The career path of the former MP Ken Eastham, who has died aged 96, was at one time in the last century typical of many of those who sought to pursue a life in Labour politics. Had he been from Yorkshire, he could have stepped from the pages of a novel by JB Priestley, a stalwart representative of the common sense of the common man.
He was an industrial engineer, a trade union shop steward and a Manchester City councillor before arriving at the age of 51 at Westminster. There he proved to be reliably diligent in the pursuit of the interests of his Manchester Blackley constituents and of the English north-west, without ever seeking public reward or caring about personal recognition.
Eastham’s 18 years in the House of Commons, following his previous 18 years as a councillor for the Beswick area of east Manchester, coincided precisely with the tenure of the Conservative governments elected between 1979 and 1997, thus consigning him to a parliamentary life spent entirely in opposition. He was nevertheless quietly relentless in his criticism of government policy and in attempting to ameliorate its impact on his constituents.
In his maiden speech, during the debate on the first budget of Margaret Thatcher’s administration, his experience as chair of Manchester’s planning and education committees enabled him to warn of the “grave disaster” he foresaw from the effect of public expenditure cuts on services provided by local government. “This is a budget that will eat away the seed corn of the nation’s future,” Eastham told the chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe.
He harried ministers throughout his career on issues relating to the everyday lives of the people of his beloved home city, and often drew attention to the distinction between the lifestyles of those he termed “fat cats” and the lives of their employees who had made such comparative luxury possible. He was a member of the employment select committee from 1983, and in 1987 was appointed as Labour’s regional whip for the north-west, remaining in the whips’ office until the 1992 election. He was also vice-chair of the parliamentary Labour party’s trade and industry committee and trade union group.
He announced in 1994 that he would stand down at the next general election as he was approaching the age of 70. His last parliamentary intervention was remarkably far-sighted: on the subject of hospital waiting lists and the growing problems surrounding social care.
Eastham was a convivial MP, a modest man who enjoyed an occasional pint in the Strangers’ Bar with his friends and colleagues from Manchester and with members of his local press, yet did not seek a national profile.
He was, however, an internationalist, serving as a member of the Council of Europe from 1981 until 1983, and had the distinction in March 1983 (according to research by Hansard) of being the first MP to mention Nelson Mandela’s name in the House of Commons. Mandela had been reviled as a “terrorist” by many Conservative MPs in the years after his imprisonment in 1962, but his incarceration had never been raised in the chamber, nor his name heard, before Eastham questioned the foreign secretary on what representations had been made by Britain about the continuing captivity of the man who would later be feted as the president of a democratic South Africa.
Born in Manchester, Ken was one of the two children of James Eastham, a barber, and his wife, Margaret (nee Chapman). He went to Queen Street primary school, in the Bradford area of east Manchester, and then to Openshaw Technical College.
He joined the Labour party in 1953 and was elected to the city council nine years later. By this time he was a turbine planning engineer for GEC at Trafford Park, a post he occupied from 1961 until his election to Westminster. On the council, he was chair of planning (1971-74) and of the education committee (1978-79).
He was deputy leader of the council from 1975 until 1979, when he was elected as an MP within a month of his selection as the Labour candidate. For the same period he was also a member of the North West Economic Planning Council and a director of the Manchester Ship Canal.
An active trade unionist, he became president of the local Amalgamated Engineering Union and was sponsored by the union as an MP. In 1989 he introduced a bill in the Commons in an attempt to give shareholders and trade union members the right to block company donations to political parties.
In 1951 he married Doris Haworth. She died in 2019. He is survived by their daughter, Beverly. A son, Paul, predeceased him.
• Kenneth Eastham, engineer and politician, born 8 August 1927; died 21 July 2024
