Sarah Jones (politician)

Sarah Ann Jones (born 20 December 1972)[1] is a British Labour Party politician.[2] She has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Croydon Central[3] since the 2017 general election.[4][5] She was appointed as Shadow Minister for Housing in May 2018.

Sarah Jones

MP
Jones in 2017
Shadow Minister of State for Police and the Fire Service
Assumed office
9 April 2020
LeaderKeir Starmer
Preceded byLouise Haigh (Policing)
Karen Lee (Fire and Rescue Services)
Shadow Minister of State for Housing and Planning
In office
18 March 2018 – 9 April 2020
LeaderJeremy Corbyn
Keir Starmer
Preceded byTony Lloyd
Succeeded byMike Amesbury
Member of Parliament
for Croydon Central
Assumed office
8 June 2017
Preceded byGavin Barwell
Majority5,949 (11.0%)
Personal details
Born
Sarah Ann Jones

(1972-12-20) 20 December 1972
Croydon, England
Political partyLabour
Children4
Alma materUniversity of Durham
Websitesarah-jones.org

Life and career

Jones was born and brought up in Croydon.[6] She was educated at the private Old Palace School in Croydon and at Durham University, where she read History.[7]

Jones joined the Labour Party aged 19 in 1992 after watching Conservative Party MP Peter Lilley, then the Secretary of State at the Department of Social Security, make a speech to his party's annual conference where he attacked benefit claimants and women who allegedly become pregnant to gain council housing. Jones, who was pregnant at the time, joined the Labour Party as a direct reaction to the speech.[8]

Before becoming an MP, Jones served as a senior civil servant and was part of the team delivering the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games.[9] Jones worked with Tessa Jowell, who was Minister for the Olympics at the time.[10][11] She remained close with Jowell, and in 2018 Jones led a debate in the House of Commons paying tribute to Jowell's fight against brain cancer and her campaign for improved cancer treatment.[12] Jones continued to campaign in the wake of Jowell's death, prompting the government to launch the Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission (TJBCM).[13][14] Upon its launch, Jones was appointed to the Joint Strategy Board of the TJBCM.[15]

A former Head of Campaigns at the housing charity Shelter, Jones worked for Labour MP and Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam and later ran campaigns at the NHS Confederation.[16]

Parliamentary career

Jones was selected to contest the marginal Croydon Central constituency at the 2015 General Election. Despite achieving a 5.9% swing to Labour, Jones lost by 165 votes to the incumbent Conservative Gavin Barwell.[17]

At the 2017 General Election, she successfully fought the seat and defeated Barwell gaining a majority of 5,652 votes.[18] Jones's victory made further headlines due to Barwell publishing a book titled How to Win a Marginal Seat after his 2015 victory.[19]

Jones made her maiden speech in the House of Commons during a debate on the Grenfell Tower fire. Jones criticised politicians' failure to listen to Grenfell victims before the disaster, and called on the Government to retrofit sprinklers in all council tower blocks.[20] The speech received widespread coverage for being the first time Croydon rapper Stormzy was quoted in Parliament, with Jones warning MPs: "You're never too big for the boot."[21][22][23]

After highlighting the rise in knife crime in Croydon during the General Election, Jones has run a campaign calling for a stronger Government response to knife crime across the UK.[24] She launched the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Knife Crime in September 2017, being elected as the group's Chair.[25] At its launch over 30 MPs and Peers joined the group, which is supported by charities Redthread and Barnardo's. The APPG's stated aims are to 'look in detail at the root causes of knife crime – with particular focus on prevention and early intervention'.[26]

Jones was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Healey, Labour's Shadow Housing Secretary in January 2018, and was subsequently promoted to Shadow Housing Minister in 2018, succeeding Tony Lloyd. She was re-elected in the December 2019 election, again for Croydon.[27]

She backed Keir Starmer in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election. [28]

Views

Jones is concerned about rising knife crime,[29] She has said

While parliamentary farce and stalemate continues, the reality for our country is regression. The most visceral symptom is the continuing epidemic of knife violence. Across the country children are arming themselves and dying on our streets. What bigger symbol could there be of a generation abandoned and all aspiration lost?[30]

Personal life

Jones is married and has four children; she has lived in Croydon all her life.[31][32]

gollark: My tape download program now supports downloading big files without splitting them, via range requests, assuming they're served from a server which supports it: https://pastebin.com/LW9RFpmY (do `web2tape https://url.whatever range`)
gollark: Here is a similar thing for JSON. Note that it delegates out to an external JSON library for string escaping.```luafunction safe_json_serialize(x, prev) local t = type(x) if t == "number" then if x ~= x or x <= -math.huge or x >= math.huge then return tostring(x) end return string.format("%.14g", x) elseif t == "string" then return json.encode(x) elseif t == "table" then prev = prev or {} local as_array = true local max = 0 for k in pairs(x) do if type(k) ~= "number" then as_array = false break end if k > max then max = k end end if as_array then for i = 1, max do if x[i] == nil then as_array = false break end end end if as_array then local res = {} for i, v in ipairs(x) do table.insert(res, safe_json_serialize(v)) end return "["..table.concat(res, ",").."]" else local res = {} for k, v in pairs(x) do table.insert(res, json.encode(tostring(k)) .. ":" .. safe_json_serialize(v)) end return "{"..table.concat(res, ",").."}" end elseif t == "boolean" then return tostring(x) elseif x == nil then return "null" else return json.encode(tostring(x)) endend```
gollark: My tape shuffler thing from a while ago got changed round a bit. Apparently there's some demand for it, so I've improved the metadata format and written some documentation for it, and made the encoder work better by using file metadata instead of filenames and running tasks in parallel so it's much faster. The slightly updated code and docs are here: https://pastebin.com/SPyr8jrh. There are also people working on alternative playback/encoding software for the format for some reason.
gollark: Are you less utilitarian with your names than <@125217743170568192> but don't really want to name your cool shiny robot with the sort of names used by *foolish organic lifeforms*? Care somewhat about storage space and have HTTP enabled to download name lists? Try OC Robot Name Thing! It uses the OpenComputers robot name list for your... CC computer? https://pastebin.com/PgqwZkn5
gollark: I wanted something to play varying music in my base, so I made this.https://pastebin.com/SPyr8jrh is the CC bit, which automatically loads random tapes from a connected chest into the connected tape drive and plays a random track. The "random track" bit works by using an 8KiB block of metadata at the start of the tape.Because I did not want to muck around with handling files bigger than CC could handle within CC, "tape images" are generated with this: https://pastebin.com/kX8k7xYZ. It requires `ffmpeg` to be available and `LionRay.jar` in the working directory, and takes one command line argument, the directory to load to tape. It expects a directory of tracks in any ffmpeg-compatible audio format with the filename `[artist] - [track].[filetype extension]` (this is editable if you particularly care), and outputs one file in the working directory, `tape.bin`. Please make sure this actually fits on your tape.I also wrote this really simple program to write a file from the internet™️ to tape: https://pastebin.com/LW9RFpmY. You can use this to write a tape image to tape.EDIT with today's updates: the internet→tape writer now actually checks if the tape is big enough, and the shuffling algorithm now actually takes into account tapes with different numbers of tracks properly, as well as reducing the frequency of a track after it's already been played recently.

References
  1. "Sarah Jones MP". myparliament.info. MyParliament. Archived from the original on 10 August 2017. Retrieved 10 August 2017.
  2. "Sarah Jones (Croydon Central)". London Borough of Croydon. Archived from the original on 2 August 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  3. "Sarah Jones MP". UK Parliament. Archived from the original on 2 August 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  4. "Croydon Central". Election 2017. BBC News. Archived from the original on 10 June 2017. Retrieved 9 June 2017.
  5. Booth, Samantha (9 June 2017). "Labour winner Sarah Jones thanks Theresa May for calling the general election". Croydon Advertiser. Retrieved 9 June 2017.
  6. Tobin, Olivia (9 June 2017). "Who is Sarah Jones? What do we know about Croydon's first female MP". Croydon Advertiser. Archived from the original on 9 June 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  7. "Jones, Sarah". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com. 2018 (February 2018 online ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. Retrieved 13 February 2018. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
  8. Baynes, Chris (5 May 2015). "ELECTION 2015: How her babies' fight for life and a song from The Mikado shaped Labour's Sarah Jones". Croydon Guardian. Archived from the original on 1 August 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  9. "17 From '17: Labour's Sarah Jones On How She Refused To Be Demonised As A Teenage Mum". HuffPost UK. 14 December 2017. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  10. "We must ensure people with brain tumours live well for longer - what better tribute to Tessa Jowell could there be?". Politics Home. 25 February 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  11. ""It's a hugely humbling position to be in – and very scary": Sarah Jones on being Croydon's newest MP – The Croydon Citizen". The Croydon Citizen. 7 August 2017. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  12. Perkins, Anne (19 April 2018). "Tessa Jowell hailed as an inspiration during MPs' cancer debate". the Guardian. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  13. "Uniting our community at Westminster | The Brain Tumour Charity". www.thebraintumourcharity.org. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  14. "Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission (TJBCM)". www.tessajowellbraincancermission.org. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  15. "The TJBCM Team | Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission (TJBCM)". www.tessajowellbraincancermission.org. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  16. Tobin, Olivia (9 June 2017). "Who is Sarah Jones? What we know about Croydon's first female MP". croydonadvertiser. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  17. Lynch, Russell (8 May 2015). "Croydon Central election results: Tory Gavin Barwell clings on to seat by 165 votes". London Evening Standard. Archived from the original on 2 August 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  18. "Croydon Central parliamentary constituency – Election 2017". BBC News. Archived from the original on 11 June 2017. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  19. "Tory housing minister who wrote book on how to win marginal seat loses marginal seat". The Independent. 9 June 2017. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  20. "New MP Jones challenges Tories to pay for sprinklers". Inside Croydon. 13 July 2017. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  21. "Watch a Labour MP quote Stormzy lyrics in the House Of Commons – NME". NME. 12 July 2017. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  22. "Music News LIVE: Stormzy makes political history". BBC Music Events. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  23. "STORMZY JUST MADE POLITICAL HISTORY". Grime Daily. 14 July 2017.
  24. Younge, Gary (18 October 2017). "UK needs coordinated strategy to tackle knife crime, says MP". the Guardian. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  25. "London MP sets up all-party group to combat knife crime". Evening Standard. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  26. "Knife Crime debate & APPG launch". Sarah Jones MP. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
  27. "General election results 2019 in full: here's how your constituency voted". www.banburyguardian.co.uk. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
  28. https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1214168758891294722
  29. Jones, Sarah (14 December 2018). "Scotland is showing how to win the fight against knife crime | Sarah Jones". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  30. Younge, Gary; Caelainn, Barr (29 November 2018). "Surge in young knife deaths amid police cuts and 'a climate of fear". The Guardian.
  31. "Sarah Jones's CV, Croydon Central, MP candidate". cv.democracyclub.org.uk. Democracy Club. Archived from the original on 5 August 2017.
  32. Tobin, Olivia (9 June 2017). "Who is Sarah Jones? What we know about Croydon's first female MP". croydonadvertiser. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by
Gavin Barwell		 Member of Parliament
for Croydon Central
2017–		 Succeeded by
Incumbent
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