Marie Tidball

Marie Tidball is a British Labour politician and disability rights campaigner, who has been the Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge since 2024.

Early life
She was born with a congenital disability which affects all four limbs, with foreshortened arms and legs and a digit on each underdeveloped hand. As a child she missed three years of school because of the surgery needed.

She grew up in Penistone and Stocksbridge, and attended Penistone Grammar School. Her mother was a nursery head and her father was a teacher and Labour county councillor, who helped found Barnsley College.

Career
She studied Law at Wadham College, Oxford, followed by a journalism internship at Channel 4 News. She returned to Oxford to do a Master of Science (MSc) degree in criminology and criminal justice. Her MSc dissertation was titled Mad, Bad or Disabled?. She then worked as policy and legal officer for Autism West Midlands in Birmingham. She was a founding director and coordinator of the Oxford University disability law and policy project. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 2017: her doctoral thesis was titled "The governance of adult defendants with autism through English criminal justice policy and criminal court practice" and her doctoral supervisor was Carolyn Hoyle.

Politics
Tidball has been called one of the country's leading disability rights campaigners by the Barnsley Chronicle. From 2016–2022 she was a Labour Councillor for Oxford City Council. In the 2017 election she stood in Oxford West and Abingdon, finishing third.

In June 2022, Tidball was selected to stand as the Labour for the 2024 election, with the backing of multiple trade unions, as well as Dan Jarvis, Stephanie Peacock and David Blunkett. In July 2024, she was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Penistone and Stocksbridge.