Alice Mahon
Left-wing Labour MP who held her own party to account and was bitterly opposed to the Iraq war
ALICE MAHON, who has died aged 85, was a vocal member of Labour’s hard Left, and MP for her home town of Halifax from 1987 to 2005. A fiery class warrior and a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, she – unlike him – had personal experience of poverty and deprivation. She told the Commons: “I have lived as a single parent on a very low income at a time when there were prejudices against single women seeking council houses.”
She was a member of the Socialist Campaign group of Labour MPS, and a frequent rebel against the leadership. She resigned from the party in 2009, but eight years later took a front-row seat when Corbyn, by then Labour leader, spoke at Hebden Bridge.
Alice Mahon once sponsored a Commons motion urging the Soviet government to rehabilitate Trotsky. Firmly Eurosceptic, she supported liberal abortion laws, and campaigned for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and against foundation hospitals, Trident and both Gulf Wars. The Telegraph’s Edward Pearce wrote that she “collects grievances in the way George V collected stamps”.
Notoriously, in 2006 she testified for the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic at his war crimes trial in Geneva, her campaigning for “compromise” during the Kosovo crisis – and an unauthorised visit to the Serbian capital in 1999 at the height of hostilities – having earned her the nickname “the member for Belgrade”.
Also a member of the Nato Parliamentary Assembly, Alice Mahon was one of 11 Labour MPS to vote against Nato’s bombing of Belgrade. Nevertheless, in 1998 Labour MPS elected her to the National Policy Forum, promoted by Tony Blair to decide Labour’s programme instead of the annual party conference. However, the constituency Left failed to get her on to the party’s National Executive Committee.
Serving on the Health Select Committee and vice-chair of Labour’s backbench health committee, she was effective campaigning on health issues. Elected against a background of cuts to the NHS in Halifax, she stressed the link between poor health and social deprivation, saying that Britain under Margaret Thatcher was the only European country to see a rise in infant deaths.
Alice Mahon worked hard to raise breast cancer awareness, and in 1994 piloted through a Bill to regulate diet and dietmedicine firms. In 1997 she earned the personal thanks of the Health Secretary Frank Dobson after taking up the case of a constituent in Ashworth top security hospital. The 60-page dossier she sent to Whitehall, cataloguing allegations of staff abusing patients and the proliferation of pornography, led to the suspension of the hospital’s chief executive.
But it was her attitude to the party leadership that set her apart. In June 1988, angered by Neil Kinnock dropping Labour’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, she dismissed him as “a no-talent weak man who is being eaten for breakfast by Mrs Thatcher”.
She respected John Smith, but after his death told colleagues she was in the “Stop Blair camp”. Her eventual resignation from the party was a protest at Gordon Brown’s failure to restore its “caring and progressive” ethos after the years when she “totally disapproved of everything Tony Blair was doing”.
She was born Alice Bottomley on September 28 1937, the daughter of Thomas Bottomley, a bus mechanic, and his wife Edna, a textile worker. Her mother was one of 11 children of a Scottish miner blacklisted as a union activist. Her parents were Labour supporters, and at 10 she was delivering leaflets. She joined the party in 1958.
Alice had to leave grammar school early because of her mother’s poor health, working as a machine operator, weaver, engineer, shop assistant and cleaner. She trained for two years to become a nurse, but became pregnant and left. Returning to the NHS for 10 years as a nursing auxiliary, she became a Nupe shop steward.
Simultaneously, she took a degree in Social Policy and Administration from Bradford University. Graduating in 1979, she taught Trade Union Studies at Bradford and Ilkley Community College until her election to Parliament.
Alice Mahon was elected to Calderdale council in 1982, also serving on the district health authority. Selected to fight Halifax, she ousted the sitting Conservative MP Roy Galley at the 1987 election by 1,212 votes.
She was one of 15 Labour MPS to advocate non-payment of the poll tax. In 1991 she was ordered by magistrates to pay £247.55. During the 1992 election the Conservatives targeted her as a dangerous Leftist, but she hung on to her seat by 478 votes.
Re-elected in 1997 with a majority of 11,212 as Blair swept to power, she became PPS to the Culture Secretary Chris Smith but lasted barely six months, resigning that December when she rebelled against benefit cuts for lone parents. She went on to join rebellions against university tuition fees and the end of student grants.
Despite rumours that Brown’s key adviser Ed Balls was being lined up for her seat, Alice Mahon was reselected for Halifax and held it at the 2001 election by 6,129 votes.
Her final term in the Commons was dominated by her opposition to the Iraq war. As early as March 2002 she was voicing “deep unease” about possible military action, and organising an anti-war motion signed by 160 Labour, Liberal Democrat and nationalist MPS.
Alice Mahon mobilised critics of the war at Labour’s 2002 and 2003 conferences. She accused Blair of lying about Saddam having WMDS – “and there is no delicate way of putting it” – and of “harnessing Labour to the ultra-right wing George Bush project of the New American Century”. With Corbyn, she called for John Scarlett’s removal as head of MI6 because of his role in the intelligence dossiers produced before the invasion.
As she left the Commons at the 2005 election, Alice Mahon secured confirmation from the MOD that US forces had used incendiary bombs with “similar destructive characteristics” to napalm in quelling pro-saddam resistance in Fallujah. The Italian filmmaker Sigfrido Ranucci took this up in a documentary, The Hidden Massacre, broadcast that November, which accused the Americans, despite denials, of having used the weapon against civilians.
Resigning from the Labour Party in April 2009, she told the BBC she had considered quitting in 2005, but had hoped that Gordon Brown would put matters right. The last straw, she explained was the revelation of attempted “smear tactics” against David Cameron and his wife by Brown’s former adviser Damian Mcbride and the lobbyist Derek Draper.
Alice Mahon supported the NO2EU campaign in the 2009 European Parliament elections. She remained active in CND and the Stop the War Coalition, of which she was a patron, Humanists UK and the National Secular Society.
Alice Mahon married, first, John Gledhill (dissolved), and secondly, Tony Mahon, who worked as her parliamentary assistant. She is survived by two sons from her first marriage.