The new deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, has already hit the headlines by saying he would support the return of the death penalty, describing the punishment as “100% effective”.
In an interview with The Spectator before he was appointed to the role by Rishi Sunak, he argued that “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”. Tackled about Anderson’s comments yesterday, the prime minister replied: “That’s not my view, that’s not the government’s view”, but this is far from the first time the red wall MP has been at the centre of a storm.
He has been called “the worst man in Britain” by the Daily Mirror but although his views “might appal metropolitan opinion”, said Fraser Nelson in The Telegraph, “that could be the party’s best hope in the Red Wall”.
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Who is Lee Anderson?
On his website, Anderson wrote that his “entire traceable family comes from Ashfield” and that he comes from a family of coalminers. “After leaving school I followed my dad into the pits and worked in the pits in Nottinghamshire for 10 years,” he added.
“After separating from his partner, he raised his two sons as a single parent on what he described as a meagre wage”, said the BBC. He has since married again.
Anderson said he volunteered at the local Citizens Advice centre for ten years and then worked in hostels for homeless care leavers. He was elected as a Labour councillor in the 2015 Ashfield District Council election.
However, he was suspended by the local Labour branch three years later after he hired a digger and placed “two massive concrete blocks” by a car park entrance to prevent members of the Traveller community from camping, said the Daily Mail.
Although he had been a lifelong Labour member, he defected to the Conservative Party in early 2018, telling the BBC that Labour had been taken over by “the hard-left”.
‘30p Lee’
Selected as the Conservative candidate for Ashfield in the 2019 general election, Anderson was accused of staging a conversation after he was recorded telling a man to pretend he wasn’t his friend when he knocked on his door with a camera crew in tow. He also hit the headlines when he said “nuisance tenants” on a council estate should be evicted and put in tents in a field to pick vegetables.
However, he was elected with a majority of 5,733, becoming the first Conservative to represent the constituency since a 1977 by-election.
On entering the Commons, he became no less polarising. In 2021, he announced that he would not watch any England matches during the Euro 2020 tournament in protest at the players’ decision to take the knee. He said the anti-racism gesture was a “political movement” that risked alienating traditional football supporters, noted Sky News.
In 2021, The Jewish Chronicle reported that Anderson had been investigated over allegations of anti-Semitism and voluntarily taken part in training sessions on “recognising Jew-hate” after he was found to be an “active member” a Facebook group where conspiracy theories were promoted.
In 2022, he was back in the spotlight when he said that “generation after generation” of people “cannot budget” or make meals properly. Speaking in the Commons, he claimed that meals could be cooked from scratch “for about 30 pence a day”, earning him the nickname ‘30p Lee’, noted Indy100.
No sooner had he been announced as the new Tory vice-chair this week than he was back in the headlines for calling for the return of the death penalty.
Anderson’s promotion “may help bind the parliamentary party more closely together while neutralising a source of dissent”, said The Times in a leader. “But Downing Street and Conservative HQ are likely to have their work cut out,” the paper added.
“Maybe some of my colleagues think I’m a little bit too divisive,” he said in The Spectator interview. “But I’m of the mind that half the population will hate you, whatever colour you wear.”
