Clive Lewis (politician)

Clive Anthony Lewis (born 11 September 1971) is a British Labour politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Norwich South since the 2015 general election. Lewis was a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party in the 2020 leadership election. He is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group parliamentary caucus.

He previously served as vice-president of the National Union of Students, worked as a TV reporter for BBC News and served as an infantry officer with the Army Reserve. Lewis also served a three-month tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2009.

He became shadow defence secretary in June 2016, and shadow business secretary in October 2016. Lewis left the Shadow Cabinet in 2017 in protest over the Labour Party's decision to whip its MPs into voting to trigger Article 50, but re-joined the front bench a year later as shadow minister for sustainable economics.

Lewis stood in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election, but did not receive the required 22 parliamentarian nominations, and withdrew.

Lewis has written extensively about the climate crisis, race, and democracy. He has argued that Britain is built on forgetting its "imperial history", stating that this "forgetting" is crucial to the "British state – the Union, an unwritten constitution, and even our voting system".

Early life and education
Clive Antony Lewis was born in London on 11 September 1971. He grew up on a council estate in Northampton, the son of a single father, his father is from Grenada and his mother from England. He was the first member of his family to attend university, studying economics at the University of Bradford before being elected student union president, and later vice-president of the National Union of Students (NUS). In November 1995, he was a signatory to a letter that argued for the abolition of student loans.

Lewis was temporarily suspended from the role of vice-president of the NUS in 1996 by its president, Jim Murphy, for publicly supporting concerns about tuition fees. Murphy's actions were condemned by Ken Livingstone, then a Labour MP. Lewis ran for president of the National Union of Students in 1996 on a platform of unfunded full grants and free education, and lost the election to Douglas Trainer.

Early career
After completing a post-graduate diploma in journalism, Lewis worked on local newspapers in Northampton and Milton Keynes, and was then accepted into the BBC's News Trainee Scheme. He went on to work as a broadcast journalist in Nottingham, Norwich, and Coventry. He then became the main reporter on the BBC's Politics Show East.

Lewis joined the Army Reserve, passing out of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2006 as an infantry officer with The Rifles. In 2009, he served a three-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. In an opinion piece he wrote years later, Lewis said "despite being on the left, and despite being told in the cadets that 'there ain't no black in the union jack', I still opted to serve". Shortly after returning from his tour of duty, he experienced depression, saying "I just felt like I was being crushed by it all." He received counselling through the Ministry of Defence and recovered.

Parliamentary candidate
Lewis was selected as the Labour Party's prospective parliamentary candidate for Norwich South at the party's hustings in November 2011, beating other candidates including the musician Dave Rowntree. Norwich South had been won by Simon Wright of the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 general election with a majority of just over 300 votes, defeating former Home Secretary and Education Secretary Charles Clarke.

In April 2015, during an interview by the New Statesman, in response to a question on whether he was taking his upcoming victory for granted, he said he would only lose if "he was caught with [his] pants down behind a goat with Ed Miliband at the other end". He subsequently apologised for the remark, saying he was sincerely sorry if anyone had been offended by the comment.

Lewis opposed the Labour Party's position on immigration. Locally, Lewis supported the campaign to prevent the Hewett School, a comprehensive school in Norwich, from being turned into an academy.

First term (2015–2017)
At the 2015 general election, Lewis was elected MP for Norwich South with a majority of 7,654, and 39.3% of the vote. Lewis, in his victory speech, declared New Labour to be "dead and buried" and promised to stand up for Norwich's most vulnerable against an "onslaught of cuts" by the governing Conservative Party.

In his maiden speech, Lewis brought attention to the Government’s plan to allow Housing Association homes to be bought by individuals. He accused the Government of forcibly asset-stripping housing associations, stating the policy would “further segregate” Norwich as well as increase the number of homes that were owned “as mere units of speculation”.

In June 2015, Lewis was elected Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. In the same month, he became a patron of the Anti-Academies Alliance.

In December 2015, Lewis voted against airstrikes in Syria.

Lewis was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the 2015 Labour leadership election. Corbyn credited Lewis with getting his nominations "off the ground". Lewis has been described as an ally of Corbyn, who was elected leader. In September 2015, he was appointed to the Labour frontbench as a shadow minister in the Energy and Climate Change team.

Following resignations from Corbyn's shadow cabinet after the 2016 EU referendum, Lewis was appointed as shadow defence secretary. In September 2016, at the Labour Party's 2016 Conference, when Lewis was preparing to give his first speech as shadow defence secretary, a section of his speech announcing that he "would not seek to change" Labour's current policy on nuclear weapons was changed by Corbyn's communications advisor Seumas Milne. Lewis was informed of the change by a sticky note. A month later, Corbyn removed Lewis from the defence brief, replacing him with Nia Griffith. Lewis was then appointed as shadow business secretary, with the move viewed as a tactical demotion.

On 8 February 2017, Lewis resigned from the shadow cabinet, citing the Labour Party's decision to whip its MPs to vote to trigger Article 50 to start Brexit negotiations.

In April 2017, Lewis was one of thirteen MPs to vote against triggering the 2017 general election. At the general election, he was re-elected with an increased vote share of 61% and an increased majority of 15,596.

Second term (2017–2019)
At the 2017 Labour Conference, video footage taken at a fringe event emerged in which Lewis told the male actor Sam Swann to "get on your knees, bitch". Lewis' language attracted criticism from Labour colleagues. Stella Creasy, a Labour colleague, said: "It's not OK. Even if it's meant as a joke, it reinforces menace that men have the physical power to force compliance." Swann told The Guardian: "It is clearly jovial and nothing vicious". Swann also said "The whole event was so brilliant for seeing MPs letting their hair down and fucking around with people who support them. I think Clive Lewis is an absolute legend." Lewis subsequently tweeted an apology, in which he described his behaviour as "offensive and unacceptable".

Lewis was also accused of groping a woman at Momentum's The World Transformed event at the same conference. In response, Lewis said he was "pretty taken aback" by the accusation and "completely" and "categorically" denied it. On 12 December 2017, he was cleared by Labour's National Executive Committee sexual harassment panel.

In January 2018, Lewis was reappointed to Labour's shadow frontbench as a shadow Treasury minister, responsible for sustainable economics.

Lewis supported Labour activist Marc Wadsworth, who was expelled from the party in April 2018 for bringing it into disrepute. Wadsworth had accused Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth of working "hand in hand" with the media at the launch of the Chakrabarti report into anti-Semitism in the party. Lewis, who had provided a character reference for Wadsworth, opposed the decision to expel him. Jewish students at the University of East Anglia, in Lewis's constituency, criticised him for his stance, whilst the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) issued an open letter to Lewis, who they believed had "categorically failed" Jewish people.

At the 2019 Labour conference, Lewis published a paper which accused the party of a "moral failure" on migrants' rights and called for the party to adopt an open border immigration policy with the European Union. He also accused party leader Jeremy Corbyn of being "silent on detention centres" and the "no recourse to public funds" policy of the Conservative government.

Third term (2019-2024)
At the 2019 general election, Lewis was again re-elected with a decreased vote share of 53.7% and a majority of 12,760.

In December 2019, he announced that he would run in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election following Corbyn's resignation. Despite a petition by members and supporters to get him on the ballot due to his democratisation and electoral reform policies, he received only five of the necessary 22 nominations from Labour MPs, and withdrew from the contest, which allowed his five supporters to nominate other candidates before nominations closed on 13 January.

In September 2019, alongside Caroline Lucas MP, Lewis tabled the Green New Deal Bill (formally known as the Decarbonisation and Economic Strategy Bill). The Bill was tabled to “change the way the government manages the economy to enable extensive public and private investment in a Green New Deal”.

In February 2022 Lewis was appointed to the Environmental Audit Committee, which explores the extent to which the policies and programmes of government departments and non-departmental public bodies contribute to environmental protection and sustainable development.

A few days before Liz Truss became prime minister in September 2022, Lewis said that the government had the power to address the United Kingdom cost of living crisis through measures such as: a windfall tax, nationalisation of energy companies, implementing retrofits of homes, and establishing a universal basic income and universal basic services. He said such things would not be implemented under Truss because, "it will not favour the private interests who are benefiting from the cost of living crisis, such as the funders of dark money think tanks that appear to be driving the incoming Truss government's agenda."

In September 2022, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Lewis wrote an article criticising the monarchy and the "flawed reality of the very limited democracy we inhabit". Lewis stated that he despaired at the queues to see Queen's coffin and noted that the royal succession "is as much about coercion as consent". He also criticised the language of "duty" and "sacrifice" used about the royal family which he said to be a lie and he called for constitutional, democratic reform. In the title of the article he referred to himself as a republican.

Ahead of the coronation of King Charles III, Lewis said that the monarchy had exempted itself from 160 different pieces of legislation. He stated that exemptions to the taxes people must pay have allowed the King to amass a fortune of almost £2 billion “at a time when almost three million children, his subjects, face abject poverty”.

In March 2023 Lewis led a Westminster Hall debate on the UK’s role in promoting financial security and reducing inequality in the Caribbean, where he urged the Government to enter “meaningful negotiations with the governments of the Caribbean” about reparations for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Fourth term (2024–present)
Lewis prefaced his parliamentary affirmation stating that he took his "oath under protest and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic". He subsequently remade his affirmation having omitted the words "his heirs and successors" on the first occasion. He was faced with a fine and potentially losing his seat if he refused to do so. He prefaced his second affirmation by stating: "I was elected to parliament to represent my constituents and our country to the best of my ability to defend democracy and uphold human rights and one day I hope all members of parliament will be entitled to swear an oath of allegiance based on those values."

Personal life
Clive Lewis married Yorkshire school teacher and actress Katy Steel in May 2017. Their daughter Zana was born in 2018.