Ian Lavery Ian Lavery Ian Lavery (born 6 January 1963) is a British Labour Party politician and former trade union leader from Northumberland who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wansbeck since the 2010 general election. Born and raised in Ashington, Lavery began work in the construction industry after leaving school before becoming a mining apprentice. Noted for being the sole apprentice to refuse to work during the miners' strike of 1984-1985, he gradually rose up the ranks of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and was chosen to succeed Arthur Scargill as NUM President in 2002. Once elected to
Economic and Philosophic Science Review as anti-social, saying homosexuality had ""obvious disadvantages for any species in evolutionary terms"". John Pearson, a member of the revisionist Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) in their publication "Weekly Worker" in 1999 said this was "homophobia" on the part of the EPSR. With the foundation of the Socialist Labour Party by the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill in 1996, the EPSR dissolved itself into the SLP where they operated as a faction around their paper, the EPSR. Royston Bull was elected Vice-President of the SLP in 1998, but was then almost immediately expelled