Ian Austin

Ian Christopher Austin, Baron Austin of Dudley (born 6 March 1965) is a British politician who sits as a life peer in the House of Lords.

Austin was born on 6 March 1965 and was adopted as a baby by Dudley school teachers Fred and Margaret Austin.

His adoptive father, Fred (a Czech Jew who was himself adopted by an English family on the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia), was head of The Dudley School from its formation in 1975 until his retirement in 1985.

Having failed the eleven-plus to attend King Edward's School, Birmingham, Austin was educated at The Dudley School from 1977 to 1983.

He studied government and politics at the University of Essex.

Austin was keen to obtain a National Union of Journalists card and took a job with Black Country Publishing in Netherton where his personal interest in sport, especially cycling (he was chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group) and football, led him to work as a journalist on Midland Sport Magazine.

Austin was elected as a councillor in the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in 1991, and served until 1995.

In 1995 Austin then moved to become press officer for the West Midlands Labour Party until 1998.

In 1998, Austin spent a year as deputy director of communications for the Scottish Labour Party.

Austin was appointed a political advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (later Prime Minister), Gordon Brown, in 1999.

He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Dudley North from the 2005 general election until the 2019 general election when he stood down.

He held the position until his election in 2005, and was known as one of Brown's closest lieutenants.

Austin was selected as the Labour candidate for Dudley North following the retirement of Ross Cranston, and was elected at the 2005 general election with a majority of 5,432.

This allowed him to claim the majority of the money (£21,559, just £75 short of the maximum) under his second-home allowance in the 2005/06 financial year.

Fred Austin, born Fredi Stiller, was awarded the MBE in the New Year's Honours List for 2006 in recognition of his service to the communities of Dudley.

Austin was reprimanded by the Speaker of the House of Commons for heckling during Prime Minister's Questions on 18 October 2006, and he was subsequently described by David Cameron as one of Gordon Brown's "boot boys".

The following week he was rebuked again by the Speaker for comments made towards the Conservative benches.

He then claimed for the remaining £1,344 stamp duty cost in 2006–2007, together with his legal fees.

In all, he went on to claim £22,076 (£34 short of the maximum) in the next financial year.

It also reported that Austin "flipped" his second-home designation weeks before buying a £270,000 London flat, and had claimed £467 for a stereo system for his constituency home, shortly before he changed his second-home designation to London.

He then spent a further £2,800 furnishing the new London flat.

Austin denied any wrongdoing, and defended his actions in an interview with local newspaper Dudley News.

In June 2007, Austin was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister to Gordon Brown, with a special provision to attend cabinet meetings.

He was moved to a new position in the 2008 reshuffle, becoming an Assistant Whip for the Government.

He served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government from 2009 to 2010.

In the June 2009 reshuffle, he became Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government and Minister for the West Midlands.

In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph reported that Austin had attempted to split a claim for stamp duty on buying his second home in London into two payments and tried to claim the cost back over two financial years.

Under Ed Miliband, Austin served as Shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport between 2010 and 2011 and Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions between 2011 and 2013.

On 1 June 2012, Austin apologised after falsely claiming a Palestinian human rights group, Friends of Al-Aqsa, had denied the Holocaust happened in an article he wrote on the Labour Uncut website in 2011.

He accepted the material of which he complained had been produced by an unconnected individual.

In June 2014, Deputy Speaker Dawn Primarolo told Austin to apologise after he referred to Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood as an "idiot".

In the 2015 Parliament, Austin joined the Education Select Committee, and was appointed as chair of the Labour Party's education committee.

In July 2016, Austin was reprimanded by the Speaker of the House of Commons for heckling Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by shouting "sit down and shut up" and "you're a disgrace", as Corbyn criticised the 2003 invasion of Iraq in his response to the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry.

In July 2018, Austin was put under investigation by the Labour Party for allegedly using abusive language towards the Party Chairman, Ian Lavery.

General Secretary Jennie Formby dropped the inquiry in November, although Austin did receive a reprimand from the Chief Whip.

On 17 March 2022, Austin and The Daily Telegraph apologised to former Jeremy Corbyn staffer, Laura Murray, and agreed to pay her "substantial damages" (£40,000) for suggesting she was an “anti-Jewish racist” and part of the “vile anti-Semitism of Corbyn's Labour”.

They accepted there was no basis to the claims and that Ms Murray had in fact "devoted significant time and energy to confronting and challenging antisemitism within the Labour Party".

Formerly a member of the Labour Party, he resigned from the party on 22 February 2019 to sit as an independent, and was ennobled in the 2019 Dissolution Honours.

Fred Austin died in March 2019 at the age of 90, four months after the death of his wife Margaret.

Ian Austin's adoptive siblings are David Austin, the chief executive of the British Board of Film Classification, Helen, who is a nutritionist and former teacher, and Rebecca, who is one of Britain's leading midwives.