Jim Cousins

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James Mackay Cousins, known as Jim Cousins, (born February 23, 1944, Shepherd's Bush, London) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is member of Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central, and is a member of the ruling Labour Party.

On the party's rebel left, Cousins briefly served on the party's front bench in a foreign affairs portfolio before being stripped of his position along with fellow frontbencher Ann Clwyd in 1995. The pair had been on a fact-finding tour of Kurdistan, at that time being ravaged by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and failed to return in time for a crucial Commons vote. As a key ally of the then Shadow Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Cousins was still hopeful of a ministerial job when Labour won the election in 1997, but his hopes were dashed and instead he became an influential member of the backbench Treasury Select Committee.

Although Cousins has been described as a member of Labour's so-called "awkward squad," his politics and indeed his personality are in reality more complex. He voted against the war in Iraq in 2003 and opposed the introduction of tuition fees in 2004, but on other matters - such as Tony Blair's reforms of the National Health Service, he has remained loyal.

The Liberal Democrats made a determined effort to target Cousins' Newcastle Central constituency in the 2005 general election, having taken control of Newcastle City Council the previous year, and Cousins saw his majority plummet from 11,605 to under 4,000. While unsuccessful in ousting Cousins, this result represented one of the largest swings in the country, possibly attribued to Liberal Democrat candidate Greg Stone's student-oriented campaign which focused on issues such as 2003 invasion of Iraq and Top-up fees.

While at Oxford University, Cousins was a leading member of the University's Liberal Society. During the 1960s, he authored a pamphlet rejecting the then "new" Labour of the Harold Wilson era.