Labour’s Paulette Hamilton has become Britain’s newest member of parliament, following her victory in yesterday’s Birmingham Erdington by-election.
Hamilton, who was a nurse until recently, is the first black MP elected from a Birmingham district.
Hamilton, a mother-of-five, was also a member Birmingham City Council for 18 year. She was first elected in 2004 to the Holyhead Ward council. In 2015, Hamilton was appointed to the Birmingham City Council Cabinet. She is responsible for Health and Social Care.
Hamilton won the election with a majority vote of 3,266 and a turnout of only 27%.
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The sudden death of Jack Dromey (Labour MP) in January triggered the by-election.
The constituency of Birmingham Erdington is found to the north of the City of Birmingham, and is most well known for containing Birmingham’s famous motorway junction, Spaghetti junction.
It is a poor seat with low home ownership. Erdington has been a supporter of the Labour Party since the Second World War. Erdington is the Birmingham seat that voted Leave in 2016 by the largest margin, 63% to 37%.
During the 2022 by-election campaign, Hamilton was criticised for comments she made at a 2015 event called “The Ballot or the Bullet – Does your vote count?”, in which she reportedly said: “I’m not sure we will get what we really deserve in this country using the vote”, before adding, “But I don’t know if we are a strong enough group to get what we want to get if we have an uprising … I am very torn”. The Labour Party claimed that the comments were taken out-of-context.
