Allan Roberts

Infobox Person
name = Allan Roberts


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birth_date = 28 October 1943
birth_place = Droylsden, England, United Kingdom flagicon|UK
death_date = 21 March 1990
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occupation = Politician
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Allan Roberts (28 October 1943 - 21 March 1990) was a British politician who was a Labour Member of Parliament from 1979 until his death. A teacher and social worker before his election, he was a member of the left-wing of the party.

Early life

Roberts was from a working class background, the son of a baker and a machinist. He was born in Droylsden on the eastern side of Manchester, and went to Little Moss Boys' County Secondary School. He first trained as a teacher at Ashton-under-Lyne College of Education and Didsbury College of Education. He joined the Labour Party while still a teenager in 1959, and the next year also joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

From 1967, Roberts worked as a teacher. However in 1970 he decided to retrain as a social worker, and spent the 1970s working for Lancashire Social Services and then as Principal Officer for Child Care for Salford Social Services. In 1971 he was elected to Manchester City Council and served as Chairman of the Housing Committee (a senior post, which placed him in charge of the city's council housing). He was the Labour candidate in Hazel Grove in the February and October 1974 elections, but came third in a seat that was marginal between the Conservatives and Liberals.

election

In May 1978, Roberts was a surprising choice to replace Simon Mahon who was retiring as Member of Parliament for Bootle, a constituency in which he had no local roots. Mahon and Roberts were almost polar opposites: Mahon was a right-winger, a Roman Catholic with traditional views on morality, while Roberts was a member of the new left who was also gay.Fact|date=October 2007 His experience with council housing issues was a considerable asset in winning selection, and he made a speech to the Labour Party conference in 1978 arguing that public authorities needed a surplus of council housing in order to solve the housing crisis.

Parliament

At the 1979 general election Roberts easily won in Bootle, and joined the Tribune Group of left-wing Labour MPs. His early policy speeches marked him out as a leftwinger as he called for rates to increase rather than cut services and made allegations of fraud in council housing maintenance contracts. When the Thatcher government introduced council house sales, Roberts urged that multiple fraudulent applications be made in order to clog up the system. When James Callaghan resigned to force a leadership election by Labour MPs only, Roberts and Jack Straw put down a motion calling for a wider franchise.

The News of the World and Private Eye magazine revealed in 1981 that Roberts had been injured, requiring hospital treatment, in a sadomasochistic gay sex club in Berlin during a Parliamentary visit in Easter 1980. Roberts accepted the story was true but refused to speak to the press about it; he received a unanimously vote of confidence from Bootle Constituency Labour Party. Shortly afterwards he paid a visit to Afghanistan, and returned describing the Soviet occupation as the lesser evil (although he did call for an eventual withdrawal). He disrupted Parliamentary proceedings in order to protest at the use of corporal punishment at Litherland School in his constituency in February 1981.

He continued to work on council housing issues, introducing a Bill to require councils to repair derelict council homes or otherwise hand them over to housing associations, another to promote short term lets of council homes, and a third to allow councils to set themselves up as estate agents and building societies. None of these Bills were enacted but they allowed Roberts to raise issues and ask for changes from the Government.

Labour politics

As a supporter of Tony Benn in the Deputy Leadership election of 1981, Roberts was unopposed for reselection that June. He opposed the Falklands War, and joined the Socialist Campaign Group in December 1982. The Militant Tendency were strong in his constituency which neighboured their Walton base in Liverpool, and Roberts denounced attempts to expel members of the Tendency as a "witch hunt". Following the 1983 election (in which he was re-elected with a 15,139 majority), Roberts nominated his constituency neighbour Eric Heffer for the Labour leadership and Michael Meacher for the Deputy Leadership.

Seeking to make a political point, Roberts brought forward a Bill to give private tenants the right to buy their flats in November 1983. Roberts had made enough of a name for himself to become a columnist in the Labour Herald (a newspaper set up by the Labour left, including Ken Livingstone) in 1983. He was also noticed in Parliament for his habit of dressing casually, and was rumoured to be the first MP to wear jeans to work. In November 1984, he won a libel action against the News of the World which had linked him to gay sex offences in Liverpool.

Death

Roberts was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1980s and after a long time fighting the disease, died at the early age of 46. He was the first of three MPs for Bootle in the year 1990, as his successor Michael Carr died only a month after winning the by-election.

References

*Alan Doig, "Westminster Babylon: Sex, Money and Scandal in British Politics" (Allison & Busby, London, 1990)
*Andrew Roth, "Parliamentary Profiles L-R" (Parliamentary Profiles Ltd, London, 1985).
*"Times Guide to the House of Commons", 1987 and 1992 editions.
*rayment