Luciana Berger

Luciana Berger

Luciana Clare Berger (born 13 May 1981) is a former British politician. She was Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree from 2010 to 2019. A former member of the Official Opposition frontbench, she served under Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Minister for Mental Health from 2015 to 2016. In 2019 she left and co-founded The Independent Group, later Change UK, before joining the Liberal Democrats.

About Luciana Berger in brief

Summary Luciana BergerLuciana Clare Berger (born 13 May 1981) is a former British politician. She was Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree from 2010 to 2019. A former member of the Official Opposition frontbench, she served under Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Minister for Mental Health from 2015 to 2016. In 2019 she left and co-founded The Independent Group, later Change UK, before joining the Liberal Democrats. She stood unsuccessfully for Finchley and Golders Green in the 2019 general election. She is a great-niece of trade union official and Labour MP Manny Shinwell, who rose to be a Minister in the Ramsay MacDonald government and in the Attlee government. Her grandfather sold ladies’ fashions from a market stall, and her brother is a professional musician. Her father, Howard, studied law at university and initially practised as a solicitor; he now runs a home-furnishings shop. Her mother, Antonia, is an interior designer and children’s book writer, wrote a musical hit that made the French charts in the 1960s, and was a counsellor in a palliative care unit. She said of her Jewish heritage: ‘Tikkun Olam’, literally means ‘repairing the world’, and it instilled strong values in me at quite young age.’ She has described that throughout her upbringing the Labour Party was ‘part of DNA,’ and her ‘family’s heritage’ Berger was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls, a private school in Elstree, Hertfordshire.

She subsequently gained a degree in commerce with Spanish from the University of Birmingham in 2004. She spent a year studying in ICADE in Madrid, Spain, Berger then took on on a part-time basis and completed a master’s degree in government, politics and policy at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2005, Berger resigned from the NUS Anti-Fascism Campaign with two other committee members, saying: ‘While I has been a bystander to anti-semitism, this year I have been accused of tolerating it’. A later inquiry later cleared the union of failing to tackle antisemitism, but on the other hand criticised the union for not having rigorous complaints procedures in place, and for ‘lack of proactive response to allegations of anti-Semitism’  Berger resigned in June 2016. She also joined Labour and served as director of Labour Friends of Israel. In February 2019, members of her local party briefly proposed motions of no confidence in her for “continually’ criticising Corbyn. Later that month, she joined other former Labour and Conservative MPs in forming Change UK. She left this group in June 2019 to sit as an Independent MP, beforejoining the Lib Dems in September 2019. Berger was named the University of Birmingham 2012 Alumna of the Year.