Jessica Asato

Jessica Redmond-Withey Asato (born 30 April 1981) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Lowestoft since 2024. She was a member of Islington Borough Council from 2010 to 2013.

Early life

Asato is a quarter Japanese and has family in Hawaii. She grew up in the Gorleston-on-Sea area of Great Yarmouth and the nearby Norfolk village of Rollesby where she lived with and cared for her grandmother, who had serious health problems, and went to Flegg High School in Great Yarmouth. When she was 16 in 1997, she moved from Norfolk to live with her mother in London and went to Francis Holland School, an all-girls private school. She was a keen debater at Sixth Form level, reaching the semi-finals of the Oxford Union schools' debate competition. Asato studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she graduated with a degree in law.

Political career

In 2009, Asato was ranked no 78 among the Top 100 most influential Left-wingers by ''The Daily Telegraph''. In 2009, she wrote to the then Health Secretary Andy Burnham, raising concerns about his plans to make the NHS the "preferred provider" of NHS services. Asato was subsequently accused of hypocrisy for later supporting Clive Efford's anti-privatisation National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill. In 2010, she made ''The Independents list of 10 names to watch, perhaps because she was "Social media lead" on David Miliband's leadership election campaign and was featured in the Total Politics video ''Make Your Mind Up (And Vote!)'' with Bucks Fizz and "famous political figures".

She was a councillor on Islington London Borough Council from 2010 to 2013, but resigned to spend more time in Norwich. She has been criticised in Islington by political opponents for spending too much time in Norfolk, and for allegedly being a "professional politician". She worked in Westminster two days a week as political adviser to former cabinet minister and culture secretary Tessa Jowell, and was featured as one of the ''Evening Standard's'' Lucky 13 in 2013. She is reported as saying that spending her formative years growing up in a low income household in Norfolk – from 11 until she left home at 16, and being the first person in her family to have made it to university - gives her a good foundation for life as an MP.

In Islington, she was chair of the Corporate Parenting Board. At the Labour Party Conference in 2014, she highlighted figures which she claimed showed there were 1,000 fewer childcare places in the East of England, that one in five parents had been forced to call in sick over the summer to look after their children and that child minder costs were up 44% in the last four years in the East of England.

In 2015, she was one of 15 Labour candidates each given financial support of £10,000 by Lord Oakeshott, the former Liberal Democrat, in January 2015. In the general election, Asato came second to Chloe Smith in Norwich North, having increased the Labour vote by 2% (Smith increased the Tory vote by more than 3%).

On 24 February 2023, she was selected by local party members as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Waveney at the 2024 general election. Due to the 2023 review of constituency boundaries across the UK, the Waveney constituency was abolished and the previous constituency that it replaced, Lowestoft, was re-established: the new Lowestoft constituency was made up of 44.9% of the geographical area of the old Waveney seat, and 91.4% of its population. Asato went on to contest the Lowestoft constituency in the 2024 general election, achieving a victory over the previous Conservative MP for Waveney, Peter Aldous, with a margin of just over 2000 votes.

Employment

She was employed as a health policy researcher at the Social Market Foundation and was director of the Labour Yes! Campaign in favour of alternative vote plus. She was previously acting director of Progress, a director of Left Foot Forward and is vice-chairman of the Fabian Society. It has been suggested that under her directorship, Progress became less of a cheerleader group for Blairite politics than it was when it started.

She is Vice-Chair of the Electoral Reform Society and chair of governors of Jack Taylor Special School for children with disabilities and learning difficulties, and served as joint acting chair of Brook. She is on the advisory board of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Personal life

Asato was quickly divorced from her first husband, Howard Dawber, who stood as the Labour candidate for Bexleyheath and Crayford at the 2010 general election, whilst her second husband, journalist Gareth Butler, died of a heart attack in 2008. She married her third husband, Rob Chaplin, in 2014 and had a baby in 2015.

Publications

*''By Choice, Not Chance: Fabian Facts for Socialists'' (with Howard Dawber and Paul Richards), Fabian Society 2001
*''Direct to Patient Communication: Patient Empowerment or NHS Burden?'' (editor), Social Market Foundation 2004
*''Charging Ahead?: Spreading the Costs of Modern Public Services'', Social Market Foundation, Oct 2007

References

External links

*
*

, -

{{DEFAULTSORT:Asato, Jess
Living people
Alumni of Trinity Hall, Cambridge
English people of Japanese descent
UK MPs 2024–present
Chairs of the Fabian Society
Councillors in the London Borough of Islington
Female members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for English constituencies
Labour Party (UK) councillors
Labour Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
People educated at Francis Holland School
People from the Borough of Great Yarmouth
People from Gorleston-on-Sea
Women councillors in England
1981 births
Place of birth missing (living people)