Ernie Roberts

Ernest Alfred Cecil Roberts (20 April 1912 – 28 August 1994) was a British Labour Party politician. He worked for the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, was a co-founder of the Anti-Nazi League in 1977 and was the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington from 1979 to 1987.

Early life
Roberts left primary school in Shrewsbury at the age of thirteen, having declined a scholarship to the Shrewsbury School of Art, to work in a coal mine to help support ultimately ten siblings. He worked as an engineering worker for many years, much blacklisted and dismissed for trade union activities, until he became Assistant General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1957. Ideologically, he was on the left-wing of the Labour Party.

Political career
After unsuccessfully contesting Stockport South in 1955 general election, Roberts was elected as the Member of Parliament for the Inner London constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington aged 67, according to his obituary writer Frank Allaun the oldest new MP since the Second World War, (although John McQuade who also took his only Westminster seat at the same election was eight months older than Roberts). He served from the 1979 general election until the 1987 general election, when he was deselected in favour of Diane Abbott who would go on to become the first-ever Black British female MP.

Personal life
Roberts married Joyce Longley in 1953, and had a son and two daughters, all of whom survived him following his death on 28 August 1994 at the age of 82.

Books

 * Workers' Control (Allen & Unwin 1973)
 * 労働者支配制 (Workers' Control Japanese edition) (1975)
 * Unemployment – The Facts (Part-author) (Spokesman Books)
 * Humanising the Work-place (Part-author) (Crook & Helm)
 * The solution is Workers Control (pamphlet) (Spokesman Books)
 * Democracy in the Engineering Union (Part-author) (IWC)
 * Strike Back (Autobiography, with forewords by Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill) (posthumously published 1994)