Heidi Allen
Heidi-Suzanne Allen is a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire from 2015 to 2019. Initially elected as a Conservative, she resigned from the party in February 2019, joining and later serving as leader of Change UK. She resigned from Change UK in June of the same year, and joined the Liberal Democrats in October 2019. She announced on 29 October that she would not stand for re-election at the next general election.
Allen succeeded Andrew Lansley, the former Conservative Secretary of State for Health who had held the seat since its creation in 1997, following his retirement from the House of Commons in 2015.
Early life and career
Allen was born in 1975 in Notton, a small rural village near Wakefield in West Yorkshire, and received a B.Sc. degree in astrophysics from University College London.Allen worked in corporate positions, including with ExxonMobil and the Royal Mail. In 2008, she joined the family classic-motorcycle paints business, RS Bike Paints Limited, established by her parents in 1978, and now run by her husband Phil Allen.
Allen has said she was inspired to become active in politics after watching the scenes of the Tottenham riots, and first became a councillor in St Albans. Allen served as a councillor for 18 months before making a bid to become an MP.
Parliamentary career
In February 2014, Allen ran in an open selection process for the South East Cambridgeshire parliamentary constituency Conservative Party candidacy. She was beaten by Lucy Frazer, but there was initially a controversy about a possible miscount of votes on Frazer's selection. Frazer was reaffirmed as the candidate in January 2015, and, in October 2014, Allen was selected as prospective parliamentary candidate for South Cambridgeshire.The seat was held by the Conservative Andrew Lansley, then a cabinet minister, who had decided to stand down at the 2015 general election. Allen won the seat in the general election, increasing the Conservative majority and taking 51.1% of the votes cast. The nearest candidate was Labour who took 27.2% of the vote.
In July 2015, Allen was elected to the Work and Pensions Select Committee. Allen made her maiden speech before the House of Commons on 20 October 2015, when she detailed criticism of proposed cuts to tax credits, saying, "because today I can sit on my hands no longer". She wanted to criticise the proposed tax credit cuts and to intervene before it was "too late" to stop the changes to tax credits, even though she did not wish to support the motion put forward by Labour because she disagreed with the party's overall stance, whilst also not being in favour of the Government's motion over tax credit cuts. Isabel Hardman of The Spectator described her speech as "truly brave" and "well argued". Despite her speech, she voted in favour of tax credit cuts, in line with the Conservative whip.
Allen supported continued membership of the European Union in the 2016 referendum.
On 5 December 2016, Allen announced her intention to put her name forward for the Conservative nomination for the election of Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough in May 2017. Allen proposed to combine the role with her current position as MP for South Cambridgeshire. In January 2017, she failed to win the Conservative Party nomination for the role.
In June 2017, Allen was re-elected as Member of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire in the snap general election. Over that summer it was mooted that Jacob Rees-Mogg would be a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and Allen announced that if he became leader she would leave the party.
In December 2017, Allen was tearful during a House of Commons debate on Universal Credit after hearing fellow MP, Frank Field, describe how he had talked a man out of suicide. The Department for Work and Pensions later stated that "the two examples that gave were not claimants on Universal Credit." In the same month Allen voted along with fellow Conservative Dominic Grieve and nine other Tory MPs against the government, and in favour of guaranteeing Parliament a "meaningful vote" on any Brexit deal Theresa May might agree with Brussels.
In June 2018, during a debate on changing the abortion laws in Northern Ireland following a referendum in the Republic of Ireland which would amend the Constitution of Ireland to allow terminations, Allen said that she had an abortion for health reasons when she was younger. She stated: "I was ill when I made the incredibly hard decision to have a termination: I was having seizures every day, I wasn't even able to control my own body, let alone care for a new life... I am a modern, progressive woman in this country and I am proud that this country is my home... How can it be that Northern Ireland will soon be the only part of Great Britain and Ireland where terminations are to all intents and purposes outlawed?"
In September 2018, Allen spoke in favour of a second referendum on the UK leaving the European Union. Allen said she feared the danger to jobs and businesses in her constituency and the whole nation from leaving the EU without a deal. Allen blamed the party's Eurosceptic right-wing for the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, and called them "fiscally and economically irresponsible". Allen stated that a second referendum should include the option of staying in the EU under current terms. In early 2019, she co-founded the group Right to Vote.
In August 2019, a pro-Brexit former Royal Marine was jailed for 24 weeks after threatening Allen online, including posting aerial images of her home on social media.
The Independent Group, Change UK and the Independents
On 20 February 2019 Allen resigned from the Conservative Party, along with two other MPs from her party, joining the newly formed the Independent Group. On 29 March 2019, it was announced that the Independent Group had applied to become a political party under the name Change UK, and that Allen would be appointed interim leader.In May 2019, Allen threatened to resign as leader during an internal party row about whether Change UK should back the Liberal Democrats in some regions at the European elections. Allen denied her party was in disarray. In June 2019, she left Change UK to sit as an independent MP. In July 2019, Allen founded a looser grouping of MPs called The Independents.
Liberal Democrats
On 7 October 2019, it was announced that Allen had joined the Liberal Democrats and would initially stand for the party in her South Cambridgeshire constituency at the next election.On 29 October she announced that she would not stand in the next election regardless of the outcome of the vote to call for an election in December 2019. She said that Brexit had "broken our politics" and only a new referendum could solve the deadlock. She added that she was "exhausted by the invasion into my privacy and the nastiness and intimidation that has become commonplace".