When Kim Johnson became Liverpool’s first Black MP in December 2019, she brought a long experience of community work and trade union organisation into Parliament. She had been born and brought up in the constituency she now represented, Liverpool Riverside. Her political priorities have remained close to that background: poverty, education, racism and the power public institutions exercise over people’s lives. As of October 2026, she remains its Labour MP, with a parliamentary record centred on scrutiny and campaigning rather than ministerial office.1, 2
Growing up in Liverpool
In her maiden speech in March 2020, Johnson described herself as the granddaughter of immigrants from West Africa and Dublin. Her father worked in construction; her mother worked in factories and later as a cleaner. She recalled a terraced house with an outside toilet and a childhood without a family car or holidays away. At her girls’ school, she said, teachers expected little of their pupils and did not encourage them towards university or professional careers. Her account placed work, housing and expectations at the beginning of her political story.3
Before entering Parliament, Johnson worked in community development and adult social care in disadvantaged parts of Liverpool. She was a UNISON shop steward and served on its regional and national Black members’ committees. These were settings where institutional decisions were encountered directly: through employment, services and the experience of people seeking support. They also provided a route into public life through representing others. Her background helps explain why the everyday circumstances of families and workers feature so prominently in her parliamentary questions and speeches.2
Johnson has credited trade union involvement with developing her skills and confidence. When participants in the TUC’s Black Activist Development programme visited Parliament in November 2023, she connected their training with her own experience of organising. That account offers a fuller explanation of political representation than the moment of election alone. Confidence in a meeting, experience of making a case and familiarity with collective action can be acquired over years. For Johnson, the union movement was one of the places where those abilities were developed.4
Community work and political principles
Her community involvement included an unpaid board role with Squash, the Liverpool organisation based on Windsor Street. Squash brings together food, art, gardening and community enterprise, with local residents participating in its work. Johnson’s parliamentary register records that her board role ended on 6 November 2025. The connection belongs to a part of her public life often less visible than Commons debates: organisations that create places to meet, make decisions and work together. Here, community development was expressed through shared activities and neighbourhood institutions.5, 6
Johnson describes her politics through both class and race. In a November 2023 speech to Stand Up to Racism, she argued for solidarity across communities facing discrimination, including refugees and asylum seekers. She also said that challenging racism required holding her own party accountable. The speech was openly socialist and critical of government policy, rather than an attempt to present political differences as minor misunderstandings. It set out the position from which she approached public institutions: their treatment of people with less power required continuing challenge.7
Education, class and disagreement
During the 2019–2024 Parliament, Johnson served on the Women and Equalities Committee and the Education Committee, and later joined the Home Affairs Committee. Such work involves questioning witnesses, examining evidence and negotiating reports with colleagues from other parties. It gave her opportunities to pursue subjects beyond the time available in a Commons speech. It also made disagreements part of the formal record. Committee membership did not mean endorsing every conclusion reached by a majority of members, as her work on educational disadvantage would demonstrate.1
In June 2021, an Education Committee inquiry into disadvantaged White pupils exposed a substantial division. Johnson proposed an alternative draft report that emphasised poverty, regional inequality and long-term underinvestment in communities. It argued that the working class was multi-ethnic and that racism could compound disadvantages shared across poorer households. Her draft also challenged the use of free-school-meal eligibility as a simple definition of class. The committee rejected her proposal by six votes to four. The disagreement was about which explanation of educational inequality should guide policy, and whose experiences might disappear when a broad social problem was framed around one group.8
Her questioning of ministers during that inquiry showed how she linked attainment to conditions outside school. In February 2021, she pressed schools minister Nick Gibb on poverty and whether children could learn effectively while hungry. Ministers defended the government’s education reforms and financial support. Johnson returned to the question of whether those measures were sufficient to address the hardship children were experiencing. The exchange revealed different emphases: the government stressed its programmes and expectations within schools, while she insisted that household resources were central to educational opportunity.9
She also pursued questions about what government knew. In November 2024, she asked whether the Department for Education would record how many children in pupil referral units had previously been excluded from school. The department replied that it did not hold those figures centrally and was not planning to develop the data. It said exclusion should be a last resort and emphasised earlier support in mainstream schools. The answer exposed a gap in the information available for examining pupils’ routes through the system, even where ministers and MPs agreed that avoidable exclusions should fall.10
Bringing the experiences of former pupils to Parliament
On 12 March 2025, Johnson secured a debate marking forty years since the Swann report on education and ethnic minority pupils. She focused on Black children wrongly placed in schools under the historical label “educationally subnormal”. The previous day she had hosted a parliamentary event with people affected by those decisions. In the debate, she described their experiences of being denied an appropriate education and the effects on employment and adult life. She called for a public inquiry, connecting recognition of the original injustice with scrutiny of exclusion and discrimination in contemporary education.11
School standards minister Catherine McKinnell acknowledged the unacceptable treatment of children, many from Caribbean backgrounds, but said the government did not then plan to establish an inquiry. Johnson asked for an explanation. The exchange recorded both her demand and its limit: bringing survivors’ experiences into Parliament did not, on that occasion, secure the investigation they sought.11
Food, family income and opportunity
Johnson has also argued for universal free school meals. Her campaign linked the cost of feeding children with their ability to concentrate and participate at school. She described working with the National Education Union, bringing pupils from Liverpool Riverside to Downing Street and convening a meeting of campaign partners in Parliament. Providing a meal to every pupil was the specific policy she supported. In her argument, access to food should be built into the school day, reducing a pressure that otherwise falls on families and influences children’s experience of learning.12
Her attention to child poverty continued after Labour entered government. In September 2025, she asked ministers to assess how abolishing the two-child benefit limit would affect children in poverty. The government’s reply pointed to its developing child poverty strategy and other support measures. The question kept the effect of social security rules in the parliamentary record. It also showed that changing the governing party did not end her use of scrutiny to press for changes in the resources available to families.13
Challenging criminal justice policy
Another substantial campaign concerned joint enterprise, through which people who assist or encourage an offence can share criminal responsibility. Johnson used her place in the private members’ bill ballot to propose a requirement for a “significant contribution” to the crime. Opening the second reading debate in February 2024, she credited families involved in Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association, legal specialists and researchers. She argued that the law could disproportionately punish peripheral participants. She also acknowledged the suffering of crime victims and their families.14
Justice minister Gareth Bacon opposed the bill. He argued that its proposed test was insufficiently defined and could make it harder to convict people who had assisted an offence. The debate was adjourned. Johnson wanted a tighter boundary around liability; ministers warned that uncertainty could enable culpable people to evade conviction.14
The bill fell when Parliament was dissolved on 30 May 2024, and did not become law. Its fate illustrates a constraint on an individual MP’s legislative work. Securing a debate can require ministers to explain their position and give a campaign national attention, but it does not guarantee the parliamentary time or government support needed to complete a bill. The proposal remained part of Johnson’s record of attempted reform, rather than an enacted change.15
Accountability and continued representation
Johnson’s own language has also faced challenge. On 1 February 2023, she returned to the Commons to apologise for describing the Israeli government as “fascist” during Prime Minister’s Questions. She acknowledged that the description was wrong and particularly insensitive in light of Israel’s history. She also withdrew her use of “apartheid state”, which she said had referred to Amnesty International’s description. The correction is part of the parliamentary record alongside her original intervention, and belongs in an account of a politician whose public statements invite scrutiny as well as support.16
At the July 2024 general election, Johnson was re-elected with 20,039 votes, 61.9 per cent of those cast, and a majority of 14,793. That result renewed her responsibility to represent Liverpool Riverside. Her work can be assessed through the proposals she has advanced, the evidence she has sought and the responses she has obtained. The record contains disagreements and unsuccessful demands alongside opportunities created for others to speak. It is a form of parliamentary politics built around sustained pressure on institutions, rooted in the city she represents.17
Sources and further reading
1. Parliamentary career for Kim Johnson — UK Parliament.
2. Kim Johnson MP: background and constituency work — Kim Johnson MP.
3. Budget Resolutions: maiden speech, 11 March 2020 — Hansard / UK Parliament.
4. Meeting the next generation of Black Trade Union activists — Kim Johnson MP.
5. Register of Interests for Kim Johnson — UK Parliament.
6. About Squash — Squash Liverpool.
7. My speech at the Stand Up to Racism conference — Kim Johnson MP.
8. The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it — formal minutes — House of Commons Education Committee.
9. Oral evidence: Left behind white pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, 9 February 2021 — House of Commons Education Committee.
10. Pupil Referral Units: written question 12494 — UK Parliament.
11. Swann Report: 40th Anniversary, 12 March 2025 — Hansard / UK Parliament.
12. The case for universal free school meals — Kim Johnson MP.
13. Children: poverty — written question 74229 — UK Parliament.
14. Joint Enterprise (Significant Contribution) Bill: second reading debate, 2 February 2024 — Hansard / UK Parliament.
15. Joint Enterprise (Significant Contribution) Bill: latest news — UK Parliament.
16. Points of Order, 1 February 2023 — Hansard / UK Parliament.
17. Last election result for Kim Johnson — UK Parliament.