Richard Kelley

Richard Kelley (24 July 1904 – April 1984) was a British trade unionist and left-wing Labour Party politician from the coal mining area of Doncaster. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Don Valley from 1959 to 1979.

Career Kelley was a miners' union secretary in Doncaster for 10 years, where he joined with National Coal Board managers in opposition to miners who wanted to leave work early when their work was complete, fearing that it could lead to miners hurrying their work and ignoring safety precautions. He also served as a councillor on the West Riding of Yorkshire County council from 1949 to 1959.

He was elected at the 1959 general election as the MP for Don Valley, and held the seat at five further general elections until he retired from the House of Commons at the 1979 general election.

In Parliament In February 1961, the German Democratic Republic's news agency ADN reported that Kelley had been "harassed", "threatened" and then arrested by police in West Berlin whilst visiting the city in connection with his attendance at a conference for coexistence and disarmament in Warsaw. The West Berlin authorities dismissed the claims, describing the incident as "trivial".

Kelley opposed the Vietnam War. In March 1967 he signed an advertisement in The Times calling on the government of the United Kingdom to "dissociate itself explicitly from the bombing of North Vietnam", and in April that year he was one of 59 Labour MPs to vote against the Labour government in a Commons motion on the war. He rebelled against the incomes policy of Harold Wilson's government, voting against the government in a division on the report stage of the Prices and Incomes Bill in June 1968, and voted against the government again in a further motion on Vietnam in December 1969.

In November 1976, Kelley was one of 33 Labour MPs denounced by the Social Democratic Alliance (a pressure group on the right of the Labour Party) for their alleged associations with Communist and Trotskyist organisations. The MPs, who included Tony Benn and future leader Michael Foot, were accused by the SDA of being part of a shift in the party "in favour of intolerant Marxist totalitarianism".