Stella Creasy
Stella Judith Creasy is a British Labour and Co-operative politician, who has been the Member of Parliament for the London constituency of Walthamstow since the 2010 general election. She served in the frontbench teams of Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman from 2011 to 2015.
Early life and education
Creasy was born in Sutton Coldfield, and is the daughter of Corinna Frances Avril and Philip Charles Creasy, both active Labour Party members; her father is a trained opera singer and her mother a headteacher of a special needs school. Her elder brother, Matthew Henry Creasy, is an academic. Creasy is distantly related to members of the Peerage, as John Prendergast-Smyth, 1st Viscount Gort is her fourth great-grandparent. Creasy's mother described her own parents as "very aristocratic" and herself as "enormously privileged", which contributed to her decision to join the Labour Party.After spending her early childhood in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury, her family moved to Colchester where Creasy attended Colchester County High School for Girls, a grammar school. Although she initially failed the eleven-plus exam, the Creasy family's move south gave her a second chance.
Creasy attended Magdalene College, Cambridge where she read Social and Political Sciences before pursuing postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics. In the 1990s, towards the end of John Major's period as prime minister, Creasy was an intern at the Fabian Society.
In 2006, having already started work as a parliamentary researcher, she completed her thesis entitled Understanding the lifeworld of social exclusion, receiving a doctorate in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics. Creasy received a Titmuss Prize in 2005 for her thesis.
Early career
Creasy worked as a lobbyist and PR consultant, becoming head of Public Affairs at the Scout Association.She was deputy director of a think tank, Involve and worked as a researcher and speech writer for various Labour government ministers, including Douglas Alexander, Charles Clarke and Ross Cranston.
Creasy was a member of the Young Fabians and served on its executive.
Elected as a councillor in Waltham Forest, Creasy later became the borough's deputy mayor before serving as mayor for four months prior to her election to the House of Commons.
Parliamentary career
After the retirement of Labour MP, Neil Gerrard, Creasy was selected from an all-female shortlist as the party's candidate for Walthamstow, and was elected to Parliament at the 2010 general election.Creasy served on Labour's front bench team between October 2011 and September 2015. In 2014, she was described in an The Independent profile as "one of the brightest lights of Labour's new generation" though also as "haranguing" and "aggressive".
Creasy was re-elected in 2015 with a substantially increased majority, securing a 17% increase in the share of the vote.
In the 2017 general election, her majority increased again, with a 12% increase in the share of the vote, making it the 13th safest seat.
In late 2019, Creasy was protected from a potential trigger ballot and deselection by her local party as she was on maternity leave.
Campaigns
Payday loans
Creasy campaigned successfully for better regulation of payday loans companies. In an article published by The Guardian, she stated that just six companies controlled lending to 90% of the seven million Britons without a bank account or credit card. Her disclosure that the average cost of credit charged to these customers was 272% APR, as in the rest of Europe, and that there was a fourfold increase in payday loans since the start of the recession in 2008 led to cross-party parliamentary support for a cap. Creasy also highlighted in a speech to the House of Commons the lack of competition in the market, leading to Government support for a cap of loans which exploit the poor, which in some cases reached 4000% APR. Creasy won The Spectator magazine's Campaigner of the Year prize in their Parliamentarian of the Year awards in 2011 for her work on the issue, and was also acknowledged by the coalition government's Chancellor George Osborne for having contributed to the government's change of policy.In 2012, a Wonga employee used company equipment to make offensive personal attacks against Creasy. Wonga made an "immediate and unreserved apology" following these malicious attacks, and Creasy also managed to get the firm to promote one of her constituency events in aid of struggling families.
Issues relating to women
Creasy supported the No More Page 3 campaign to stop The Sun newspaper from publishing pictures of topless glamour models.Abortion law in Northern Ireland is more restrictive than elsewhere in the United Kingdom, resulting in many women travelling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain to access abortion services. In 2017, a potential amendment to the Queen's Speech, organised by Creasy, calling for the Government to allocate adequate funding for women who are forced to travel to England to have an abortion, gained cross-party support and was ultimately signed by 100 MPs, threatening a government defeat. Conservative MP Peter Bottomley was a co-signer of Creasy's amendment. In answer to a question from Bottomley in the Commons on 29 June 2017, Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the government would support free abortions on the mainland for Northern Irish women. Earlier in June, a Supreme Court ruling upheld the legal basis for a charge of £900 for women from the province seeking an abortion on the mainland, whereas other necessary treatments on the NHS would have been free. Creasy was cautious in her response to the development. "The devil will be in the detail", she said. She was reported to have received threats from some anti-abortion activists.
Creasy opposes the decriminalisation of the sex industry.
She has argued that misogyny should be made a hate crime.
Labour Party
Creasy supported David Miliband's bid for the Labour Party leadership in 2010.Following the Labour Party's defeat at the 2015 general election, Creasy stood in the Labour Party deputy leadership election. She stated that she was prepared to work with any of the candidates for the party leadership, including Jeremy Corbyn. "Of course I would", she told Carol Midgley in a Times interview in August 2015, "because that process of rebuilding isn’t about any one person it's about all of us. It's written on the back of our membership card that we achieve more together than we do alone." Creasy gained 26% of the vote and finished second, after Tom Watson. She did not back any of the final four leadership candidates.
She was a vocal critic of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and supported Owen Smith in the failed attempt to replace him in the 2016 Labour Party leadership election.
Creasy regularly writes for Progress, a movement of centre-left Labour party members and supporters.
In 2016, Creasy criticised Momentum for being more interested in “meetings and moralising” than real campaigning.
In June 2019, she described the culture of the Labour movement as toxic.
Other
Twitter threats
At the end of July 2013, Creasy received numerous rape threats and other misogynistic messages on her Twitter timeline after expressing support for the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez, who had lobbied the Bank of England to put a woman on the £10 note and received similar messages. On 2 September 2014 at the City of London Magistrates' Court, Peter Nunn was found guilty of sending menacing messages to Creasy, and was subsequently jailed for eighteen weeks.Creasy wrote in an article published on 27 July: "Twitter tell me we should simply block those who 'offend us', as though a rape threat is matter of bad manners, not criminal behaviour." She appeared on Newsnight on 30 July 2013 with Toby Young, the Conservative commentator, over the validity of addressing harassment on the social networking site. She criticised him for a previous tweet about an MP's breasts. Young has objected to Twitter's subsequent change in policy, writing that the company, "shouldn't change its abuse policy in response to being brow-beaten by a politician".