Alex Sobel

Sobel was born Alexander David Sobel in Leeds on 26 April 1975.[1][2] His parents, Leopold and Ruth Sobel, migrated from Israel in 1971.[3][4] His family moved south when he was young[5] and Sobel grew up close to Beaconsfield, attending Holtspur Middle School and John Hampden Grammar School.[6] As a teenager, he joined anti-fascist and environmental protests in Leeds.[7] He studied information systems at the University of Leeds, graduating in 1997.[5][3] Sobel worked with social enterprises, and ran the regional body Social Enterprise Yorkshire and the Humber from 2009 until 2017.[5][8]

Sobel joined the Labour Party in 1997.[7] In the 2005 general election, he was the Labour candidate for the Beaconsfield constituency, where he came third.[7] Having previously run unsuccessfully in Leeds City Council elections from 2002 to 2007, he was elected as a Labour councillor for the Moortown ward in the 2012 council election, and was re-elected in the 2016 council election.[9][10] He led the council's work on air pollution and climate change.[11] In the 2015 United Kingdom general election, he unsuccessfully contested the Leeds North West constituency. During the election, Sobel and the Leeds North West Labour Party were required to publish an apology leaflet and pay legal costs after falsely claiming the Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland voted for the Academies Act 2010.[12] In December 2015, Sobel co-founded the activist group Open Labour.[13]

In the 2017 general election, he was elected as MP for Leeds North West, beating the Liberal Democrat incumbent Greg Mulholland.[14][15] In October 2017, Sobel was elected as one of the officers of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on rare, genetic and undiagnosed conditions.[16] In 2019, he formed an All-Party Parliamentary Group aiming to reduce carbon emissions to net zero as early as possible.[17] In July 2019, Sobel became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry.[17] He spoke at an Extinction Rebellion protest in October 2019.[18]

Sobel was re-elected in the 2019 general election. In March 2020, he called for an emergency universal basic income as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic[19] In April 2020, he became shadow minister for arts, heritage and tourism.[20]

Sobel is married with two children,[4] and lives in Weetwood, North Leeds. He is Jewish.[21]

In February 2020, Sobel self-quarantined after learning that a confirmed COVID-19 pandemic case had also been in attendance at a conference eight days earlier which he and Lilian Greenwood, another Labour MP, had attended.[22]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alex Sobel.

• Official website
• Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Contributions in Parliament at Hansard
• Voting record at Public Whip
• Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou