Gale Rogers (born 5 January 1954) was a British Labour politician who served as a member of the Bromland Town Council in Lincolnshire from 7 April 2013.
Biography[]
Gale McKennessy was born in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England on 5 January 1954 to a family of working-class Irish Catholics. She married Bromland resident and factory worker Tom Rogers in 1973, and she worked as a secretary for a local trade union before becoming involved in her constituency Labour Party. Rogers was affiliated with the democratic socialist wing of the Labour Party, informed by her and her husband's life experiences growing up in working-class Irish families in a town with a declining manufacturing industry and a rising, middle-class-dominated service industry. Rogers became the leader of the local Labour Party during the 2000s, supported by many members of Bromland's growing South Asian immigrnat community; in her speeches, she compared the Hindu and Muslim immigrants from India and Pakistan to her own Irish Catholic forefathers, as she believed that they were both industrious communities who endured the worst socioeconomic circumstances both at home and in Britain (where both the Irish and South Asians also experienced discrimination), yet continued to work hard and retain their hope of a better future for their families. However, the growth of the South Asian population in Bromland was accompanied by racial backlash from the town's white working-class, who accused Labour of abandoning them on both the national and local scale, and of prioritizing the needs of immigrants over the ethnic English. In 2013, Rogers and 9 other Labour candidates were elected to the 30-seat Bromland Town Council, with Labour placing in second with 33.19% of the vote; the Conservative Party placed in first with 38.07% of the vote and 11 seats. Labour's narrow defeat was caused by the defection of many white working-class Labour voters to UKIP, which placed in third with 15% of the vote and 5/30 council seats. Rogers attempted to win the support of swing votes on the Town Council to secure her appointment as Mayor, but, with the support of UKIP, the Liberal Democrats, and Labour dissident Felicity Hawkins, Conservative candidate Arabella Marsh defeated Rogers in a Town Council vote of 19-10.