Former
Welcome to my website and blog.
You can read a bit more about who I am and what makes me tick here. A summary of the work I did when I was Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield between 1992 and 2019 can also be found here.
The older posts on here date from my time as an MP but I have continued to blog since leaving Parliament.
The opening paragraphs of my blog posts appear at the bottom of this page in reverse date order. The “Read on” buttons take you to what I have written in full. My posts below also contain links to articles I have written and which have been published elsewhere, together with posts imported from my own Facebook page.
To view posts on a specific subject, from both during and after my time in Parliament, please click one of the buttons below.
These are the main subjects on which I’ve written. Click here to view the full list of categories.
Here is the link to my Bluesky account, and here is the link to my Twitter/X account. You can also view my Facebook page and LinkedIn profile.
Click on ‘Contact’ below to get in touch with me.
This feed refreshes intermittently. Please log in to X (Twitter) to view my newest tweets in full.
‘This isn’t some skinhead – this is Elon Musk.’
@Lewis_Goodall reacts to the world’s richest man telling the Tommy Robinson rally to ‘fight back or die’.
The US allows, on its soil, United Nations diplomats from Iran, Russia & North Korea.
Yet Mahmoud Abbas, who represents the sole presently existing Palestinian alternative to Hamas, is banned—along with all other Palestinians who need a visit visa.
Genuinely nonsensical.
I was a Labour MP throughout the Blair and Brown governments. I had my differences with them. Sometimes those differences were so profound that I voted against the government in the House of Commons – for example over the invasion of Iraq and over the extension of detention without trial. My votes on those issues and what I said on a number of others were not popular with the Labour establishment …
On Friday, Ministers announced that they want to scrap Healthwatch, the statutory patients’ and public watchdog for the NHS and social care. This is my response as Chair of Healthwatch Birmingham and Solihull:
Like millions of other people around the world, I can’t get my head around the enormity of the devastation that Israel has been inflicting on human life in Gaza, week in, week out, since the awful attack its own citizens suffered twenty months ago. Neither can I get my head around the fact that the rest of the world allows the atrocities to continue. The most powerful country in the world even …
Today (April 8th) marks 20 years since MG Rover went into administration, bringing to an end a hundred years in which “the Austin” – as the Longbridge factory has always been known – became the most famous vehicle manufacturing plant in the country. Assembly of a limited range of cars restarted at Longbridge within a couple of years after that day and continued for a few more. But 2005 was the …
I have been deeply saddened by the news that TV motorsport pundit and ex-Formula 1 team boss, Eddie Jordan, has died, aged 76. Always “EJ” to his friends, I first met Eddie Jordan as long ago as the early 1990s. I was at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix and he approached me in to explore whether I might be able to encourage Rover Group, which was based in my Parliamentary constituency, to …
Last month, I wrote about the haunting photo of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya standing alone and unarmed in front of advancing Israeli tanks amid ruins around his hospital in Gaza. I called the post “What courage looks like.” Soon after the photo was taken, Dr Abu Safiya was abducted by Israeli soldiers and taken out of Gaza. He was held in solitary confinement for 24 days and he is still in Israeli …
I was privileged to be one of those representing Remembering Srebrenica at Holocaust Memorial Day, hosted by Birmingham City Council today. 2025 is a special year for commemoration – marking both the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the 30th anniversary of the genocide near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica when over 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were …
Few people will have been unmoved by the pictures of joy and anticipation which have been broadcast from Gaza in the past twenty-four hours. After fifteen months of horror at a scale that those of us in the rest of the world will mercifully never experience, there is the chance that the death and destruction may be coming to an end.
Unarmed and facing Israeli tanks amid devastation next to his hospital, one Palestinian doctor shows the world what courage looks like. It is a photo that will come to symbolise the sheer enormity of Israel’s assault on healthcare in Gaza and its attempt to empty the north of Gaza of Palestinians altogether. It is ethnic cleansing and it is deliberate policy. It’s not even secret. It is called …
“I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what is happening in Gaza now is a genocide…We don’t teach about genocides in order to realise it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.” Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Having posted a personal story about my passion for motorsport a couple of weeks ago, I am again back onto that theme with this one. It is about something else currently on TV: the drama series ‘Senna’ now streaming on Netflix. I begin by discussing the first three episodes – but I’ve since added a postscript on the rest of the series.
It is no secret that I have been nutty about motorsport all my life. No surprise, then, that I am currently glued to the four-part docuseries ‘Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story’, which is being screened on BBC Two. For me it brings back special personal memories, as someone who was around at the time, albeit with no more than a brief cameo role in what happened.
I was Labour Member of Parliament for Birmingham Northfield between 1992 and 2019 and a former Shadow Transport Minister. I now chair Healthwatch in Birmingham and Solihull, and the West Midlands Board of Remembering Srebrenica. I also work as a public affairs consultant. I am an effective community advocate and stakeholder alliance builder with a passion for human rights. I am a trustee of the Balfour Project charity and of Citizens Advice Birmingham, and a former Chair of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
