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 and was MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington from 1979 until 1987.

Ernie Roberts left elementary 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 was an engineering worker for many years, much blacklisted and dismissed for union activities, until he became Assistant General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1957. He was very much on the left wing of the Labour Party.

After unsuccessfully fighting in United Kingdom general election, 1955, Roberts was elected Member of Parliament for the inner London constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington at age 67, according to his obituary writer Frank Allaun the oldest new entrant MP since the Second World War, (although John McQuade who also took his only Westminster seat at the same election was eight months his senior). He served from 1979 general election until 1987 general election, when he was deselected in favour of Diane Abbott.

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