John Hughes (English politician)

John Hughes (29 May 1925 – 14 August 2009) was Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Coventry North East in the United Kingdom from 1987 to 1992.

Born in Tanfield Lea, County Durham, he served in the Royal Navy aboard HMS Victorious during the Second World War. A former Durham and Keresley miner, storeman and transport union convener, in 1986 he successfully fought and received compensation following a claim of unfair dismissal as a result of his union activities from Austin-Rover's Unipart works in Coventry.

Mr Hughes served as a Coventry City councillor for the Holbrook Ward, and chair of the Coventry District Labour Party from 1977 to 1981. In his time on the Council, he was expelled three times from the ruling Labour group for defying the party whip over spending cuts, rent rises and school meal price rises.

He was MP for Coventry North East at a time when his Constituency Labour Party was the scene of particularly fraught left-right battles, even by the standards of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In 1985, the left wing won control of the CLP at the AGM. Hughes had not been particularly prominent in the period leading up to this, but he came out of political semi-retirement as an "elder statesman" figure to become CLP chair. A few weeks later the sitting MP, George Park, announced his intention to retire at the next election, if he had not done so there would probably have been an attempt to deselect him. The CLP then went into the procedure for selecting a parliamentary candidate. At the selection meeting the right wing voted for Hughes as he seemed the weakest of the left-wing candidates, mainly because he was aged 60 and so might only serve one term as an MP. (The losing candidates were, in decreasing order of votes: Ted Knight, Bob Ainsworth, Kate Allen and Reg Race.)

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