Oliver Coppard on battling Nick Clegg, campaigning for Remain and opposing anti-semitism in Labour

Labour’s candidate to become South Yorkshire’s new mayor may never have held public office before, but Oliver Coppard has already enjoyed – and occasionally endured – a life filled with political experiences.

The son of former Barnsley Council chief executive Phil Coppard, he began his political education at the age of six. Both he and his sister started delivering leaflets for the Labour Party and trade union campaigns when his father was a council officer involved with both the local Labour Party and the National and Local Government Officers Association in Sheffield.

His early experiences inspired him to pursue a career in politics, undertaking a degree in the subject at the University of Leeds and participating in a six-month internship in the office of senior Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt in 2002.

“I’ve always been passionate about making the world a better place, which I know sounds pretty trite,” he says.

“But actually that is the truth of it – you see the million and one injustices that people go through day to day. Figuring how to fix that and make things better is something I’ve always been interested in. I think when you are introduced to politics, and particularly the Labour Party, at such a young age you see there is a route for you to play that role.

“I put myself forward when I got the chance. I stood for local council as a paper candidate quite frankly when I was 22 or 23, did politics at university and through that course we were sent to work in Congress.”

After working in the office of then Sheffield Heeley MP Meg Munn and going onto jobs for the Policy Connect thinktank as well as Barnsley Council and the Sheffield City Region LEP, Mr Coppard first came to public prominence when he was selected in 2013 as Labour’s candidate to take on Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in Sheffield Hallam.

The Daily Mail columnist Andrew Pierce labelled Mr Coppard as his ‘Twit of the Week’ for suggesting it was possible to win the seat despite Labour never holding it previously and Mr Clegg having a 15,000 majority.

But at the 2015 election, Mr Coppard more than doubled Labour’s vote from 2010 and cut Mr Clegg’s majority to just 2,000. Labour went on to win the seat in 2017 and still retains it.

“No-one believed we could beat Nick Clegg, but we kept going and we worked incredibly hard,” he reflects. “I think the thing that most resonated with people here in Sheffield was that they wanted somebody who would stand up for our community and put our community first.

“I think that is why they felt so let down by Nick Clegg, who essentially got the job as Deputy Prime Minister and went back on so much of what he’d said before the election. I’m really proud so many people put their faith in me, even though we didn’t quite get over the line.

“I think I had a huge advantage over Nick Clegg in the sense that this is my home. I know the place, I understand the place in my bones. It is where my friends and family live, it is where I go for a drink on Friday night, it is where I do Park Run."

But that positive experience was followed in 2016 by a more bruising time as the field director for the Remain campaign in Yorkshire and the Humber.

He says: “I learnt a huge amount of about campaigning and how to run a campaign on a significant scale.

“But it is probably fair to say that I learnt as much about how not to run a campaign and I say that with all respect to the volunteers and people who worked on the campaign, because they were brilliant. But the problems were more strategic and systemic.

“There was to a certain extent a sense of complacency that ‘Remain is going to walk it’. In any political campaign, complacency is incredibly dangerous.

“What the Leave campaign did so well and so effectively was recognising people were feeling incredibly let down.

“This idea of ‘Take Back Control’ and giving people control over their lives actually relates to devolution in my mind. People want to be in control of their own futures.”

While Mr Coppard did not stand in Sheffield Hallam at the snap General Election of 2017, having recently taken a job at the BookTrust charity, his political ambitions were not over.

But in August 2018, Mr Coppard, who is Jewish, decided to go public about his dismay about the extent of anti-Semitism within the Labour movement.

He said the situation meant he would not be putting his name forward to be Labour’s next candidate in Sheffield Hallam.

In an article for The Huffington Post, he said Labour “felt like a hostile environment for people like me”.

He wrote: “The growing intolerance of our movement has crushed my belief that I could play an active role in putting the Labour Party into government and Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10.”

Mr Coppard reflects today: “I was incredibly sad to make that statement.

“There’s no guarantee I would have been selected for the seat, but I had to make a decision about whether I could stand on the doorstep and defend the way the Labour party then was. In politics, principles matter. I couldn’t defend the indefensible and I had to make that choice.

“It was a very hard choice because I have been part of the Labour movement since I was a kid. These are my friends, these are my family and my chosen family in lots of instances.

“Writing something so publicly about the challenge of being Jewish in the Labour Party at the time was heartbreaking for me. I’m sad I had to do it, but I think it was the right and in hindsight, I’m glad I did do that.”

Mr Coppard says that while things are “not perfect” within Labour, he believes there has been a serious effort by Sir Keir Starmer to tackle anti-semitism in the party – meaning he now feels able to stand as a candidate again.

With Dan Jarvis standing down as mayor to concentrate on his Parliamentary duties, Mr Coppard is now strong favourite to win the election in May and become the first Jewish metro mayor in the country.

He says: “I’m not putting myself forward to be the Jewish mayor of South Yorkshire, I’m putting myself forward to be the mayor of South Yorkshire and it just so happens that I am Jewish. I am proud of who I am and my faith, but equally I’m not asking for people to vote for me on that basis – let’s talk about policies and ideas instead.”

Aim to do politics differently

Oliver Coppard says that if elected as South Yorkshire’s mayor, his aim would be to “restore pride, purpose and prosperity” to the region and tackle the inequalities in areas such as transport spending and earnings power.

“When I put myself forward, I said I want to try and do politics differently. That means actually doing things in a way they haven’t been done before,” he said.

“The question is to establish what do we want as a community in South Yorkshire, and then fighting for that on the basis of what people here have decided are priorities. That is a different way of approaching that challenge and doing politics and that’s why I put myself forward to lead that charge. I’m really excited about it.”

Listen to "96: Chris Burn talks to Labour's South Yorkshire mayoral candidate Oliver Coppard".

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today. Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you'll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers. Click here to subscribe.