page_title: Dennis Skinner
section_title: Parliamentary career
hierarchical_section_title: Dennis Skinner / Parliamentary career
caption_attribution_description: English: Dennis Skinner at the 2016 Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Skinner had not been re-elected to the NEC by fellow MPs,[1] so this may be his last conference as an NEC member.
context_page_description: Dennis Edward Skinner is a British politician who served as Member of Parliament for Bolsover from 1970 to 2019. He is a member of the Labour Party.
  Known for his left-wing views and acerbic wit, he belonged to the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs. He was a member of Labour's National Executive Committee, with brief breaks, for thirty years, and was the chairman of the Committee in 1988–89. He was one of the longest serving members of the House of Commons and the longest continuously-serving Labour MP.
context_section_description: In 1956, Skinner joined the Labour Party. He was chosen as Parliamentary Prospective candidate for Bolsover on 5 June 1969. Skinner was elected as MP for the then safe Labour seat of Bolsover at the 1970 general election and retained it until 2019. 
  Due to his aggressive rhetoric, Skinner became known as the "Beast of Bolsover". Skinner recalls that he earned the nickname for his behaviour in a tribute debate in the Commons following the death of former Conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden in 1977: "They were making speeches about the wonder of Anthony Eden, so I got up and talked about miners and people seriously injured and dead in the pits and the £200 given to the widow. There was booing and then all the Tories left and the papers had a go, some serious ones".
  During his tenure in the Commons, Skinner would usually sit on the first seat of the front bench below the gangway in the Commons (known as the 'Awkward Squad Bench' because it is where rebel Labour Party MPs have traditionally sat) in a tweed jacket (whilst most other MPs wear suits) and signature red tie. In 2016, he stated that he had never sent an email and did not have a Twitter account.
  Skinner was a strong supporter of the National Union of Mineworkers and their leader Arthur Scargill in the 1984-85 miners' strike. Skinner refused to accept a parliamentary salary in excess of miners' wages, and during the miners' strike he donated his wages to the NUM.
  Skinner has voted for equalisation of the age of consent, civil partnerships, adoption rights for same-sex couples, to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and for same-sex couples to marry, and has a strongly pro-choice stance on abortion. On 20 January 1989, he talked out a move to reduce the number of weeks at which an abortion can be legally performed in Britain by moving the writ for the Richmond by-election. On 7 June 1985, he talked out a bill by Enoch Powell which would have banned stem cell research by moving the writ for the by-election in Brecon and Radnor. Skinner later described this as his proudest political moment.
  In 2000, Skinner denounced former ally Ken Livingstone, then serving as a Labour MP. Livingstone had failed to win the party's nomination to be a candidate for Mayor of London, and had then decided to run as an independent candidate instead, urging his supporters to help Green Party candidates get elected. Skinner said that Livingstone had betrayed Labour Party activists in his Brent East constituency, whom he described as having fought for him "like tigers" when his majority had been small: "He tells them he's going to be the Labour candidate, then he lies to them. To me that's as low as you can get". He contrasted Livingstone with the official Labour candidate, Frank Dobson, saying that Dobson was "a bloke and a half... not a prima donna ... not someone with an ego as big as a house". Skinner said Livingstone would "hit the headlines, but you'll never be able to trust him because he's broken his pledge and his loyalty to his party. The personality cult of the ego does not work down a coal mine and it does not work in the Labour Party".
  Conversely, despite his left-wing views, Skinner for a long time had a positive relationship with Prime Minister Tony Blair, a leading figure on the right of the party, stemming from advice that Skinner gave Blair regarding public speaking. As late as February 2018, he described the Blair and Brown ministries as a "golden period" for the NHS. However, Skinner strongly criticised Blair in May 2019, after the former Prime Minister had advised pro-remain Labour supporters who felt that the party's line on Brexit was too ambiguous to vote for explicitly pro-remain parties in the 2019 European Parliament election; in the Morning Star, Skinner described Blair as a "destructive force" who was "try(ing) to destroy the Labour Party so people keep talking about his reign" and stating that he "went into Iraq and destroyed himself. He helped David Cameron and Theresa May into power. You're talking about a man who made a mess of it."
caption: Skinner at the 2016 Labour Party Conference
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