough is enough."^[23]

Lammy has 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 has said that black and ethnic minority people still face and perceive bias.^[24] 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 system of "deferred prosecution" for young first time offenders to reduce incarcerations.^[25] A report published by Lammy states that black and ethnic minority people offend at the same rates as comparable white people when taking age and socioeconomic status into account. 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.^[26]

Same sex marriage

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 which justified Jim Crow laws in the 20th-century United States.^[27] US television host Lawrence O'Donnell praised Lammy's speech, relating it to Oscar Wilde's testimony on "the love that dare not speak its name" during his 1895 trial for sodomy and gross indecency.^[27]

University admissions

Lammy has criticised Oxford University for admitting relatively few black students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Lammy stated, “This is social apartheid and it is utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain,” Lammy also stated, “Difficult questions have to be asked, including whether there is systematic bias inherent in the Oxbridge admissions process that is working against talented young people from ethnic minority backgrounds,” Lammy has criticised the university for resisting publishing information on black admissions and considers this reluctance, “defensive” and “evasive”. Lammy said, “I have been pressuring the University of Oxford to publish this data for over a year and they have only begrudgingly decided to partially publish it now.” Lammy has expressed concern about Oxford's treatment of all disadvantaged potential students, saying “I just don’t think the universities fully understand what they’re doing. Oxford spent £10m on this and what we’ve seen over the last decade... is we’ve gone backwards on social class, we’ve made no progress on north/south divide and we’ve made little progress on race.”^[28]

Windrush scandal

Lammy believes the Windrush scandal is about injustice to a generation who are British, have made their homes and worked in Britain and deserve to be treated better. Lammy wrote, "But the real issue is the hostile environment policy that caused this crisis in the first place, and her (Amber Rudd's) resignation must not distract from this fact. Each Windrush story is the hostile environment policy personified and writ large. Each case is directly linked to a policy that ignores the principle of habeas corpus by imprisoning innocent people without reference to a judge, jury or evidence of guilt. It is this policy that barred British citizens from accessing the public services and benefits that they themselves built with their own hands, staffed and paid for. It is this policy that turned employers, doctors, landlords and social workers into border guards. (...) Let’s not let government ministers change the subject to illegal immigration. At root the hostile environment is a policy rooted in pernicious cruelty designed to make life so difficult for people who are here legally that they simply give up and, as suggested by Theresa May’s vans, “go home”. ( ... ) A minister falling on their sword is usually an attempt to draw a line under a scandal and encourage the media to move on. But the person sat in the hot seat at the Home Office makes no difference to the thousands of people suffering as a result of the hostile environment policy. An unjust law is no law at all. The Windrush generation will not get justice until it is the law that is changed, not just the home secretary."^[29]

Lammy told Sajid Javid in July 2018 a constituent waiting 10 weeks to start the citizenship process had contacted him. Lammy commented, “It is outrageous that those who have been failed by the Home Office should be failed once more by the very scheme designed to correct historical wrongs; it is morally repugnant that more than two months after the former home secretary made her statement to the House of Commons, members of the Windrush generation find themselves anxiously waiting for nothing more than recognition of their rightful status.^[30]

Lammy has publicly shown his support for Vernon Vanriel who was not allowed back to the UK in 2005 by the ruling Labour government. Lammy was in the government at the time of Vernon being rejected and sent back to Jamaica to live in absolute poverty in a roadside shack. Vernon would have to wait 13 years in Jamaica before the current Conservative government brought him back to the UK to be reunited with his family.

Voter ID

Lammy has stated that the voter ID system disenfranchises poor people. He wrote "No evidence of in-person voter fraud at polling stations. Voter ID schemes = the systematic disenfranchisement of poor people and ethnic minorities. This Jim Crow writ large and how the racists disenfranchised African Americans in the Deep South. Straight out of that playbook."^[31]

Grenfell Tower fire

David Lammy described the Grenfell Tower fire as corporate manslaughter and called for arrests to be made.^[32] Lammy wrote, "Don't let them tell you it's a tragedy. It's not a tragedy, it's a monstrous crime. Corporate manslaughter. They were warned by the residents that there was an obvious risk of catastrophe. They looked the other way. We don't need another review kicked into the long grass and years of equivocation– what a civilised country should demand is arrests and a criminal trial before a judge and jury. (...) If past disasters have taught us anything, it is that things change only when powerful people are put in the dock. So, for the sake of the victims, call it what it is: a crime of the most horrendous kind."^[33] His friend Khadija Saye was one of the victims of the fire.^[34][35]

Lammy also said over failure of authorities to come up with figures for how many people have died, “It's hard to describe the extent to which the local council has lost the trust of these people (survivors of the fire and bereaved families). They completely understand the difficulty in identifying people because of the nature of the fire. But if they are to trust that the authorities are standing with them, they need to know that every possible effort is being made to count and identify the dead, and they don’t think that is true.”^[36]

European Union and Brexit

On 26 January 2016, Lammy claimed that 1 million Indians sacrificed their lives during the Second World War, not for the survival of Britain and to fight Nazism, but instead for the "European Project". The statement was strongly criticised by some right-leaning publications.^[37][38][39]

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. People's Vote is a campaign group calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union.^[40]