Thomas Williams, Baron Williams of Barnburgh, PC (18 March 1888 – 29 March 1967) was a British coal miner who became a Labour Party politician.
Career
Born in Blackwell, Derbyshire, Williams grew up in Swinton in Yorkshire, and began work in 1899 in Kilnhurst colliery. He became involved in trade unionism and joined the Independent Labour Party, switching briefly to the British Socialist Party during World War I before joining the Labour Party. In 1918, he was elected as a Labour member of the Bolton-upon-Dearne Urban District Council.
He was elected at the 1922 general election as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Don Valley, and held the seat until he stepped down at the 1959 general election.
In Parliament
In the First Labour Government, from January to October 1924, Williams was Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Noel Buxton, the Minister of Agriculture. In the Second Labour Government from 1929 to 1931, he was PPS to the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield.
Williams first held ministerial office in Winston Churchill's wartime Coalition Government, when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries from 1940 to 1945, serving under the Conservative minister Robert Hudson. He was made a Privy Counsellor in August 1941. In Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government, he was Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1945 to 1951, most notably steering the Agriculture Act of 1947 through the House of Commons. After Labour lost the 1951 general election he was the opposition spokesperson on Agriculture until 1959.
After his retirement from the House of Commons in 1959, he was created a life peer on 2 February 1961 taking the title Baron Williams of Barnburgh, of Barnburgh in the West Riding of the County of York.
His autobiography, in which he gives an account of his life since childhood, was published in 1965 with a foreword by Clement Attlee.