Do we like them?Do we like David Lammy?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent and on the right side of the big stuff, but his Gaza record and justice reforms are contested, and we couldn't open his full voting record.
He studied law, then did a Harvard Law master's in 1997 and worked as a lawyer in San Francisco before winning Tottenham at 27 in 2000. He was a junior minister under Blair, then spent years as a backbencher known for campaigning on Windrush, Grenfell and race in the justice system. He became Foreign Secretary in July 2024, and Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary in September 2025.
On the harm test, the trans rights record is the one to check. At a 2021 Labour conference fringe he said there were “dinosaurs on the right” and in his own party who wanted to “hoard rights”. He said he was proud of helping pass the Gender Recognition Act 2004, and that it needed updating. He also said Labour shouldn't be inflaming a very small minority group. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants from him.
The recent fight was over jury trials. As Justice Secretary he pushed to move the courts away from juries to tackle the backlog, which LBC calls a big and divisive step. Then Starmer's era ended and Burnham took over. Lammy left on 20 July and said he would back the government from the backbenches.
The good stuff is real. He is best known for campaigning for Windrush generation victims and for Grenfell Tower victims, and for work on race in the criminal justice system. As Foreign Secretary he pressed for the UK to recognise Palestinian statehood. How that sat with his Gaza and arms policy depends on whether you read it as principle or as too little, too late.
The gaps: the voting-record page was rate-limited when we tried to open it, so we haven't checked his votes issue by issue, and nothing in this card rests on them. Several controversies from his time in government are only covered in sources we couldn't open, so we've left them out. From what we could read, he's a decent bloke whose main sins are the ordinary ones of a long political career.