Labour MP Graham Stringer holds Blackley and Broughton seat

Graham Stringer has been elected as the MP for the constituency of Blackley and Broughton with 23,887 votes.

Conservative MP Alexander Victor Elias was second with 9,485.

Mr Stringer said: “It has been a successful night for Labour in Manchester, it has been a dreadful night for Labour nationally.”

Despite a reduced share of the vote, Mr Stringer still led a 14,402 majority.

Graham Stringer was raised in Manchester, having attended Christ Church Primary School, Beswick and Moston Brook High School for Boys. He left Manchester to attend the University of Sheffield, where he graduated in 1971 with a degree in Chemistry.

He worked as an analytic chemist in the plastic industry, before becoming a local councillor for Manchester in 1979.

Stringer has held the seat for nine years, since the Blackley and Broughton seats merged in 2010. He previously held the seat in Blackley from 1997, when he took over the seat from the retired Kenneth Eastham.

He is the third Labour Member of Parliament in the Blackley constituency, which has been a safe Labour seat since Paul Ross defeated Erin Johnson in 1964.

The sixty-nine-year-old has proven himself a popular MP for Blackley and Broughton, having won the 2017 General Election with 70.45 per cent of the votes.

He became a member of the Environment, Transport and Regional Affair Committee in 1997 and served on this until he became a parliamentary secretary in 1999.

After spells as both a back bencher and parliamentary whip, he served on the transport committee for six-years. During this time, he campaigned against congestion charges in Greater Manchester.

Stringer is also a member of Labour Friends of Israel, promoting the relationship between Britain and Israel.

He has previously criticised Labour party leaders, being the first member of parliament to publicly call for Gordon Brown to resign as the Prime minster in 2008 and branding Ed Miliband’s 2014 election campaign “unforgivably unprofessional”.

Stringer has also made headlines as a prominent Eurosceptic in the Labour Party and favoured an EU referendum. In 2018, he was one of the four Labour MP’s to oppose the amendment for the UK to remain in the customs union in the event of a no deal Brexit.