Labour appoints Tony Lloyd as Shadow Scotland Secretary

The Labour Party has appointed Tony Lloyd, the member of parliament for Rochdale, as the new Shadow Scotland Secretary.

The previous post-holder, Lesley Laird, lost her seat of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath in the general election earlier this month to the SNP.

Labour lost all but one of its Scottish MPs on December 12th, and Laird was one of six others from north of the border that didn’t return to parliament this week.

The only current Scottish Labour MP is Ian Murray in Edinburgh South. Murray did initially serve as the Shadow Scotland Secretary but resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench in 2016.

Lloyd began his parliamentary career in 1983 when he became the member for Stretford. He later became the MP for Manchester Central in 1997.

He served as a minister of state in the foreign and commonwealth office between 1997 and 1999, and in 2006 Lloyd became the chair of the parliamentary Labour party.

He spent several years out of parliament after he resigned in 2012 to stand as the police and crime commissioner for greater Manchester. He was then selected as Labour’s candidate in Rochdale for the 2017 election.

On his re-entry to parliament, Lloyd was appointed by Corbyn as a shadow housing minister before moving to become Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 2018. Lloyd retained his seat on December 12th with a majority of 9,668.