Honorific-Prefix: | The Right Honourable |
The Lord Hussain | |
Native Name Lang: | phr |
Office: | Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal |
Term Start: | 25 January 2011 Life Peerage |
Birth Name: | Qurban Hussain |
Birth Date: | 27 March 1956 |
Birth Place: | Kotli District, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan |
Nationality: | British |
Occupation: | Politician |
Party: | Liberal Democrat (since 2003) |
Otherparty: | Labour (1996–2003) |
Qurban Hussain, Baron Hussain (phr|قربان حسین; born 27 March 1956) is a British–Pakistani Liberal Democrat politician and life peer.[1]
Hussain was born on 27 March 1956 to a Pahari Muslim family in Kotli, Mirpur District, Pakistan.
Hussain was the unsuccessful candidate for parliament for Luton South in 2005 and 2010. He was firstly a member of the Labour Party, from 1996 to 2003, but then joined the Liberal Democrats in protest over the Labour government-backed invasion of Iraq.[2] He was a member of Luton Borough Council from 2003 until 2011, serving as its deputy leader from 2005 to 2007.
Hussain was created a life peer as Baron Hussain, of Luton in the county of Bedfordshire on 20 January 2011. In the Cameron–Clegg coalition government, he served as diversity adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Hussain briefly withdrew from the Lib Dem whip in March 2015 for having smuggled an impoverished two-year-old Kashmiri boy into the UK decades earlier, at the request of the boy's mother. He admitted to having committed an offence but insisted it was morally the right thing to do.[3] He was later readmitted to the party whip.[4]