David Winnick

David Julian Winnick (born 26 June 1933) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Walsall North since 1979.

Winnick, who was born to a British Jewish family, was an advertising manager and a branch chairman of the Clerical and Administrative Workers Union. He was a councillor from 1959 on Willesden Borough Council, then the London Borough of Brent.

Winnick was first elected as an MP in 1966, for Croydon South (now the area roughly covered by Croydon Central constituency), defeating incumbent Richard Thompson. He lost his seat to Thompson in 1970. After completing a diploma in social administration at the London School of Economics, he stood again in Croydon in October 1974 and was returned for Walsall North in 1979.

Winnick is generally regarded as on the left of the Labour Party and has a strong commitment to human rights. That commitment made him a strong voice in the House of Commons against both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

On 9 November 2005, Winnick's amendment to a government bill on detention of terrorist suspects without trial - proposing that the maximum period of detention should be 28 days, rather than 90 - passed in the House of Commons by 323 votes to 290, shortly after the government's 90-day proposal was defeated by 322 to 291. This was Tony Blair's first Commons defeat on a whipped vote, after nearly nine years as Prime Minister, and may come to be seen as a critical moment of his term in office.

In January 2009, he urged the communities minister to deplore the fact that Richard Williamson, a British born bishop and Holocaust denier, had been brought back into the fold by the Vatican.

Winnick played a prominent role in the campaign to force the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin. This followed controversy from May 2009 concerning MPs' alleged misuse of permitted allowances and expenses.