Liams Biography

Liam is the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, elected Chair of the Global Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and IMF and an Associate of Nuffield College, Oxford. He sits on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Inclusive Growth, founded the APPG for Children of Alcoholics, is a proud patron of NACOA and is a Trustee of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Trust. He chairs the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Taskforce on behalf of the city.  After a successful career in business creating a high growth multi-million pound technology firm, Liam was elected to serve the people of Hodge Hill in East Birmingham where five generations of his family lived and worked in 2004.  He was promoted to become a minister within six months and to Cabinet after four years, serving as the youngest member of Gordon Brown’s top team helping coordinate No 10 Downing Street as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster during the Great Financial Crisis before negotiating Labour’s fiscal consolidation plan as Chief Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury.  In Opposition, Liam has served in several roles in the Shadow Cabinet, and chaired the Party’s Policy Review. He was Labour’s candidate for West Midlands Metro-mayor in 2020 and recently co-founded the West Midlands Forum.  An economic historian, Liam’s history of British capitalism, Dragons, told through the lives of ten British entrepreneurs, was published in 2016 and he has written extensively about economic development and the reform of capitalism.  In addition, Liam has worked extensively on foreign affairs. He is a former member of the Council of Europe and is one of Westminster’s leading authorities on China. His book Turning to Face the East was published in 2013, he co-founded the UK-China Young Leader’s Roundtable, and helps anchor the UK-China Leadership for the Future Forum. He has travelled and taught extensively through the Middle East and the Gulf and his book, Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas was published in 2017.  Liam has helped bring hundreds of millions of pounds to his constituency in new schools, health centres and the Heartlands hospital extension and today his constituency sends more children to university than almost any other West Midlands constituency. Elected with a majority of 460, he has built the largest Labour majority in the West Midlands.  The son of a science teacher and a district council officer, Liam was educated at a tough comprehensive school but went on to graduate top of his year at Manchester University, winning the Robert McKenzie Prize for Political Science and election as leader of the Students Union. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to the Harvard Business School where he graduated with honours. He joined the Labour Party when he was 15, and decided to run for Parliament when he lost his mum to cancer when she was just 52. He is a member of Unison.  Liam is married to Sarah with three children, Alex, John and Kyla.