Dawn Butler

Dawn Petula Butler (born 3 November 1969) is a British Labour Party politician who has been a Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent Central since 2015.

Butler was elected as the MP for Brent South at the 2005 general election.

Butler put herself forward for selection for West Ham in 2005 but was not selected.

Following the retirement of Paul Boateng to become British High Commissioner to South Africa, she was selected as the Labour candidate in Brent South and retained the seat for her party at the 2005 general election with a majority of 11,326.

She was the third black woman to become a British MP after Diane Abbott and Oona King.

Interest in youth services continued as one of her main interests in Parliament.

Earlier (in November 2005), she had been promoted to Parliamentary Private Secretary to the health minister Jane Kennedy, but decided to stand down from this post in early 2006.

On 24 October 2006, she was appointed chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Youth Affairs, and she is an honorary vice president of the British Youth Council.

In 2006, Butler voted against investigations into the Iraq War.

After Gordon Brown became prime minister in June 2007, Butler was made one of the Labour Party's six vice chairs, with particular responsibility for youth issues.

In November 2007 she was appointed to the Children & Families Select Committee.

She was promoted to Assistant Whip on 12 September 2008.

She served in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government as Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office and Minister for Young Citizens and Youth Engagement from 2009 to 2010.

Butler was named female MP of the year at the 2009 Women in Public Life awards.

Following her appointment as Minister for Young Citizens and Youth Engagement, Butler became the first black woman to speak from the despatch box in the House of Commons in December 2009.

She later said that Conservative MPs "tried to belittle me at that moment in history", specifying that one Tory MP "took great delight in telling me that ‘upskilling’ was not in the English dictionary".

She lost her seat at the 2010 general election to Sarah Teather (Liberal Democrat).

Butler's constituency of Brent South was abolished at the 2010 general election.

Its territory was mostly divided between two constituencies: a new Brent Central seat and a re-drawn Brent North.

Butler was selected as the Labour candidate in Brent Central but lost to Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat candidate, who had been the MP for Brent East which had also been abolished at the general election.

During her time outside of Parliament, she worked creating learning programmes for companies.

In 2013, Butler was selected as the Labour candidate for Brent Central at the general election in 2015.

Prior to the election, Teather had announced she would stand down from parliament, so she did not contest the seat.

Butler was returned to parliament with a majority of more than 19,000 votes.

Butler is a former chair of the Women's Parliamentary Labour Party.

She returned to Parliament as the MP for Brent Central at the 2015 general election.

In October 2016, she was appointed to the new role of Shadow Minister for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities by Jeremy Corbyn after his re-election as Labour Leader, later becoming a close ally of Corbyn.

She subsequently voted against investigations a further six times up until 2016.

She explained that this was because she believed that it would be wrong to hold investigations "while we still had troops in Iraq ... If you held an inquiry while the troops were still out there doing their best to fight for the country, it would have been soul-destroying for them."

She was appointed to the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons shortly after her election, and served on standing committees.

Following a vote in September 2016, she was succeeded by Jess Phillips.

In February 2017, she resigned from the Official Opposition frontbench to vote against the triggering of Article 50, which formally launched the Brexit negotiations.

She returned as Shadow Minister for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities in June 2017, before being promoted to the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities in August 2017.

She stood in the 2020 Labour Party deputy leadership election and came last, in fifth place.

She was removed from the Shadow Cabinet by new Labour leader Keir Starmer in 2020 and returned to the backbenches.

Butler was born in Forest Gate in East London, to Jamaican immigrant parents Milo and Ambrozene Butler; she has one sister and four brothers.

She was educated at Tom Hood School in Leytonstone and Waltham Forest College, both in London.

She worked as an officer of the GMB Union, including time as a national race and equality officer.

Butler was also an adviser to the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, on employment and social issues.

Butler first sought selection to be a Labour parliamentary candidate in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where she featured on an all-women shortlist but was unsuccessful.