Colin Burgon

Colin Burgon (born 22 April 1948) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Elmet from 1997 to 2010.

Early life

Colin Burgon was born in Leeds to Catholic, Labour-supporting parents. His mother, Winnie, was a school secretary; his father, Tommy, was a tailor; and his brother Terence also became a teacher. He was educated at St Charles R.C. Junior School and passed the eleven-plus exam, enabling him to attend St Michael's Catholic College in Woodhouse. In later life, Burgon said that alighting the bus wearing a grammar school uniform in Gipton made him aware of the class system and made him "deplore structures that inherently deny opportunity to people".

On leaving school, Burgon trained as a teacher at Carnegie College, Leeds, then studied at Huddersfield Polytechnic. Burgon worked as a history teacher at Foxwood High School (which later became East Leeds Family Learning Centre and was demolished in 2009), a deprived secondary school in the Seacroft area of East Leeds, where he was an active member of the NUT union. Burgon left teaching and the NUT in 1987 to work for Wakefield District Council as a local government policy and research officer. He was also a research officer with the GMB Union. Burgon was made an honorary member of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) for his support for NUM actions in the 1984–85 miners' strike. Before he became an MP, Burgon worked with Elmet miners and their families during and after the strike. Burgon was the chairman of Labour Friends of Venezuela. He is on the left of the Labour Party and has vociferously criticised what he calls the "neo-liberal" policies the party pursued during the New Labour leaderships of Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Burgon stood down from Parliament in 2010.