Tim Farron

Tim Farron (born May 27, 1970, Preston, Lancashire, England) is a British politician who was leader of the Liberal Democrats (2015–17).

Farron studied politics at Newcastle University, where he was the first Liberal Democrat to be elected president of the student union. At the age of 21, while he was still a student, he unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in a strong Labour constituency near Newcastle. A year later, having returned to his home county of Lancashire, he was elected a local councillor. After he narrowly failed to win the Conservative parliamentary seat of Westmorland and Lonsdale in 2001, he fought for and won that seat in 2005.

Farron’s politics placed him on the left of his party, and his passion—informed by a publicly declared commitment to Christianity that was rare in modern British politicians—was for social justice and redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. His most controversial act during his first term as an MP was in 2007, when he voted against new legislation to ban discrimination on the grounds of sexuality (most notably in regard to small family-run hotels and bed-and-breakfast businesses that did not want to admit same-sex couples). Farron acknowledged that his Christian beliefs led him to regard homosexuality with discomfort. Later, on becoming party leader, he declined to say whether he regarded homosexuality as a sin, although he accepted same-sex marriage, which had been legalized in the United Kingdom in 2014.

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After the 2010 general election, in which the Conservatives fell short of an overall majority, the Liberal Democrats joined a coalition government, with party leader Nick Clegg serving as deputy prime minister. Farron was a consistent critic of the coalition and voted against it in Parliament on a number of high-profile issues, notably in December 2010 when he opposed an increase in university tuition fees. (In the 2010 general election campaign the Liberal Democrats had promised to scrap those fees, but in coalition the party decided to support Conservative plans to raise them.) He also defied coalition policy by voting against the government’s decision to replace Trident with a new generation of submarine-launched nuclear weapons. As the leader of the party’s left wing, Farron contested two important party elections in 2010, losing the vote among MPs to become deputy leader in June but winning the vote of the wider party membership later that year to become its president.

In the May 2015 general election, the Liberal Democrats had a disastrous showing, losing nearly two-thirds of their support. Farron was one of only eight Liberal Democrat MPs to retain their seats out of the 57 who had been elected in 2010. Clegg resigned as party leader, and Farron stood against Norman Lamb, a loyal minister in the coalition government. Farron defeated Lamb to become party leader in July 2015.

As the head of pro-European Union Liberal Democrats, Farron was one of the most outspoken advocates of the “Remain” side in the referendum on whether the United Kingdom should withdraw from the EU. For Farron, the decision to stay was a “no-brainer.” After a majority of Britons voted in favour of leaving the EU in the June 2016 referendum, Farron argued that the “Leave” movement’s lack of clarity regarding the nature of separation meant that there was a wide divergence of opinion among those who had voted for Britain’s exit from the EU (“Brexit”) regarding what it meant. In particular, he claimed that many who had voted to leave the EU hoped that Britain would remain within the organization’s single economic market, a notion for which there was no room within Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s clean-break vision of “hard” Brexit.

When May called a snap election for June 2017 to pursue a mandate for her vision in the upcoming Brexit negotiations, Farron and the Liberal Democrats made the promise to hold a second referendum on the terms of Brexit a centrepiece of their election manifesto. Although that stance failed to stir a groundswell of support, it did result in a gain of four seats for the party in the election as the Liberal Democrats went from eight seats in the House of Commons to 12. Only days after the election, Farron surprised party members and observers by announcing his intention to step down as leader of the Liberal Democrats because he had found himself “torn between living as a faithful Christian and serving as a political leader.” He was replaced as party leader by Vince Cable in July 2017.

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