Dan Carden is the Labour Party MP for Liverpool Walton, having first been elected to parliament at the 2017 general election.  

In the 2024 general election, Carden received 26,032 votes in Liverpool Walton, representing 70.6% of the vote share. The Reform UK candidate, Joseph Doran, received 5,787 votes (15.7%), while the Green Party candidate, Martyn Madeley, secured 2,388 votes (6.5%). Carden was duly elected with a majority of 20,245.

The Liverpool Walton constituency is located in the north of Liverpool. It is considered one of the safest Labour seats in the UK, having been held by the Labour Party since 1964. The immediate predecessor MP was Steve Rotheram, who served from 2010 to 2017 before becoming Mayor of the Liverpool City Region. It includes Anfield, the home ground of Liverpool Football Club.

Political Career

Carden is a member of the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee (since November 2023) – the committee responsible for examining the expenditure, administration and policy of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and other associated bodies.

Carden served as a trade envoy to Mexico (January 2025 – June 2026). Appointed by the trade secretary, envoys are tasked with boosting British exports and attracting foreign investment. An envoy’s duties typically involve leading trade delegations, lobbying host governments on market access issues, and building relationships with overseas businesses.

At the beginning of the parliament elected in 2024, Carden stood unsuccessfully for election as chair of the foreign affairs committee. In the contest, the results of which were announced in September 2024, Carden secured 281 votes, placing second. They were narrowly defeated by Emily Thornberry, who won the support of 289 colleagues.

A former frontbencher, Carden served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as shadow secretary of state for international development from 2018 to 2020.

Following Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader in 2020, Carden was appointed shadow financial secretary to the Treasury. In this post, Carden accused the then-Conservative government of overseeing “obscene profiteering and cronyism” during the Covid pandemic.

In an article for the House magazine, published December 2020, he wrote: “The government’s incompetence, its cronyism, its ideological obsession with outsourcing and privatisation has undermined our NHS and put lives at risk.

“These problems didn’t start with the pandemic. For too long, the public purse has been treated by politicians as a resource for corporate allies to plunder – but coronavirus has shone a light on the scandalous extent to which naked self-interest pervades the highest levels of government.”

Carden resigned from Starmer’s frontbench in October 2020 in order to vote against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill at its commons third reading – defying the party’s instruction to abstain.

The proposed legislation in question, often referred to as the “spycops bill”, was introduced by the Conservative government to authorise undercover agents and informants to commit crimes while on operations. The Labour Party had whipped its representatives to abstain on the bill on the basis that the legislation is “far from perfect” yet “necessary” due to “the need to provide a clear lawful framework for the use of human intelligence sources”.

In his letter of resignation, Carden wrote: “As a Liverpool MP and trade unionist, I share the deep concerns about this legislation from across the labour movement, human rights organisations, and so many who have suffered the abuse of state power, from blacklisted workers to the Hillsborough families and survivors.”

The following month, Carden criticised Corbyn’s suspension from Labour. Corbyn’s suspension came after he issued a response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report into the Labour Party, arguing “the scale of the [antisemitism] problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents”.

In a statement, Carden said that “the grounds for [Corbyn’s] suspension remain unclear”.

He added: “I unequivocally stand in solidarity with our Jewish members over Labour’s collective failure on antisemitism. It’s sad that what should’ve marked a moment of reflection and repair has been overshadowed…

“We need to move forward with a shared focus on winning a Labour government and giving hope to our communities who deserve better.”

Carden was also among the 32 Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) MPs to sign a statement declaring that they opposed the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn and calling for the disciplinary action to be “swiftly reversed”.

The statement read: “This decision and the division it causes severely undermines efforts to unite to defeat antisemitism and fully implement the EHRC recommendations and to challenge and defeat this disastrous Conservative government.”

In September 2023, Carden was appointed parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to Rachel Reeves, then the shadow chancellor. A PPS acts as an unpaid assistant to a minister, providing a link between the senior frontbencher and backbench MPs.

Carden resigned from his post in November of the same year to vote in favour of a motion tabled by the Scottish National Party (SNP) calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza – defying the instruction set out by the party’s frontbench. Labour had tabled its own motion, making a more moderate appeal for a “humanitarian pause” in the conflict and ordered its representatives to support that stance.

Carden was a member of the public accounts committee from 2021 to 2024 and the environmental audit committee from 2021 to 2022.

Carden is a patron of LGBT+ Labour – a socialist society formally affiliated with the Labour Party.

Carden is listed as a member of the all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) for arts and heritage, crown dependencies and British overseas territories, Greenland and Poland among others.

Carden delivered his maiden speech on 12 September 2017 during a debate on the Finance Bill. In it, he stated: “My grandad and dad worked on Liverpool’s docks in the days when they were the engine room of our city’s economic and social life.

“Casual dock labour gave rise to trade unions, collectivism and working class struggle. We are a city of survivors, and we have had to be. It is one reason we still hold dear our sense of solidarity and why today individuals are strong and communities proud.”

He added: “I do not have time to do justice to the agony the [Conservative] government have inflicted through welfare and disability benefit cuts…

“At times, my own party lost its way. We failed to define the banking crisis as the result of casino capitalism that it was, and we started to talk the language of austerity and cuts. It was not good enough, and it only served to let this government off the hook.

“But today we have hope: a Labour leadership [under Jeremy Corbyn] determined to transform society. We are once again a mass membership party.”

Political Views

Leadership elections and loyalty

Labour leadership 2020: Carden was one of 33 Labour MPs who nominated Rebecca Long-Bailey for the party’s leadership in early 2020. The election was triggered by the resignation of Jeremy Corbyn following the party’s defeat in the 2019 general election, which resulted in Labour’s fewest seats in the House of Commons since 1935.

Long-Bailey, then the shadow business secretary, was widely regarded as the continuity candidate for the party’s left/Corbynite wing. Long-Bailey finished second with 27.6% of the vote, losing to Keir Starmer, who won a decisive victory in the first round with 56.2%.

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Factional identity and party tradition

In 2017-2019 and 2019-2024 parliaments, Carden was largely associated with the left wing of the Labour Party as a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs.

A PoliticsHome report, published in May 2024, revealed Carden had left the SCG. In a subsequent interview with the New Statesman, Carden said he left the group for “no particular political reason” but went on to express his support for ideas advocated by Blue Labour, an economically left-wing and culturally conservative tradition/group in the Labour Party.

Carden currently chairs the Blue Labour parliamentary caucus, made up of fellow MPs Jonathan Hinder, Jonathan Brash, David Smith and Connor Naismith.

Founded by Labour peer Lord Glasman in 2009, the Blue Labour creed champions what it terms the politics of “faith, family and flag”, embracing a form of social conservatism with a progressive or left-wing economic policy. Blue Labour articulates a critique of both New Labour’s social liberalism and free-market globalisation.

In January 2025, Carden called for a new national inquiry into the operation of grooming gangs in the UK.

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In an article for the Daily Mail, published January 2026, Carden said he could never support “the UK joining a customs union” with the European Union.

He wrote: “can never support the UK joining a Customs Union with Brussels. And yet we hear suggestions that this is being seriously contemplated by some at the very top of the Government.

“Moreover, we hear that it appears to be the aim of people who now have designs on the PM’s job.

“Andy Burnham has declared how he wants to see us back in the EU in his lifetime, while Wes Streeting wants us to have a deeper trading relationship with Europe.”

He added: “I look further back in my party’s history than the EU, welfare and the Equality Act for inspiration.

“The roots of the Parliamentary Labour Party were in 19th- and early 20th-Century organised labour, and in Christian societies sceptical of state power overriding the collective endeavour of trade unions and communities.

“Their socialism was founded on the principles of brotherhood and mutual aid. Without these principles, Labour looks a pretty vacuous entity unable to address the problems of modern Britain. People feel that their lives are governed by forces they cannot name, with neither the state nor the market able to help.”

Labour Friends of Nato: Carden is a patron of Labour Friends of Nato (LFN), a parliamentary network and pressure group established in January 2026 to reinforce the Labour Party’s commitment to the Atlantic alliance. According to a LabourList report, the group seeks to deepen understanding of Nato’s strategic role among MPs and party activists. It also seeks to provide a platform to rebut political arguments from both the left and right that seek to diminish Britain’s involvement in the treaty.

The formation of the network was framed by its founders as a return to the post-war traditions of the Clement Attlee government, which helped establish the alliance.

The group set up with plans to organise fact-finding missions to Nato’s military and political headquarters in Brussels and hosting an annual lecture in honour of Ernest Bevin, the former foreign secretary and Nato treaty signatory.

Assisted dying

On the second reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill (Assisted Dying Bill) in November 2024, Carden did not record a vote. However, they went on to vote against at third reading (June 2025).

In a statement explaining his position, he said: “Legalising assisted suicide will normalise the choice of death over life, care, respect and love.”

He added: “I draw on my own family experience, caring for my dad who died from lung cancer three years ago.

“I genuinely fear the legislation will take us in the wrong direction. The values of family, social bonds, responsibilities, time and community will be diminished, with isolation, atomisation and individualism winning again.”

Social values and conscience issues

Social media ban: In January 2026, Carden was one of over 60 Labour MPs to sign a letter to the prime minister calling for the introduction of an Australia-style ban on social media access for children under the age of 16. Organised by Plymouth Moor View MP Fred Thomas, the initiative brought together a cross-factional coalition of backbenchers – spanning the Socialist Campaign Group, Tribune Group and Blue Labour – to demand action.

The letter called on Keir Starmer to “show leadership” by introducing a minimum age for social media access “to protect young people from the consequences of unregulated, addictive social media platforms”.

It stated: “We are all strong supporters of technology, and of this Labour government’s ambition to use tech to improve lives. But successive governments have done far too little to protect young people from the consequences of unregulated, addictive social media platforms.”

Foreign policy and security

Sanctioned (Russia): In April 2022, Carden was among the group of MPs placed on a sanctions list by the Russian government. The measure barred them from entering Russia and was presented by Moscow as a retaliatory response to the UK’s stance on the invasion of Ukraine.

Palestine

Palestinian recognition letter (July 2025): In July 2025, Carden was among the over 254 MPs to sign a cross-party letter calling for the government to immediately recognise the state of Palestine. The letter called on the prime minister and foreign secretary to recognise Palestine at the UN Conference then taking place in New York.

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Before Politics

Born in Liverpool in 1986, Carden attended St Edward’s College in the city.

He studied international relations at LSE, where he was also chair of the university Labour Club.

After graduating, Carden worked for Unite the Union, including time in the office of its then-general secretary, Len McCluskey.  

Personal Life

Dan’s father, Mike Carden, was a shop steward with the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU, now part of Unite) during the Mersey Docks dispute from 1995-1998.

In 2024, PinkNews listed Carden among a number of out LGBTQ+ parliamentarians.

On his website, Carden has written: “My mum has served our National Health Service for over 40 years in Liverpool. My dad, like his dad, was a dockworker. In 1995, he was sacked, alongside 500 Liverpool dockers, for refusing to cross a picket line.

“I saw families break apart, people lose their homes. The experience had a profound effect on my politics, and as I boy I joined the Labour Party and my trade union, Unite.”

In July 2021, Carden gave a widely reported speech during a debate on LGBT+ History Month, discussing his personal struggles with alcohol addiction during his twenties linked to the pressure of trying to hide his sexuality.

In the speech, he said: “It took me a long time to admit that I was struggling with my mental health and alcohol addiction – actually it took repeated interventions from the people who really loved me…

“I denied I had a problem, I suppressed my emotions – as I’d learned to do as a kid – and I told myself things were fine.”

Trivia

Carden is a leading figure in the Blue Labour group.